Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has imperial delusions

The Emperor of Social Media’s admiration for Augustus, the father of Rome, shows he’s fallen for the myth of the strong man.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg , chief executive officer and founder of Facebook Inc., speaks during the F8 Developers Conference in San Jose, California, U.S., on Tuesday, April 18, 2017. Zuckerberg laid out his strategy for augmented reality, saying the social network will use smartphone cameras to overlay virtual items on the real world rather than waiting for AR glasses to be technically possible. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

Today’s topic is the Z to A of leadership. The Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been talking to The New Yorker magazine about the person he admires most from history. And it turns out to be the first Emperor of Rome, Augustus.

Zuckerberg studied Latin at school, likes classical history and sees in Augustus a complex achiever. He and his wife even named their second daughter August. “Basically, through a really harsh approach,” says Mr Z, “he established two hundred years of world peace.”

But attaining a goal that we would love to emulate today “didn’t come for free, and he [Augustus] had to do certain things”.

He did indeed. According to the emperor’s biographer Jochen Bleicken: “The outstanding achievement of Augustus is his rescue of the state and empire from a major crisis that seemed to offer almost no prospects ... Augustus kept the state of Rome and Roman rule alive.”

To do that, Augustus put lifts in his sandals to make him look taller, “was especially bloodthirsty in pursuit of his enemies, but knew how to cover up his cruelty”, his “sense of justice was nothing but a tool used for political ends and to reward his supporters”, and his “emotions were worn for show ... for a theatrical display of emotion was all he needed to achieve whatever aim he had”.

He also probably sat out the decisive battle of Philippi with a chronic case of diarrhoea.

Augustus was a better choice for Zuckerberg than, say, Caligula, who with the horses and sisters might be more of a Trump guy. But nevertheless the Emperor of Social Media plumped for the world’s most successful and ruthless imperialist. Perhaps the idea of nation after nation falling under one man’s control, attempts at rebellion (or should that be regulation?) being ruthlessly crushed, and ending up a god appeals to the Facebook founder?

Zuckerberg has clearly been romanced by the idea of the strong man: the far-seer who, by force of character and willingness to take tough decisions where others quail, emerges to rule the world. The man who gets big stuff done. Like a bloke, in fact, who takes a local student dating app and turns it into the common communications platform for half the world.

The strong man has always been seductive.

Augustus, the first emperor of Rome and father of the nation, has an admirer in the form of Zuckerberg. Picture: iStock

In 1935 Adolf Hitler addressed 60,000 Hitler Youth in Nuremberg. It was about the same time as the first Nuremberg racial laws were being promulgated. The Fuhrer’s peroration ended: “Before us marches Germany! In us marches Germany! And behind us marches Germany!”

In her recent book Travellers in the Third Reich, Julia Boyd recounts how Michael Burn, a British journalist, wrote to his mother after witnessing the event. “It has been wonderful to see what Hitler has brought this country back to and taught it to look forward to,” he gushed, “I heard him make a speech yesterday ... which I don’t think I shall ever forget and am going to have translated.”

The distinctly un-Nazi Burn was by no means the only Briton of his era to fall for a dictator. The plummy narrator on a Pathe News reel from 1932 was only echoing the opinions of his viewers when he said, of Italy’s public works program, “It’s just part of Mussolini’s great plan for giving work for ex-servicemen”, before adding of Il Duce, “and in his opening speech he spoke some words of wisdom.”

The political prisoners in his jails and exiles on his islands would have enjoyed those.

Such praise for Musso became known as the “say what you like but at least he made the trains run on time” strand of apologetics. In my adolescence Spain was ruled by Franco and Yugoslavia by Tito, two authoritarian gerontocrats credited by many British apologists for having brought order and stability. The daughter of a Labour peer justified her Aegean holiday home to me in the 1970s by saying that at least the despotic Greek colonels had established regular ferry services from Piraeus.

This desire to be fathered is a common theme of dictator-love. My childhood home contained Soviet annuals in which Stalin appeared in several guises. He was stern when necessary (which alas was often, given the way Russia’s enemies behaved) but loving when possible. So there he’d be, holding up a child amid the ripening corn, a smile blooming under that heavy, sad moustache.

Adolf Hitler channelled his inner strong man during the Nuremberg rallies.

Sigmund Freud recognised the urge. “There is no love that does not reproduce infantile stereotypes,” he wrote. And one of those was the father-figure. In his own sessions with patients he noted their desire to see in him an all-knowing, sheltering figure, to whose view of the world and of themselves they could surrender. Patients would often come to him when their own world was disordered - they preferred authority to chaos. We might add to that the tendency many us have to masochism: believing that the more the remedy hurts, the more effective it will be. Or, at least, the more it will hurt someone else.

No part of the political spectrum is immune from this fantasy. Jeremy Corbyn and his comrades have long been admirers of men like Hugo Chavez and the Castro brothers. In 2014, the year Russia annexed Crimea and shot down a civilian airliner, Alex Salmond and Nigel Farage expressed admiration for Vladimir Putin. “He’s restored a substantial part of Russian pride and that must be a good thing,” said Salmond. “The way he played the whole Syria thing. Brilliant,” said Farage.

Then there’s the Chinese autocracy, bucking expectation by becoming more dictatorial even as it becomes more capitalist. President Xi is the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao and, given recent reports of mass “re-education” camps for Chinese Muslims, the most oppressive. And behind him parade Erdogan of Turkey, Orban of Hungary, Duterte of the Philippines, Ortega of Nicaragua, al-Sisi of Egypt and others. The standout politician in Italy is Matteo Salvini, political heir to Mussolini, whose party now tops the polls.

Facebook’s founder would do well to study the lives of humbler leaders - Mandela, Churchill or Gandhi, say - who may not have built empires but who left a greater legacy than the strong men of their times. Had he actually lived under Augustus, Marcus Zuckerbergus would almost certainly have been crucified for so severely disrupting the peace of the empire. A leader, you see, has to do certain things.

The Times