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Human lust for power seems to be a prime cause of misgovernment within leaders -- the will of one person to exert rule over others, no matter what form that may take.
"Know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed." With these words, a little-known Swedish chancellor during the strife of the Thirty Year's War of the 1600s, Count Axel Oxenstierna, effectively put forth a maxim that explains much of the crisis in today's world leadership.
And in the words of America's second president, John Adams, "While all other sciences have advanced, government is at a stand; little better practiced now than three or four thousand years ago."
I encountered these quotes while reading famed historian Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, a masterfully insightful book written in 1984. Tuchman chronicled the folly of governments from the ancient world to more modern times.
Misgovernment, she wrote, is of four kinds. First is tyranny or oppression, of which history provides so many well-known examples. Second is excessive ambition. Among those cited is Germany's twice-attempted rule of Europe by a self-conceived master race. Third is incompetence or decadence. Czar Alexander II, last of Russia's Romanov dynasty, is a prime example. Finally she lists folly or perversity.
History is full of examples of each of these kinds of misgovernment. Common to all, it seems, is the unbridled lust for power that, once attained, can result in disastrous consequences that endures for generations. There is a principle from Scripture that confirms the long-lasting effects of doing wrong, both personally and collectively: "The Lord is longsuffering and abundant in mercy, forgiving iniquity and transgression; but He by no means clears the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation" (Numbers 14:18).
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