So often leaders, especially strong leaders, surround themselves with yes-men (and yes-women). This can seem helpful to teamwork and a sense of direction.
But it can be extraordinarily valuable for the strong leader
to include in the court a Fool. Someone who regularly sees things from
completely different perspectives, without illusion, and who is empowered to
speak up, saying the unsayable.
Shakespeare has Fools in so many of his
plays – Feste in Twelfth Night, Touchstone in As You Like It, Nick Bottom in A
Midsummer Night’s Dream among them. But the best model for our modern leader is
the Fool in King Lear.
The Fool uses song as well as speech to give the king
feedback. He is the only one permitted to challenge head on, to say to the
aging Lear that he’s deluded and stupid. And yet Lear treats him as his friend.
There’s a long traditional of Fools in Russian literature, not
least in Pushkin’s Boris Godunov.
I wonder if Vladimir Putin has a Fool? Not that
he’d last long, one senses.
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