St. Eutychus

When things go wrong

Responding to a crisis as a leader is a three-step process. You need to blame shift, punish and move on, and you need to do it fast. As a ruler you need to maintain the appearance of infallibility. To do this you always need to have a scapegoat handy, preferably a willing, dedicated scapegoat, preferably a goat. Appoint a goat as your undersecretary and whenever anything goes wrong you can have a ritual goat sacrifice, hire a new goat and get back to the business of running your empire. It’s always a good idea to hire a mute goat, you don’t want them bleating out all your secrets in a bid to get their head off the chopping block. That way forging written confessions is easy. The goat can’t verify anything, and you’re in the clear.

If crises are occurring too regularly it may be that you aren’t delegating enough, be prepared to let go of a little control, it will make blame shifting easier in the long run, and if an underling makes a grab for too much power you can easily crush them using the blame shift, punish and move on method.

What now?

So, you’ve conquered all, you’re at the pinnacle of human civilisation. You’ve erected statues to honour your achievements. You’ve named cities after yourself. Rock stars make an effort to perform at your charity bashes, for free. What do you do now? It’s like buying a birthday present for a man who has everything, you spend ages agonising about what to get him and then you capitulate and buy him something that he’s already got lots of, like hankies. When it comes to taking over the world your options are much the same, you can, if the thought grabs you, try to take over other planets, stake your claim there, try to be the human master of the universe. Or you can give in to the one great truth. Everyone, sooner or later, dies. So spend the rest of your life trying to come to terms with that. No matter how much you achieve your going to die, and you can’t take it with you. Now if you’re anything like Attila the Hun, you’re going to want to eat your children because they sure don’t deserve your empire, but lets face it, no one deserves your empire. My advice is, write a book about how you managed to achieve what you achieved, sell everything and go and live in a cave somewhere as a hermit. Or try to return to normal life in normal society and when people come running up to you for autographs be polite and sign them, it doesn’t take too much effort, and who knows, maybe one day they’ll be the ruler of the world and you’ll need a favour.