Caesar Derangement Syndrome

The original political pathology

CAESAR V CATO

It’s been a while since my last Caesarpost. Too long.

But when I look around all I see is Cato vibes, and that means it is time.

We all acquire at least some of our interpretations of current events and our personal judgments of contemporary public figures through some kind of automatic ideational osmosis. Many people acquire all their opinions in this manner. The thought appears fully formed in their minds and they just go with it, assuming it is the product of their own exceptional discernment and close reading of reality. In fact, it has formed over years of not-so-subtle propagandistic repetition from the mouths and pens of mostly unremarkable people of even less remarkable character and judgment.¹

The propaganda is so pervasive, and alternate takes so vociferously cut down and banished from the arena of acceptable public discourse, that everyone “just knows” that x interpretation is true and y contemporary is a bad man. If you have even an inkling that x might not be true, or y may not be quite as bad as everyone thinks, you’re still trapped. In a political debate, you will find the words flowing unprompted from your mouth: “I’m not saying x is a good guy—he’s a thug—but…” Because to even dare saying y is pretty great, all things considered, will more than likely provoke an hysterical overreaction from whomever you are talking to.

When it comes down to it, such a propaganda onslaught turns otherwise reasonable men into emotionally incontinent holders of the “correct” opinions. Challenge such beliefs and you will provoke a fit of cognitive dissonance, maiming their precious feelings and causing them to lash out with shallow moral outrage and petty emotional manipulations. This is what the social enforcement of proper beliefs—and lack of an individual will—does to a man.

This is somewhat forgivable when it comes to current events. It’s not like most people have the time or inclination to check and see if their opinions are justified. The supply of such beliefs is high and access is easy. And for most, it’s not worth losing relationships over, because that’s what will happen. But when it comes to the more distant events and personalities of history, I’m afraid there is no excuse. Here, it takes effort to be wrong. In order to comment on un-current affairs like Caesar’s Civil War, for instance, one cannot simply rely on cultural osmosis to form one’s opinions, because so few discuss such things in any depth to provide the raw material for automatic opinion forming. If you’re doing anything more than calling up some common piece of cultural memory, for instance, by referring to someone “crossing the Rubicon,” you actually have to do some actual reading and thinking.

And unless you want to be the historical equivalent of a modern political commentator—a profession only a step up from being an actor, with beliefs preformed and justified by extensive reading of people merely repeating those same beliefs—you’re going to have to cast a wide net, read the original sources, and mentally excommunicate the smooth-brained academics who uncritically accept what was basically the fake news of the time. And there was a lot of fake news about Gaius Julius Caesar.

To misjudge this man is an unpardonable sin, one that can only be mitigated through diligent study and perpetual public renunciation of one’s past errors. And a special place in hell is reserved for those “degree-holding opinion-regurgitators” and their political-commentator parrots who compound their original sin by resurrecting ancient invective and corrupting the minds of modern innocents.

And with that necessary preamble out of the way, it’s time to take a closer look at the Civil War, the characters involved, and how a more accurate appraisal of these things can perhaps act as a mental fortress against the modern recurrence of the political pathology of those times—and there are many such cases.

In my last Caesarpost I referred to Robert Morstein-Marx’s 2021 book Julius Caesar and the Roman People. All quotes in this article will come from that book, which I highly recommend. Morstein-Marx gets Caesar better than most classicists. Here is how he characterizes the man in the book’s conclusion:

By the time of his entry on the highest stage of politics in 63, he was known as a popularis of a particular sort: one exceptionally skilled at cultivating the support of the Roman People but not a demagogue, or a street fighter, or even as a significant player in the classic popularis proposals for land redistribution, debt relief, or the like. (Certainly he was no “democrat,” as he has sometimes been called: such exotic creatures did not exist in Roman public life.)

As he notes, “it is commonplace to compare US presidents to Caesar – with the intent to damn, not to praise them.” But contrary to this popular conception of Caesar as “an aspiring autocrat who spent his life scheming to achieve that goal,” “in the pre-Civil War years [i.e. until he was in his late 40s] Caesar never behaves as an ideologue, activist, or great reformer.” He was thoroughly Roman in his values, ideology, expectations, and “traditional patterns of aristocratic ambition.” The Roman republican system rested upon “the community’s proper allocation of honor,” which was the Roman People’s exclusive right to confer—the foundation of the republican meritocracy. And the Roman People conferred unprecedented honors upon Caesar. Morstein-Marx demonstrates:

…that Gaius Julius Caesar saw himself, and was seen by many if not all of his contemporaries, as a great republican leader – a powerful combination … of patrician pedigree, “popular” politics, and stunning military achievement, with values and goals consistent with ancient republican canons of virtus, dignitas, and gloria, who measured himself and was measured by his contemporaries against models of leadership in the past rather than yet-unknown forms of autocracy that lay in the future … [H]e was an exceptional general, an exceptional speaker, even an exceptional writer, and by all accounts an exceptionally attractive personality, friend, perhaps even lover …

Those who slander the man today as a power-mad tyrant have an excuse—albeit a poor one. As Morstein-Marx puts it, they are only “following a first-rate contemporary source: Cicero.” But Cicero was a profoundly two-faced and opportunistic man, and his late attempts to justify Caesar’s assassination as “tyrannicide” are betrayed by his earlier praises of the man. “It is impossible to escape entirely the shadow that Cicero casts over the history of this period. Yet we must try.”

Cicero was an inveterate elitist and egocentric. Amusingly, Morstein-Marx quips:

… attentive readers of Cicero’s letters will be familiar with how remarkably closely Cicero’s pronouncements about the “ups and downs” of the Republic (mostly downs) track the vicissitudes of his own personal fortunes. … Scholars raised on Cicero’s doctrines of senatorial hegemony, the common people’s deference to their betters, and the need from time to time for the state’s “defenders” to eliminate trouble-making demagogues by means of extralegal violence if necessary, may think it quite natural to equate “the Republic” with “dominance of the Senate,” but what portion of politically active Roman citizens … would have agreed with them?

Eliminating rivals with extralegal violence is precisely what Cicero did in response to the Roman Senate’s own “January 6”: the so-called Catilinarian conspiracy of 63 BC, which culminated in a group of “insurrectionists” led by Roman politician Lucius Sergius Catilina (Catiline) attempting to “overthrow” the Roman government. For Cicero, who was a consul at the time, this was his opportunity to “save the Republic,” and he did his best to frame it in these terms. Prior to the attempted insurrection, Cicero had engaged in a campaign of character defamation against Catiline—Cicero’s popular opponent in the prior year’s consular election and admittedly a loose cannon—that rivaled Russiagate for its use of over-the-top hysteria and questionable sources of intelligence.

Cicero, in red, shortly before hiring a small army to protect himself against the dire threats made against his life by Catiline in 63 BC (colorized).

In his orations during this time, Cicero railed against Catiline’s alleged aim to kill all the nobles, as well as against those who supported Catiline tacitly by simply not believing in the conspiracy as Cicero presented it. (Are you denying that Catiline interfered with our elections? How dare you.) Cicero was a master of rhetoric and invective and was relentless in his campaign to goad Catiline into an actual revolt, which he could then put down. It is a long and complex affair, but Cicero came out on top, eventually calling for the extrajudicial murder of the conspirators. Caesar opposed this as a dangerous and illegal precedent; Morstein-Marx interprets his reasoning as such:

His apparent objective … [was] to avoid the kind of popular backlash that was inevitable if traditional, cherished Roman rights … were violated, and thus to secure and strengthen the Senate’s paternalistic leadership of the Republic. Yet Cato, Cicero, and others had a different idea of how to deal with the conspirators, and of how best to strengthen the authority of the Senate. Cicero thought it restored rather than undermined by the Catilinarian executions – a questionable conclusion in view of the coming backlash of 58 [when Cicero was exiled for his role in the executions], which Caesar may have anticipated.

The mention of Cato brings us to our second villain and the man who better deserves the credit, or ignominy, for destroying the Republic. Marcus Cato’s speech in the Senate, in Morstein-Marx’s words, “appears to have avoided legalistic justification altogether in favor of moralistic indignation, scornful attacks on supporters of Caesar’s motion for irresolution or, worse, complicity in the conspiracy, along with a highly emotional amplification of the immediate danger still posed by the conspiracy despite its apparent decapitation.” (All paramoralisms.) Cato’s framing was “one of war and imminent existential danger,” rivaling Cicero’s own taste for the histrionic. The deplorable Catilinarians were truly an existential threat to “our Republic,” and any who questioned this were by association and implication traitors to the Republic. Cato thus neutered any support for Caesar’s motion through the fear of being personally implicated in the conspiracy. Easier to simply let the conspirators be killed and get on with life without become a target for Cato’s vitriolic nagging.

This is the man hallowed today as a Stoic sage, the most virtuous of Romans, the principled conservative and staunch defender of Republican ideals. In fact, he was a radical and reactionary, “outright oligarchical” in his politics, a fanatic ideologue and supreme egotist. Cato is the one who drove Pompey and Caesar apart and sabotaged any reconciliation that might have avoided the Civil War. He was a frequent violator of Roman laws and norms for his own ends and an obstinate obstructionist to popular legislation and Caesar’s rights. He was a man incapable of political compromise, which his worshippers interpret as principled constancy. His obstructionist tactics included the use of political violence when necessary (i.e., when he didn’t get his way and couldn’t secure popular or senatorial support) and endless filibustering against the People’s and Senate’s will, for instance when he blocked Caesar’s military triumph in 60 BC.

Cato, probably with Caesar very much in mind, had been committed in recent years to a one-man campaign to minimize or eliminate the traditional honors to victorious commanders for military achievement … and to replace them – bizarrely, given the long-standing traditions of the Republic – with honorifics and praises for morally upright administration.

As Morstein-Marx puts it:

… scholars have been too impressed with Bibulus and Cato’s obstructionist tactics and too ready to concede that they were “correct” from a traditional republican perspective. Far from representing an established republican constitutional tradition, Bibulus, Cato, and those who followed their lead pushed the obstructive devices available to them far beyond their customary limits and attempted to use them to suppress the People’s sovereign right to effect its will through the voting assemblies without so much as articulating an alternative position either before the People or even, it seems, the Senate.

They did so by simply declaring they would not allow a bill to pass, and then following through on this threat. “This was absurd in any republic deserving the name.” When Cato and his small clique of radicals were unsuccessful in blocking a law, they resorted to annulling it “on questionable technical and religious grounds.”

… the principle of popular sovereignty meant nothing to Cato and Bibulus. Stung by total defeat, they would work only harder to force a reckoning with the man who in their eyes had proven himself “stronger than the entire Republic.”

Say it again, with understatement:

This radical exploitation of the Senate’s rules by a man who continues to be portrayed as ‘conservative’ or ‘traditionalist’ does not appear to be sufficiently appreciated.

The above demonstrates Cato’s overweening egotism. He attempted to impose his own will on the Republic, against all tradition, doubling and tripling down on vastly unpopular positions. If anyone had the personality of a tyrant, it was Cato. In fact, one of his favorite tools of subversion, the minority veto, only proves the point. Cato was often a minority of one, as with his opposition to Caesar’s canvassing for a second consulship while still in Gaul. This second consulship represented his clique’s “greatest fear,” according to Cicero. Does that sound familiar? Maybe this will draw out the parallel:

Put simply, Caesar demanded an honorific return from his (ultimately) victorious campaigns against Rome’s oldest enemy in keeping with Roman traditions, while his inveterate enemies, now joined in increasing anxiety by Pompey, rejected his demands for fear that, if they did not do so and failed to force him to pay a high price for his refusal to yield to their radical obstructionism in 59, not only would he survive and be stronger than ever but the lesson would be passed to the future, and a central buttress for their vision of a Senate-dominated Republic would perhaps be toppled forever.

Cato and his supporters were willing to ignore law, elections, and institutions, all in the effort “to destroy the man whom the Roman People certainly would have elected consul for the second time if they had only been given the chance to do so.”

Cato was more anankastic than principled, rigid rather than accommodating, willing to destroy everything—Rome, himself—rather than compromise, even with a man as reasonable as Caesar. When he ran out of options and faced defeat, he disemboweled himself. If Appian’s account is to be believed, he tore himself open “like a wild beast.” Morstein-Marx speculates as to Cato’s motivations:

Instead of playing a “martyr to freedom” as he would certainly become in the retrospective tradition of resistance to “tyrannical” emperors, it may be, for instance, that Cato felt honor-bound to pursue to its logical end the hostile policy he had adopted toward Caesar for at least a decade, that he was unwilling to survive defeat in a war for which he bore much responsibility, or simply that he could not bring himself to acknowledge as victor face-to-face a man he had demonized for so long.

If he had lived, he might have been forced to have been the recipient of Caesar’s famed clemency (Caesar himself is said to have lamented that Cato’s suicide prevented him from pardoning him), and while there is not much textual evidence for anyone actually having been insulted by receiving it, for Cato it probably would have galled him to no end.

But before it came to that, Cato and his minority of supporters were the ones “intent on a violent confrontation” with Caesar. They did everything they could to precipitate it, all while painting Caesar as the belligerent and the “existential” threat. Not even Pompey wanted the war. As Morstein-Marx puts it:

… the Civil War of 49–45 was a war that neither leader [Caesar nor Pompey] wanted – although the same cannot quite be said of Caesar’s bitterest enemies clustered around Cato, who bear a heavy responsibility both for recklessly pushing the confrontation to war and for spoiling the final negotiations as Rome was going over the precipice.

Pompey gave in to the worm-tongued machinations of then-consul Lentulus and Cato, who chastised Pompey for “allowing himself to be deceived ‘again.’” I can’t help but see the current Ukraine war as a replay of this dynamic. To spell out the parallels: Caesar = Putin/Russia, Pompey = U.S./Ukraine, Cato = neocons/NATO. In our times, the role Cato played is dispersed among many actors, but they all share his nature: an irrational persistence, an obstinate sense of their own righteousness, and the seemingly delusional belief that their actions will not have very obvious consequences. In the face of such insouciant obstinacy and myopic entitlement, what did the geniuses in the West expect?

Says Morstein-Marx on the Civil War:

… their choice to risk the horrors of civil war to avert that possibility [a second Caesar consulship] “by any means necessary” was one that turned out in the event very badly for the Republic. Under the circumstances, no reasonable person could have expected Caesar simply to yield quietly. Under such circumstances, as Thucydides had written long before, the formerly unthinkable becomes “prudent” and “necessary.”

Take note, election fortifiers and regime propagandists.

The irony is that Pompey had spent the prior part of his career in sharp opposition to Cato et al., “whom he had no reason to trust in the longer term more than he did Caesar,” a fact which prompted Caesar repeatedly to express bewilderment and dismay. In fact, most Romans supported Caesar, whether it was consular senators, junior senators, or local officials and ordinary citizens: “If the People should count as the central constituents of the SPQR as well as the Senate, then it would seem that ‘the Republic’ was largely in Caesar’s camp in January–March 49.”

To conclude this brief rundown of Caesar, Cicero, and Cato, and some of the conflicts in which they participated, here is what Morstein-Marx writes in his conclusion:

… we are forced to conclude that it was Caesar who better represents the historical republican tradition in this struggle, not those who are so often held up as the hard-line defenders of the “constitution.” Rather, it is Cato and his followers who seem bent, at least from the execution of the “Catilinarian” conspirators in 63, on breaking from long-standing republican tradition and intent on creating, by the novel exploitation of traditional obstructive devices…, a new kind of republic … in which, despite the restoration of the tribunician power, popular sovereignty would be effectively suppressed and the institutions of the People subordinated in practice to senatorial authority.

Morstein-Marx proceeds to give a rational, sociopolitical explanation, informed by game theory, for the Civil War and the end of the Republic, and as far as it goes, it is a good one. For him:

The paradoxical answer I propose is that what tore the Republic apart was not that anyone was seeking to overthrow or undermine it [this seems to contradict what he says above about the what Cato was actually doing], but that important agents convinced themselves that the other side was intent on doing so, leading to an erosion of mutual trust to the point where each side, acting on this conviction, was determined to prevent that result by any means necessary – civil war.

He applies the logic of liberal Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die, according to which “democratic/republican institutions and constitutions do not fail necessarily because they are simply badly designed or ill suited to their functions but also, quite often, by the erosion of democratic norms, in the absence of which institutions can be co-opted with remarkable speed and finality.” These norms are among the unwritten rules or shared codes of conduct accepted and enforced by a particular community, the most important of which Levitsky and Ziblatt identify as “mutual toleration” and “institutional forbearance.” When these norms are jettisoned in favor of an “any means necessary” approach, former peers become enemies. “Radical uncertainty” and “unintended and paradoxical results” are the outcome of this scenario—in the case of the Civil War, these results included the total dismantling of previously existing norms.

Paradoxically perhaps, of all the acts perpetrated in those cruel civil wars, it may have been Caesar’s assassination that at a key moment did the most to fuel the cycle of destruction that would in time tear the life out of the Republic.

However, this explanation is incomplete. While Morstein-Marx discounts structural-demographic causes, Peter Turchin would probably disagree, seeing those factors an underlying driver of the erosion of norms and the rise of extreme political polarization. But both theories, for all their utility, are not ponerological explanations.

Cato was clearly personality disordered—I would go so far as to call him a political psychopath, perhaps of the anankastic variety—and Cicero, despite having some things Cato lacked (like actual political instincts and what might pass for common sense at times), was a praise-craving, self-aggrandizing spellbinder. Caesar, by contrast, was the only one acting according to Republican norms until he was forced, against his own nature, to protect himself and the traditions he stood for and embodied. This is what Morstein-Marx gets wrong. It wasn’t “nobody’s fault” or “everybody’s fault.” Caesar was up against a pathologically persistent minority who would stop at nothing to destroy him and reform the Republic in their image—that is what they had in fact been doing for years by this point. His choices were between taking the coward’s way out and fighting. Naturally, he chose to fight.

From the day of Caesar’s speech objecting to the extrajudicial murder of the Catilinarian conspirators, Cato had it in for Caesar. You could say he was patient zero for Caesar Derangement Syndrome. He wasn’t just willing to destroy the Republic to “save” it (in his mind); his very idea of the Republic was anathema to Caesar and to the Roman People. Cato, with pathocratic egotism, thought it “right” and “proper” to deny the People their right to choose their leaders and legislate their Republic, and to impose his own vision on them by force, even against the will of his fellow senators. He wasn’t even a senatorial supremacist. The Senate and People of Rome, in his mind, should conform to his vision, laws be damned. His “Republic” was one in name only—an oligarchy with Cato playing the guiding role because he craved that power and thought he had the right to it by virtue of his lofty “morality.” Caesar—his superior in every respect—just happened to be in his way.

So what was the nature of this Caesar Derangement Syndrome? For Cato, perhaps it was simply the instinctive hatred of someone who was everything he wanted to be himself, but wasn’t—because he lacked the hardware. Or perhaps it was more than that: a product of the psychopath’s “special psychological knowledge.” Pathocrats are repelled by normal human values and customs, and despite his pretense of being a conservative, Cato was a radical innovator. And he spread his derangement to others. The small clique surrounding him were a ponerogenic nucleus that ponerized the Senate.

The Catos of the world want absolute control on their own terms, and anyone refuses to get with the program and roll over, whether a Caesar or a Trump or a Putin, must by destroyed. Caesar’s opposition to the unchecked power of the Senate, the influence he gained through his charming personality and sharp intellect, marked him out as a natural threat to Cato’s oligarchic faction. The contemporary Trump and Putin Derangement Syndromes have Cato stamped all over them, the former in a domestic American sense, the latter in a geopolitical one. While Cato spread his derangement via rhetoric on a relatively small scale and gained the support of only a minority of Roman politicians and citizens, today’s potential for spreading this kind of mind virus is exponentially more potent. We see it in the news and conversation every day.

To hear the average American or European speak of Putin, you would think he was the worst dictator and mass murderer “since Hitler” (as German midwit Jürgen Nauditt called him on X recently). For all the potential Trump fans in my readership, Putin is actually a better Caesar analogue. I would argue he is even more defamed in the public’s eye, and more unjustly so. Putin is basically to Russia what Caesar was to Rome. Cicero’s friend Atticus once described Caesar as behaving “with sincerity, moderation, and prudence.” This would fairly apply to Putin.

Psychopaths are very good at demonizing their enemies and making their audience believe those enemies are the tyrants. It’s the “reversive blockade” technique, made powerful through the expert use of paramoralistic language, which hijacks our tendency to moralize, even when the target is undeserving. Many will uncritically accept the reversal, to the point of seeing a decent and remarkable man like Caesar as the epitome of evil. For others it will have an equally intended effect: they will try to find the “reasonable” common ground between the truth and the lie. “Well, I’m not saying Caesar was a good guy—he was a thug—but…”

But Trump, as an American, is naturally more salient to a domestic audience. And despite the fact that in many regards, he is no Caesar, the effects of Trump derangement are palpable.

Behind the modern outbreak of this syndrome in all its variations is the same thing: a pathocratic oligarchy with visions of a “new world” in which they rule unchallenged and control everything, imposing their vision on the People with pathological egotism. To them, violating the rights of the citizenry to elect their own leaders means nothing, and if they deem it necessary, they will take “any means necessary” to prevent it, whether that means rigging or “fortifying” elections, attempting to assassinate the People’s choice, or launching psychological operations to defame and tarnish the character of their enemy. They see this as their right, and they will present it as inherently good. They will present themselves as the “good guys,” insinuating that this characterization is prima facie correct and to believe otherwise is unthinkable. If they’re doing their job, you will feel slightly bad for even thinking that they are not in fact the “good guys.”

Unlike then, it’s difficult today to trace the derangement back to any one person or group like you can with Cato. In the current situation, the near-global nature of TDS or related afflictions suggests that its spread and adoption by many is largely a result of the “mutual understanding” among pathological individuals that Lobaczewski warned about. As he put it back in the 1980s, before the Internet:

The more powerful this nucleus and the pathocratic nation, the wider the scope of its inductive siren-call, heard by individuals whose nature is correspondingly deviant, as though they were superheterodyne [radio] receivers naturally attuned to the same wavelength. Unfortunately, what is being used today are real radio transmitters in the hundreds of kilowatts, as well as loyal covert agents networking our planet.

Considering the absolute inversion of reality that is the mainstream historical take on Caesar, Cicero, and Cato, I think it’s a useful lens through which to view what is happening today—that our knee-jerk opinions on such matters can be so completely at odds with reality. Cato and Cicero, despite being total weasels and reprobates, got all the good press. But it only takes a little effort to see what was really going on.

Io, Caesar Victor! Imperator Gloriae!

1. Dabrowski called this social influence the “second factor,” distinct from the first factor (biology) and the third factor (self-directed autonomy). Lobaczewski calls the certainty with which people hold onto second-factor-produced opinions the “egotism of the natural worldview.”