A Manual for Greatness — my interview with Johnny Burtka
How leaders can rise above mediocrity
I recently sat down with Johnny Burtka, the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and had a wonderful conversation on leadership, history and greatness. Johnny is a graduate of Hillsdale College, and his most recent book is titled “Gateway to Statesmanship—Selections from Xenophon to Churchill”.
In this episode we discuss:
The Mirrors for Princes tradition
Obstacles as a Ladder to Greatness
The Potency of Xenophon’s ‘Education of Cyrus’
The Leadership Qualities of Cyrus
The Complex Enduring Power of Cicero’s ‘On Duties’
Cultivating Greatness of Soul and the Magnitudo Animi of Churchill
Machiavelli as Practitioner, not Political Philosopher
Where should an 18-year old dedicate himself to?
Washington’s Farewell Address as a Beautiful Political Text
Books Mentioned:
Gateway to Statesmanship—Selections from Xenophon to Churchill by Johnny Burtka
Education of Cyrus by Xenophon
On Duties by Cicero
The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni
Walking with Destiny by Andrew Roberts
Thanks to our sponsor Intercollegiate Studies Institute! Check out their programs on supporting quality thought and intellectual life in and after your college years.
Stay Ancient,
Alex
Transcript
Alex Petkas:
“Without proper education and mentorship, most individuals in leadership positions in most countries for most of time have been quite mediocre or even terrible.” That is a quote from a book written by my guest today, and I think he wrote it in order to try to do something about this problem. So I'm here with Johnny Burtka, author of Gateway to Statesmanship: Selections from Xenophon to Churchill.
Johnny is the President and CEO of Intercollegiate Studies Institute, ISI. Is it right that you are the youngest president in the organization's history?
Johnny Burtka:
So I'm the youngest president since Bill Buckley, who was the first president. He was more of a figurehead, but the first two years when it was founded in 1953, he was the president.
Alex Petkas:
Wow, kudos. But welcome to the Cost of Glory, Johnny.
Johnny Burtka:
Yeah, great to be on.
Alex Petkas:
Yeah, we just finished the Life of Pompey, which ISI generously sponsored. [Pompey was] one of the many youths ahead of their time in leadership positions in Roman history and this time of chaos. So Johnny, I thought it'd be great to have you on the show because this book is really highly aligned with our mission at the Cost of Glory, which is to extract greatness from the past and inject it hopefully into the future. But why don't you tell us in your own words what this book is about and what inspired you to write it?
Johnny Burtka:
Yeah, so that's a great question and thanks again for having me on the show. I mean, I think you and I probably share an assessment of the mediocrity of the current ruling class that we have in America and throughout the West. And even amongst people who I think are trying to fix the problem, trying to ameliorate it, it struck me that there's a lack of political imagination. And for me, I think there's really two sources of it in my own life. Biographies of great leaders are, for the past several years, I've done nothing but listen and read biographies of great leaders from throughout history. And I think that just opens up your horizons in terms of what's possible in your own life and also what's possible in the course of your nation or your regime. But then I think the second is philosophy, or at least in the case of my book, the intersection of Philosophy and Politics.
And so what I set out to do is really to put together a collection of advice for political leaders from an old and forgotten tradition called the mirrors for princes tradition, which basically these are conduct manuals for leaders that existed in nearly every civilization known to mankind. From the Greeks and the Romans to the ancient Chinese, Indians, in Byzantium, all the way through the Middle Ages up into the Renaissance where it experienced a flowering and then it largely disappeared from the scene. And so my mission really was—because no one since the Renaissance, at least to the best of my knowledge, had put together a collection of mirrors for princes—really to try to revive this genre, revive these thinkers and ideas for a new era. And hopefully get us actually writing our own mirrors for princes for today.
Alex Petkas:
I love that. Yeah, when I was a classicist, we talked about this earlier, I actually wrote an article on a early Byzantine mirror for princes by Synesius of Cyrene, this guy I wrote my dissertation on. So yeah, it's a fascinating genre and it's very much, I think it's very much in a way what Plutarch is doing with his biographies. I got a quote here that I love from Plutarch that kind of gets to this and I'll read it. So in the introduction to his life of Aemilius Paulus and Timoleon, he has this nice introduction and he says, “I began the writing of my lives for the sake of others, but I find that I'm continuing the work and delighting in it now for my own sake also. Using history as a mirror and endeavouring in a manner to fashion and adorn my life in conformity with the virtues therein depicted.”
And it goes on, “For the result is like nothing else than daily living and associating together when I receive and welcome each subject of my history in turn as my guest, so to speak, and observe carefully how large he was and of what mean and select from his career what is most important and most beautiful to know.” And I love this idea of Plutarch getting to see these guys as they putter around the house and how they behave in their private lives in addition to their public lives.
And I just want to finish this little passage here, “In my own case, the study of history and the familiarity with it, which my writing produces, enables me since I always cherish in my soul the records of the noblest and most estimable characters to repel and put far away from me, whatever base, malicious or ignoble suggestions, my enforced associations may intrude upon me.” He's a minor local politician, so he has many enforced associations, so to speak, people that he has to deal with. And he says, “Calmly and dispassionately, I turn my thoughts away from them to the fairest of my examples.” So I love this idea of history as a mirror.
Johnny Burtka:
Absolutely. I mean, that kind of reminds me of Machiavelli describing, during the day he's out and about, there's hustle, bustle, dealing with all these things, and then in the evening he sort of locks himself in his study and communes with the greatest minds from throughout history. And it just, that's when he feels like he's actually coming alive. And yeah, I do like these great figures, these biographies as mirrors. I really do think imitation, I think Cicero even gets to this, that the shortcut to greatness really is imitation and human beings are mimetic creatures and it's just, I don't know, there's something about imitation that even if you don't end up becoming great, you at least have the odor of it when you're imitating great men. So I think that's the way to go.
Alex Petkas:
Yeah, at least you know to recognize it, which is really important for everybody, I think. Yeah, this idea of history as a mirror and the mirror for princes, on the one hand it's these texts, I think they're trying to portray what an ideal leader should look like, whether it's through narrative or through description. On the other hand, I think there's a part of it that's about seeing yourself and, you know, when you look in the mirror, you don't see an idealized version of yourself. You see, I think, you should see your real self. You see warts and all. And comparing yourself through emulation to great examples can also help you understand where your own weaknesses are but also I think, as you kind of alluded to, imagine what you could be also, it has that dual function.
Johnny Burtka:
Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, I mean, looking in the mirror, you really do get the, it's the unvarnished reality of who you actually are. Seeing other people, yeah, I think the most helpful thing for me is kind just seeing where other people were at the same stage in life that you're at and what mistakes they made, what they got, but then also what breaks they got. Because a lot of, there's this interplay between, there's virtue excellence on one hand, and that's something that you can control through discipline and through imitation and through surrounding yourself with influences who can help raise you up and elevate you.
But then there's also chance or fortune or providence, maybe those are different things. Maybe they're overlapping in some sense, but you really do see in certain people, kind of these waves. I think Machiavelli says, he's talking about Fortune towards the end of the prince, and he says, “When Fortune wants to make a prince great, she puts obstacles in front of him. She brings enemies before him for him to conquer.” So even those things that maybe they appear small, every obstacle is really kind of a step on that ladder to greatness, and it's a necessary part of the journey.
Alex Petkas:
Yeah, so in this mirrors for princes collection, you've got Xenophon, Xenophon's Education of Cyrus, you've got Machiavelli in there, the prince, which I think is a really interesting selection, I've very much enjoyed. You've got writing the farewell address of George Washington, Cicero's On Duties, you've got some Teddy Roosevelt. It's a great selection. Before we get into it, and I want to hit all those guys and some lessons from them. So you have spent your career in and around politics, media, how would I phrase this? What are some of the experience that you've had in politics or in leadership that have influenced the way that you came to write this book? or what are some lessons that you've got from your own experience seeing leaders in action in your career?
Johnny Burtka:
To me, relationships are really everything. I think the whole of your success, whether it's in, and I've been adjacent to politics when I was running the American Conservative Magazine or, ISI, is at the intersection of, we're an educational organization, but we're educating many people who go on to careers in politics or public policy or journalism. And when I say relationships, I think, as a leader, I think your primary job is managing relationships. And there's kind of a web of relationships around you. Everyone has relationships above you. You're always accountable to someone, a board of trustees or the people that support your organization, that make it possible, so that there's a sense in which you're managing up to the people above you. There's a sense in which you're managing down to the staff you have, to the team that you've built out. And as cliche as it sounds, personnel really is policy.
If you could spend all your day either working towards your goal on a particular project or hiring the right people, finding the right people to join your team, you always needed to find the team first, build the team because that's going to make your work infinitely easier if you have the right team in place. But then you're also managing external relations with people outside of your institution, whether that's the media, whether it's other people that you're aligned with, collaborators out in other institutions. And so the interesting thing about being a leader is it's probably less about every day, okay, did you check all this stuff off of your to-do list of what you need to get done, and it's more so if you're successful, it'll be because you somehow, you're at the pressure point of these up, down and then to the sides of managing all these relationships.
And so if you can manage them well, you'll succeed. If you manage them poorly, you'll fail. And I think nearly every career, at least in my own experience, nearly every career opportunity, nearly every step up has happened because there was an individual, I guess, of some importance who I built a relationship with over the course of my life. And I obviously took initiative over and over and over again. But the reason that initiative stuck is because I had people who had more influence than me, who took an interest in mentoring me or forming a friendship with me and then, they're really the ones who I think opened up a lot of the doors I couldn't have opened up myself.
Alex Petkas:
Yeah, you see this so often in Plutarch's Lives with Pompey, for instance, his relationship with Sulla was absolutely pivotal. And there were other men that we didn't really go into so much in the biography, but somebody like Marquis Philipas, I mean, there's all these great figures that are really essential for Pompey's rise from this 18-year-old, son of a Consul to be leading armies by age 23 and becoming Rome's greatest general by the age of 30. And obviously he was talented, but people saw that talent and made it happen for him. And I was recently reading the book, Founders by Jimmy Soni on the PayPal story, and one of the things that he talks about in there is how Peter Thiel got a lot of flack in his hiring decisions at PayPal when he sort of grudgingly had to serve as the CEO, that he didn't hire the NBA types or necessarily people with experience.
And he took a lot longer in his hires because he just wanted to hire for a certain kind of character, a certain kind of talent, and he was looking for really special people. And so that process of course, takes a lot of time, but then you don't have to rehire people and fire, et cetera. And I think that this is one of the lessons that you get from studying these mirrors for princes or Plutarch's Lives is really character selection, character identification, really understanding human nature is one of the hardest jobs that you'll ever have as a leader. But maybe we can get into, you talked a lot about friendship, the first selection that you have in there, Xenophon's Education of Cyrus, it's great texts, great, great choice. He talks a lot about friendships, the importance of being good to friends. Why did you pick Xenophon's Education of Cyrus to lead off the collection?
Johnny Burtka:
So I began the book with Xenophon's education because I feel like it's one of the most potent, powerful books in the entire mirrors for prince's genre that actually has a track record of producing great leaders. So Alexander the Great was inspired by Xenophon's portrait of Cyrus. Julius Caesar allegedly carried scrolls of Xenophon's education with him when he went out to battle. Even Thomas Jefferson had two copies of it in his library at Monticello. And then the British poet and soldier, Sir Philip Sidney quite famously wrote that because, it's a fictional portrait of Cyrus, it's certainly based on certain historic details, but it's embellished in such a way, it's an imaginary portrait of Cyrus.
And Sir Philip Sidney basically says, because it's imagined well, and because he basically, he's not just listing Cyrus's political principles, it's a story from birth to death. It's kind of a page turning epic tale, because he's using that amount of imagination to tell it, it has the power to create many more Cyrus's over the course of the ages. So for me, there's just so many fundamental lessons really about leadership, about power, about virtue, about discipline that are contained in it that I felt like I had to begin there.
Alex Petkas:
Yeah, and I would just add Cicero, apparently he wrote to a friend of his that he actually took and read Xenophon's Education of Cyrus when he was on his ill-fated mission to Cilicia as proconsul in like, 50 BCE he's so resentful that he has to be away from Rome, especially when the temperature's really raising this conflict between Caesar and Pompey. But he said he read Xenophon's Cyropaedia so many times that the scroll was starting to wear out.
Johnny Burtka:
Really?
Alex Petkas:
As he's the governor of Cilicia, yeah. And then he talks about how Scipio Africanus the Younger, who's one of his heroes, always kept it with him. And Machiavelli mentions this too. So yeah, it's such an influential text. And like you said, one of the things I think is so fascinating about it is it's quasi fictional, and this is of course Cyrus the Elder, Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire, and Xenophon knew Cyrus the Younger who was distant, distant descendant of Cyrus the Great. And one of the things I think is so interesting about the text is how at the end of it, he talks about how degenerate the Persians are now for the most part, and they don't live up to that model. So it's not surprising that Alexander would read that text and think, wait a sec, these guys might be ripe for the picking.
Johnny Burtka:
Yeah.
Alex Petkas:
Yeah, I love that Xenophon spins, of course, Xenophon, such a fascinating kind of warrior. I was going to say warrior poet, but he's not a poet, but a warrior author. We covered his Anabasis in the Cost of Glory. He's very much in the spirit of Plutarch in that he wrote one of the first biographies of Agesilaus, the king of Sparta that Plutarch later used as a source for his own biography of Agesilaus. But I think that one of the things interesting about Xenophon is he spends a lot of time in that text talking about the education system of the Persian nobles, and I don't know where he got this stuff, but it's really great. And he's of course a man who has a lot of experience studying the Spartan education system that he talks about in his own constitution of Sparta, that he later sent his own son through by the good graces of Agesilaus. So, yeah, what do you think about that?
Johnny Burtka:
The education system that he describes in this fictional Persia, it looks a lot more like Sparta than it would have the actual Persian mode of education at that time. But yeah, it was an elite project. It was only the children of the aristocrats that got to participate in it. It was very austere, physically rigorous. The elders of the city would gather in the town square and mentor and shape the young men. Notably, the merchants were banished from the public square altogether. Commerce was not allowed to happen there, and yeah, they did a lot of hunting and sleeping out in the cold. And then from there, he gets an education with his uncle in Media, and they're much more indulgent there, and he experiences, learns about the finer things but always managed to restrain his passions in pursuit of honor and glory.
Alex Petkas:
Yeah, and there's a little plug in there for intermittent fasting. When they're out hunting, the kids, they wouldn't even dream of eating before they catch their prey for the day. I thought that was really interesting. Yeah, so it's such an influential text that I hope that more people read it as a result of this book. But this issue of a fiction, as it were, influencing generations of leaders is really fascinating. Something that we talked a little bit about before we got on the call, Homer is kind of in that tradition. When he writes the Iliad and the Odyssey, if it's the same guy, let's assume it is, he's not writing history, but the Greeks all think that these guys were real.
That Achilles was real, their shrines to Achilles, kind of like Hercules. I did a episode, one-off, on Seneca's tragedy of Hercules when he went mad. Hercules kind of has a similar role. Even these mythological figures in these early times had that kind of mirror for prince's quality to some extent, the tragedies. And I think it's sad that we've gotten away from that in a way in American education, in the classics world, at least in my experience, that these figures in these fictions aren't seen as important paradigms for leadership primarily and for emulation.
Johnny Burtka:
Yeah, unfortunately, I can't really think of, in our own American tradition, I'd be hard-pressed to really think of a work of fiction that is actually taught today that would be anything like, I mean, I'm sure you could somehow cobble together a list, I don't know, Huckleberry Finn? I don't know exactly what it would be, but you could probably put together a list, but we really don't have a similar kind of epic narrative that creates, produces new leaders through the exercise of the imagination. And yeah, it's a real loss.
Alex Petkas:
What do you think is one quality or takeaway that people have admired from Xenophon's portrayal of Cyrus for leadership?
Johnny Burtka:
Yeah, so I mean, he's incredibly successful, he's charming, he's cunning. I think the thing that probably strikes people the most is that he uses a system of, when he's talking about how to motivate his troops, he says that his men must be hunted with good words and good deeds. And so he's constantly looking for ways to affirm the behavior that he wants to see more of and punish or perhaps just refrain from rewarding the behavior that he doesn't like. He also, he leads by example, he is the most restrained in his passion of any of his men. He never asked them to do anything that he wouldn't do himself. He doesn't drink wine. The most beautiful woman in the empire is brought to him, and he doesn't pursue her in any way. I mean, but this is all in pursuit of something greater, which for him was the founding of an empire.
It was honor. These, kind of, higher things, perhaps not the highest thing, there are some criticisms that perhaps some of his tactics, his competitions, his rewards, his use of praise and flattery could in some ways have become corrosive to his manner, to his society. But it certainly enabled him to lay this path to success. Even some of the tactics that he uses with his army. One thing he does is, so he changes the definition of virtue, right? Virtue is no longer a reward in its own sake. It's a means to the end of pleasure, but not pleasure right away. It's pleasure you're going to get later. He chooses to arm the commoners and he somehow convinces the nobles that it's in their interest to arm the commoners, because that way they'll be more protected and other people can do the fighting. But he's really is kind of revolutionizing the entire political system.
He institutes a meritocracy, which the nobles like because they think we're the greatest, we're the most excellent, so we'll benefit from this. But this obviously opens the path for others to inherit wealth and power. He deceives people, including his own father, to basically make the army loyal to himself more so than even the Persian state. He acquires other armies through various promises and deceptions, I don't know, those are all kind of the tactics that he deploys. And I think as a reader, you're just marveling at how adept he is at lining up all these pieces on the chess board, but then you see it all unravel immediately after his death, which then leads you to question whether or not it was quite as successful as it first appears in whether or not knowledge is the solution to the political problem as Xenophon asserts at the beginning of the book.
Alex Petkas:
Yeah, fascinating. Well, I hope we'll have a chance, I'm sure that we will, if I live long enough, to cover that text in more detail on the Cost of Glory in the way that we did the Anabasis. And to say nothing of Cyrus the Great himself is worthy, of course, of a proper Cost of Glory biography, I think...
Johnny Burtka:
And if I could just add real quick, something I discovered two weeks ago, which blew my mind, is that in the last several years, tens of thousands have gathered around Cyrus's tomb for Cyrus the Great Day, which allegedly is not allowed in Iran, but basically they're chanting Cyrus's name. It's essentially an attempt to reclaim an ancient Persian identity in modern-day Iran as a protest of the current regime. But still to this day, these historic figures are, they're throwing flowers on his tomb. I mean, it's really quite interesting.
Alex Petkas:
Amazing. Wow, I got to attend someday. Well, so we mentioned Cicero a little bit, and he's top of mind for me and for a lot of my listeners. So a great selection you have in here is from Cicero's On Duties. Why don't you tell us a little bit about why you picked this text?
Johnny Burtka:
Sure, and here, I'm actually curious for your perspective on it. So I picked Cicero for several reasons. One, because On Duties, similar to Xenophon's The Education, this is a text that really has a lot of enduring staying power throughout all of Western civilization, influenced the early church fathers. Many of them sort of like, well, outside of the Bible, read Ciceros On Duties. This was almost blessed by the church in a sense. Thomas More was said to have never left the house without a copy of it in his breast pocket. Erasmus is a huge fan of it. So this is, it's a powerful book. I feel like Machiavelli is somewhat reacting against it, is somewhat critical of it. So personally, I've read through this selection a number of times. I've read the book a couple times. I struggle with it myself. I've come to appreciate it the more that I've read it.
But to me, I don't know, so I'm conflicted. I included it because it's one of the greatest books of all time, but it just doesn't speak to me the way that Xenophon or Machiavelli speak to me. And I think I feel like he's just a little too tidy in tying together the useful with what is actually the good and beneficial and these things can't be in conflict. And I don't know, it just seems like, and then there's a question of whether he's successful. I don't know. Is the Roman Republic the ideal or is the Roman Empire the success that we should be looking up to? So I don't know, how do you personally situate Cicero compared to some of these other historians and philosophers?
Alex Petkas:
These are some of the big questions you're putting your finger on, really. So Cicero's De Officiis was the first full text I ever read in Latin. I took a course, it's about 180 pages in Latin, and we read our professor, I was an undergrad, he came in with a copy of the Oxford Classical Text, and he puts it down and he says, this semester we're going to read this whole book. And we're all third year undergrads, and that's way more Latin than you typically read in a semester in a typical classics program. So it was a haul, so I always have this fondness for it. And like the church fathers appreciated, Ambrose wrote a De Officiis of his own. Officiis comes from, for the background here, comes from the Latin, sorry, it's a Latin translation, officium, of this Greek term from Stoicism, καθήκον, which is, sort of translated as duty but in Stoicism it means right action.
What it behooves you to do in the moment as someone who wants to live according to nature and wants to be a wise man and be just. And he's kind of translating, kind of paraphrasing this famous text of Panaetius, this Stoic from a couple generations earlier. And I think interestingly, what I find really striking about it is I'm reading it now again, having really drilled into the biographies of Cicero and Pompey and Caesar, is he's writing this in, I think 44 BCE. It's like his last philosophical treatise. Caesar has just died, been assassinated, Pompey's dead. Cato has just died too in Africa, all of them dying violently. And I think I see a subtext in a lot of these paragraphs, and I think Cicero wrote this text kind of fast.
He wrote a thousand pages of philosophy over the course of a year or two. It's really dazzling, but you can see some of the signs of the speediness and that he kind of doesn't flesh out of his examples. Maybe he's being careful, so I think you can see latent devaluations of the careers of Caesar and Pompey too, who disappointed him. Let's see if I can find a passage here. Well, here's thinking of Cato here, “Hence it is that such men suffer themselves to be overcome...” Well, let's start over that top of that paragraph, “Now it is hard when you covet preeminence to maintain the equity, which is the most essential property of justice. Hence, it is that such men suffer themselves to be overcome neither in debate, nor by any legal or constitutional hindrance. And in the state, they for the most part, employ bribery and intrigue that they may acquire the greatest influence possible and may rise by force rather than maintain equality with their fellow citizens by justice.”
That bribery is a huge issue in the late republic, and he's talking about unscrupulous men. And Cato is in his mind, is a counter example of this. And we could spend a whole, and maybe I will spend a whole episode on Cicero's De Officiis at some point, I think he's also thinking of a guy like Lucullus, who retired from private life before the troubles of the Republic. And he has this passage here talking about whether it's good to live an active life if it means getting your hands dirty or to retire into private life.
Johnny Burtka:
Yeah.
Alex Petkas:
“But there are, and have been many who in quest of the serenity of which I am speaking, have withdrawn from public affairs and taken refuge and a life of leisure. Among these are the most eminent philosophers, including those at the very first rank. And also, here's Lucullus, without being named, some stern and grave men who could not endure the conduct either of the people or of their rulers. Some to have taken up their abode in the country, engrossed in the care of their own property.” I mean, any Roman of the time would be like, that Lucullus, who's building fish ponds and castles in the side of the mountain. So I think Cicero is also, for his career, he's not been a Stoic. He's been an academic skeptic, which suits his sort of orator persona as somebody who doesn't want to commit to a particular side, wants to weigh all perspectives, he's got to argue for some bad clients sometimes. It's sort of his duty.
But then after Cato dies really gloriously and to the shame of Caesar, he commits suicide after his army is defeated in Africa, I think Cicero kind of starts to warm up to Stoicism in this way that he never had before. And so in a way, it's like a kind of subtle homage to Cato. And I think that explains a lot of why he's sort of trying to muster the words to capture this ideal that he saw in Cato, that he himself, Cicero, has not really lived, which is one of the reasons I think it's not so, the words are good, but they're not spoken with the same kind of conviction. It leaves me a little dry, but I also feel that the tension of the man in it, that's probably a longer answer than you wanted.
Johnny Burtka:
Yeah, no, that's very helpful. And again, I'm looking at this not as a classicist or as a historian, just simply as a practitioner trying to glean, and I do think it's, I would say my own personal ethics are probably closer to Cicero than they are to Machiavelli or Xenophon. So there's a sense in which just Cicero is probably better for your soul, but the others might be a little more fun to read, so anyways.
Alex Petkas:
Yeah. Well, one thing that Cicero talks about that I think he really does mean is this idea of greatness of soul. I'll just read a quick quote here. Let's see, “On the other hand, in panegyrics, our speech rolls on with a fuller flow when we praise deeds that have been wrought with a large mind bravely and grandly.” Then he talks about how people are always banging on about the Battle of Marathon, the Battle of Thermopylae, et cetera. The glory of Marcus Marcellus, another Plutarch hero, defeated Hannibal, “And of others, more than can be numbered. And the Roman people as a nation excels other nations chiefly in this very greatness of soul”, this Magnitudo Animi, which is something that Aristotle I think talks about. That a leader needs, a man in public life needs some kind of elevation of soul. He's got to have contempt for the small things and aspire to the great things. How do you think you cultivate that?
Johnny Burtka:
How do you cultivate greatness of soul?
Alex Petkas:
Yeah, do you just have it or is it a choice? Can you train it?
Johnny Burtka:
Yeah, that's a really good question. I'm reading through Andrew Roberts biography of Winston Churchill, Walking with Destiny, and he does talk about how, basically Churchill's aristocratic background, which would make him probably very unsuited for politics today, made him quite suited for politics in the time in which he lived. And part of that was actually, there was a sense of entitlement that he had that kind of insulated him. It worked to his advantage because it insulated him from the fear of criticism, because he felt like he had a right to what he was doing.
He felt like he deserved it. He felt like it was just part of, it was part of his destiny and that was inherited. And so there's a sense in which he, his whole life, he would also even court death. And he had so many near brushes with death, I mean, it's insane. Like a dozen times. And he almost even courted it at certain points but he just knew that he had this sense of destiny. And part of that was also from his upbringing and who he was by rank. And so yeah, there's a way in which, but he was kind of just born into those circumstances and that led him to cultivate that disposition.
Alex Petkas:
That's fascinating.
Johnny Burtka:
Yeah, I don't know, I think it's got to be a combination of setting before you, the examples of serious men who have done important and great things and trying to channel that in your own life. And then I think spending time with the best living examples that you can find of that. And it just sort of rubs off on you because those people ask you to do things, ask you to make sacrifices, ask you to rise up and push beyond where your comfort zone is. And you can either accept that path if you care about greatness, or you can maybe you say, no, actually I'm comfortable enough where I'm at and the goodness is just fine. Or I'm fine being an ordinary person living my life well, I mean, not by virtue of what greatness is. Not everyone can be great, and not everyone desires to be great, and that's okay.
Alex Petkas:
Yeah, but you do see this in so many of the great leaders in the late Roman Republic, the sense of the destiny, that they have this just supreme confidence in themselves. Sulla is a great example. He has this almost religious faith in his own greatness. And Caesar, you could say the same. Interestingly, Pompey strikes me as a little bit on the insecure side of things. He doesn't believe that. Perhaps one of his weaknesses is a leader, but yeah, I love that. Well, why don't we take a look at Machiavelli while we still have some time. As you said, he kind of cuts against the grain. If Cicero is the paradigm, a leader should be good, just, there's nothing good that is not also righteous. This maxim that Cicero tried to live by or at least preached, Machiavelli really takes it in a different direction, so why did you include him in the collection?
Johnny Burtka:
Yeah, so with Machiavelli, I think, so once you make your way from Cicero, and let's say you read Augustine and then you read Thomas Aquinas, or you read a number of the other Christian texts that preceded Machiavelli, and there's probably many different reasons for this, but they tend to shift away from practical advice for rulers to more, I would say spiritual or ethical advice for leaders. And that may be because a lot of them were written by theologians, but I feel like something got lost a little bit in this tradition. And there may have been too much placed on the idea of if you're a good person, if you're faithful to God and to your country and to your family, that'll be enough. The rest is going to follow. And I don't think that's true. I think it's important. I think that's necessary to be pious and to be moral.
But I don't think that's a sufficient basis for actually being a political leader or a ruler, because I think the reality is that people are trying to destroy you at all times, people from within, people from without. And so it's like you're trying to accomplish certain goals, you're trying to move the ball down the field, and meanwhile, you're being attacked from all sides. And so to me, you really need to be a student of human nature. You actually do have to be quite cunning and adept at navigating these waters or else you'll be crushed by the burden of your task. And so I think for Machiavelli, he just thought, well, let's just, he was also dealing with political challenges in his own day in Florence and dealing with the papacy and their relationship to political power.
And there were so many other factors that I think for him, again, speaking as someone who's more of a practitioner, not a political philosopher, but to him decoupling the art of political rule from everything above it perhaps allowed him to just think more clearly about what was in his view necessary to acquire and maintain political power. And so to me, just reading Machiavelli was just such an arrest, I remember reading it in college and being so scandalized by it. I just was like, this is disgusting. I hate this. And now just sitting down and reading it years later, especially after reading all these other books and just being in awe reading. I mean, I would just have to set this book down every five minutes and just be like, whoa, what just happened? I have to think about that. I don't know. There's something that just really rings true. And even if you can't accept it all, whole hog, there's something really powerful about the book that actually brought me back more to my experience of reading Xenophon than it did anywhere else.
Alex Petkas:
Yeah, many sentiments in there would be warmly praised by Xenophon or Thucydides, who he's really drinking from the fount of Polybius, maybe Plutarch would disagree, but he will faithfully depict the characters that Machiavelli admires nonetheless, because I feel like he realizes that he's a conduit of something greater. One of the things that Machiavelli advises in the selection that you have in the chapter 14 is the prince should dedicate himself to nothing more than the art of war. That he should constantly be studying the art of war, that in peace time, all the more should he redouble his efforts to study the art of war because that is what his regime succeeds or fails on, fascinating. So I guess when I'm thinking of application, what would the art of war be today? Obviously we have real wars and real weapons and real battles, but is it fair to extend that concept to other things that are war like for leaders?
Johnny Burtka:
Well, so I think there are two things going on. So one, I would say it is mostly neoconservative, there's a weird thing at play where the great popularizers of these classical ideas, at least when it comes to war, and ‘great soul’ leaders are often more on the neocon side of politics. They're the ones that have written the biographies. They're the ones who talk about Thucydides all the time. And so I think part of the reason for that, which I think has actually led to a lot of very distorted and kind of stupid, highly ideological kind of interventions throughout the world, but I think basically the reason why is because we have a system of government. We have limited government, constitutional government. That is not necessarily the playing field that comes most naturally to people that are wanting to imitate great individuals and who are placing their political hope on great leaders.
So I think what is essentially happening is that, if we're kind of sticking with actual war making, that is one area of our political system where we have allowed the executive to have more unrestrained, unchecked power. And so I do think there's a sense in which, because you perhaps can't necessarily be a great leader in the ancient sense as much in our own political system, the only place you're allowed to do that is in the area of war. And so I think it attracts people who are interested in that to then pursue wars, and they want to relive every conflict today as though they were a Churchill or as though they were whoever from ancient history. So I actually think that it leads to some weird distortion. So in one sense, maybe practicing war is where people try to do that today. In another sense, I think people really, if you're wanting to know, okay, who is it that's most interested in these kind of classical figures, it's mostly people in the tech startup space.
I think that's, it's the great entrepreneur, the titan of industry, that's where people are playing out these sort of things today. Like everyone, Napoleon is the most inspiring figure for tech entrepreneurs. If you talk to political philosophers about Napoleon as being a model or inspiration for your political program, they're going to get anxious. Even talking about Xenophon, they're a little bit like, oh, you got to be careful. Machiavelli, watch out. They can just get nervous. But if you talk to business people, they're like, hell yeah, they're all in on it. They love this stuff. And so maybe business, specifically tech entrepreneurship is sort of the space where we do that today. I don't know.
Alex Petkas:
Yeah, because I often wonder where, so a lot of our listeners are in or considering the path at some point of going into public life, and where do people like that go for a training in the arts? Are they going to join the army? Are they going to be officers going to West Point or are they going to go into law? I think a lot of them are really going into tech and business as a stepping stone to learn skills, hard skills, whether it's cybersecurity or propaganda, the way that media works. Yeah, so I wonder if you had an 18-year-old trying to figure out what kind of vertical he should dedicate himself to, if he wanted to go into public life, where would you steer him? How do you think about that?
Johnny Burtka:
Yeah, I probably wouldn't suggest the military, and even that is less for the more recent woke manifestations of the campaign, the commercials for the Army or whatever, I think it more just has to do with it being so bureaucratic and so structured towards the next promotion and pay increase. And this is not in any way to disrespect people that take that course. But I think if you're thinking of just pursuing great soul, if you really want that innovative spirit and trying to accomplish great things, I think there's just a lot of conformity and bureaucracy in the military that cuts across the current of the qualities that we might be looking for if you want to be a great soul leader. Not universally, but I think largely by its design. So yeah, where would you go? I think this is a challenge. I'm sort of at a loss for where...
Alex Petkas:
I know a lot of people are asking that question right now.
Johnny Burtka:
Yeah, where would you, yeah, certainly not going into management consulting or not being a lawyer. These are all the traditional routes and they're all kind of boring and antithetical to this sort of life.
Alex Petkas:
Yeah, law too seems to, the legal school system just really seems to have lost its edge somehow. I don't know. Tell us a little bit about, while we're on this topic of the youth and what they should do, tell us a little bit about ISI and its mission and what you guys do. Because I mean, this is really in the mission, I think of ISI in line with the book, but also in the idea of training up the youth of the next generation.
Johnny Burtka:
Yeah, so I mean, to put it succinctly, I mean, what we're really trying to do is to identify, educate, and mentor the next generation of great American leaders. And I mean, for us, that means focusing on the universities. So as much as the universities are flawed, and as much as I think it'll be quite challenging to reform most major universities, it is still the case that the top talent of the next generation comes through the university system. So basically, we're working on college campuses. We have over a hundred chapters. We've got about 80 campus newspapers. We have field officers that are out on the ground. We work with a network of professors. We're trying to identify top talent, both individuals who have certain intellectual qualities, but also certain moral qualities and certain ambition to make an impact in public life. And we're coming alongside of them, bringing them into community, introducing them to great books, great ideas, great thinkers and great mentors who can shape their career and then helping to launch those careers when they graduate.
Alex Petkas:
Love it. And even if it's kind of cool to not graduate from college, it's probably better to get into a college that has a nice name brand and then drop out of it.
Johnny Burtka:
Yeah, that's true. Many have followed that path.
Alex Petkas:
Yeah. Well, I love that work. Why don't we talk a little bit about Washington while we still got some time, because I think my friend, Ben Wilson, How To Take Over The World Podcast has just finished most of a series on Washington, it'll probably be finished by the time this interview comes out. So I'm just reminded of how amazing and Plutarch ian a man George Washington was, and also a guy who was kind of in this tradition of being influenced by fictional depictions of real people like Joseph Addison's Cato, which was extremely influential on Washington, this depiction of Cato the Younger who in a lot of ways was like Washington's hero from the Roman Republic. And he staged Cato's Addison at Valley Forge in this bitter terrible winter, which I think was an interesting choice to stage a play in the middle of a war for a bedraggled man starving in winter quarters. But tell us about the selection you made from George Washington for this book.
Johnny Burtka:
Sure. So yeah, this is part of the attempt, while the genre of the mirrors for princes died out, this is kind of my attempt to cobble together some new texts to add to that canon. And the reason I pick Washington's farewell address is because I think it is the most beautiful political text written in the entire history of the United States. At one point in time, this was actually more cited and read and circulated more copies of it existed than the Declaration of Independence itself. It used to be, it might still be in the Senate, but I don't think in the House, it was read every year on an annual basis.
I think maybe on Washington's birthday. It was written maybe mostly by Hamilton, but some by James Madison, obviously with Washington's input. And I just think it reflects this, I don't know, he just comes off as being truly a grateful man, truly, I think the father of his country, someone who has exemplary virtue, but it's a virtue that's not primarily an intellectual virtue, even though he's clearly a smart guy, but it's a virtue that's really born by experience in his life and founding the country.
So yeah, to me, I think Washington does stack up among the greatest statesmen of all time. And I think the American project that he set out, and even his model of stepping away from power when he could have taken more power, it required a degree, an amount of restraint that is, I think, superhuman. And I think he ended up building one of the greatest nations ever to exist in the history of mankind. But I think, the thing that I like about it is this, it's not super ideological. I think the way that we approach America very often is in a highly ideological way. Kind of, let's distill the principles from the declaration, and these ideas are what America is. And for him, obviously there's a sense of Republican virtue and all of those Republican ideals are embodied in it, but it's written really just deeply from the experience and reflecting on prudentially what he thinks would be required for the country to flourish and pull together as a union after his time as president.
Alex Petkas:
Yeah, he talks in there a lot about the necessity of keeping away from factionalism, preserving the union, let's not get into these ideas that the North and the South have different interests, or the East and the West have different interests. And also some interesting comments on the danger of picking foreign allies and letting them, and sticking with them beyond the point of our own interests, I thought was really a lot of foresight there, really for many eras and many countries. But what are some of your favorite parts of that that you would take as lessons for leaders today?
Johnny Burtka:
Yeah, so building off of a couple that you mentioned, obviously to him, the sense of the importance of the union as a whole and really cultivating sentiments, and I think even especially in the leadership class, a sense of duty to the whole of the regime and not just to the particular faction they represent. I think today that's obviously, it's easier said than done because our problems have reached an existential point, but I still think that that appeal to seeing the whole, it's very Ciceronian, there's a sense of the common good that he possesses. I think his warnings about entanglements, military entanglements, alliances that have overrun their usefulness, not developing these sympathies towards other nations that are permanent, but they're clearly, he espouses a foreign policy that's restrained, but it's aligned clearly with the national interest in a very direct way. It's not highly ideological. I mean, he's prudential, even in how he approaches trade.
I mean, his first piece of legislation that he signed was actually a tariff bill. So he did have a sense that you needed to use economic policy to shape and build up the national power of the country. But he also had liberal sentiments. He was not willing to have commerce around the world, but sort of a clear sense of the national interest. Then also the thing I like is he was a mentor to Alexander Hamilton, and Hamilton was a man who I think many ways was very un-Washingtonian, highly ambitious, very much a self-promoter, just always grinding, trying to become great and died in a very epic sort of way.
But even with that, you don't get the sense that Washington admired that, and perhaps he tried to inculcate a degree of restraint in Hamilton, but he always promoted him. He saw the talent and he really allowed it to grow and to flourish and didn't, maybe at times he held him back, but he was able to recognize a great, someone who aspired to be great and kind of encouraged him in that journey. And so I think that mentorship, Hamilton was I think 22 when he started to serve in Washington as an aide-de-camp to Washington. Then by the age of 30, he's writing the Federalist Papers. So pretty impressive trajectory with Hamilton.
Alex Petkas:
Yeah, their relationship is so interesting, and Washington largely kept himself free of envy, which is the great bane of so many prominent politicians to resent those who challenge you and to get revenge on them or to keep your subordinates subordinate. I think there's a lot of lessons there, and his ability to step out of the spotlight, of course, that addresses, they want to elect him for a third term as the president and he declines. I think that's how the context goes. Well, Johnny, this has been great. I love the book and I love the mission of ‘Statesmanship selections from Xenophon to Churchill’, and where can people find you if they want to find out more about your work?
Johnny Burtka:
Yeah, absolutely. So go to isi.org to read about everything we're up to at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Also to catch a new video series we'll have, which is inspired by the book, which you'll be a guest for that series. So be sure to check that out. And then you can of course, follow me at Johnny Burtka on X, or you can look up Gateway to Statesmanship on Amazon and order the book there.
Alex Petkas:
And we'll put links to all those in the show notes as well. So thanks again for joining us, Johnny.
Johnny Burtka:
Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
