A few comments on POWER, being or working close to or under a Power, which is to say a leader or one who exerts wide primary influence on the affairs of men.

I have written it this way, using two actual people to give an example of magnitude enough to interest and to furnish some pleasant reading. And I used a military sphere so it could be seen clearly without restimulation of admin problems.

The book referenced is a fantastically able book by the way.

Reference: The Book Entitled:

Simon Bolivar was the Liberator of South America from the yoke of Spain.

Manuela Saenz was the Liberatress and Consort.

Their acts and fates are well recorded in this moving biography.

But aside from any purely dramatic value the book lays bare and motivates various actions of great interest to those who lead, who support or are near leaders.

Simon Bolivar was a very strong character. He was one of the richest men in South America. He had real personal ability given to only a handful on the planet. He was a military commander without peer in history. Why he would fail and die an exile to be later deified is thus of great interest. What mistakes did he make?

Manuela Saenz was a brilliant, beautiful and able woman. She was loyal, devoted, quite comparable to Bolivar, far above the cut of average humanoids. Why then did she live a vilified outcast, receive such violent social rejection and die of poverty and remain unknown to history. What mistakes did she make?

The freeing of things is the reverse unstated dramatization (the opposite side of the coin) to the slavery enjoined by the mechanisms of the mind.

Unless there is something to free men into, the act of freeing is simply a protest of slavery. And as no humanoid is free while aberrated in the body cycle, it is of course a gesture to free him politically as it frees him only into the anarchy of dramatizing his aberrations with NO control whatever and without something to fight exterior and with no exteriorization of his interest he simply goes mad noisily or quietly.

Once as great a wrong as depraving beings has been done there is of course no freedom short of freeing one from the depravity itself or at least from its most obvious influences in the society. In short one would have to de-aberrate a man before his whole social structure could be de-aberrated.

If one lacked the whole ability to free man wholly from his reactive patterns, then one could free man from their restimulators in the society at least. If one had the whole of the data (but lacked the Scientology tech), one would simply use reactive patterns to blow the old society apart and then pick up the pieces neatly in a new pattern. If one had no inkling of how reactive one can get (and Bolivar of course had no knowledge whatever in that field), there yet remained a workable formula used "instinctively" by most successful practical political leaders.

If you free a society from those things you see wrong with it and use force to demand it do what is right, and if you carry forward with decision and thoroughness, and without continual temporizing you can, in the applications of your charm and gifts, bring about a great political reform or improve a failing country.

So Bolivar's first error, most consistent it was, too, was contained in the vital words "you see" in the above paragraph. He didn't look and he didn't even listen to sound intelligence reports. He was so sure he could glow things right or fight things right or charm things right that he never looked for anything wrong to correct until it was too late. This is the ne-plus-ultra of personal confidence, amounting to supreme vanity. "When he appeared it would all come right" was not only his belief but his basic philosophy. So the first time it didn't work, he collapsed. All his skills and charm were channeled into this one test. Only that could he observe.

Not to compare with Bolivar but to show my understanding of this:

I once had a similar one. "I would keep going as long as I could and when I was stopped I would then die." This was a solution mild enough to state and really hard to understand until you had an inkling of what I meant by keeping going. Meteors keep going — very, very fast. And so did 1. Then one day ages back I finally was stopped after countless little stoppings by social contacts and family to prepare me culminating in a navy more devoted to braid than dead enemies and literally I quit. For a while I couldn't get a clue of what was wrong with me. Life went completely unlivable until I found a new solution. So I know the frailty of these single solutions. Not to compare myself but just to show it happens to us all, not just Bolivars.

Bolivar had no personal insight at all. He could only "outsight" and even then he did not look or listen. He glowed things right. Pitifully it was his undoing that he could. Until he no longer could. When he couldn't glow he roared and when he couldn't roar he fought a battle. Then civic enemies were not military enemies so he had no solution left at all.

It never occurred to him to do more than personally magnetize things into being right and victorious.

His downfall was that he made far too heavy use of a skill simply because it was easy. He was too good at this one thing. So he never looked to any other skill and he never even dreamed there was any other way.

He had no view of any situation and no idea of the organizational or preparatory steps necessary to political and personal victory. He only knew military organization which is where his organizational insight ceased.

He was taught on the high wine of French revolt, notorious in its organizational inability to form cultures, and that fatally by a childhood teacher who was intensely impractical in his own private life (Simon Rodriguez, an unfrocked priest turned tutor).

Bolivar had no personal financial skill. He started wealthy and wound up a pauper, a statistic descending from one of the if not the richest man in South America down to a borrowed nightshirt to be buried in as an exile. And this while the property of Royalists was wide open, the greatest land and mine valuables of South America wide open to his hand and that's not believable! But true. He never collected his own debt of loans to governments even when the head of those governments.

So it is no wonder we find two more very real errors leading to his downfall. He did not get his troops or officers rewarded and he did not aim for any solvency of the states he controlled. It was all right if there were long years of battle ahead for them to be unpaid as no real riches were yet won, but not to reward them when the whole place was at his disposal! Well! The limit of his ability consisted of demanding a bit of cash for current pay from Churches — which were not actively against him at first but which annoyed them no end — and a few household expenses.

He could have (and should have) set aside all Royalist property and estates for division amongst his officers, their men and his supporters. It had no owners now. And this failure cost the economy of the country the tax loss of all those productive estates (the whole wealth of the land). So it is no wonder his government, its taxable estates now inoperative or at best lorded by a profiteer or looted by Indians, was insolvent. Also, by failing to do such an obvious act he delivered property into the hands of more provident enemies and left his officers and men penniless to finance any support for their own stability in the new society and so for his own.

As for state finance the great mines of South America, suddenly ownerless, were overlooked and were then grabbed and worked by foreign adventurers who simply came in and took them without payment.

Spain had run the country on the finance of mine tithes and general taxes. Bolivar not only didn't collect the tithes, he let the land become so worthless as to be untaxable. He should have gotten the estates going by any shifts and should have state operated all Royalist mines once he had them. To not do these things was complete, but typically humanoid, folly.

In doing this property division he should have left it all up to officers' committees operating as courts of claim without staining his own hands in the natural corruption. He was left doubly open as he not only did not attend to it, he also got the name of corruption when anybody did grab something.

He failed as well to recognize the distant widespread nature of his countries despite all his riding and fighting over them and so sought tightly centralized government, not only centralizing states but also centralizing the various nations into a Federal state. And this over a huge land mass full of insurmountable ranges, impassable jungles and deserts and without mail, telegraph, relay stages, roads, railroads, river vessels or even foot bridges repaired after a war of attrition.

A step echelon from a pueblo (village) to a state, from a state to a country and a country to a Federal state was only possible in such huge spaces of country where candidates could never be known personally over any wide area and whose opinions could not even be circulated more than a few miles of burro trail, where only the pueblo was democratic and the rest all appointive from Pueblo on up, himself the ratifier of titles if he even needed that. With his own officers and armies controlling the land as owners of all wrested from Royalists and the crown of Spain, he would have had no revolts. There would have been little civil wars of course but a court to settle their final claims could have existed at Federal level and kept them traveling so much over those vast distances it would have crippled their enthusiasm for litigation on the one hand and on the other, by dog eat dog settlements, would have given him the strongest rulers — if he took neither side.

He did not step out and abdicate a dictatorial position. He mistook military acclaim and ability for the tool of peace. War only brings anarchy, so he had anarchy. Peace is more than a "command for unity", his favorite phrase. A productive peace is getting men busy and giving them something to make something of that they want to make something of and telling them to get on with it.

He never began to recognize a suppressive and never considered anyone needed killing except on a battlefield. There it was glorious. But somebody destroying his very name and soul, and the security of every supporter and friend, the SP Santander, his vice-president, who could have been arrested and executed by a corporal's guard on one one-hundredth of available evidence, could suborn the whole treasury and population against him, without Bolivar, continually warned, loaded with evidence, ever even reprimanding him. And this brought about his loss of popularity and his eventual exile.

He also failed in the same way to protect his military family or Manuela Saenz from other enemies. So he weakened his friends and ignored his enemies just by oversight. His greatest error lay in that while dismissing Spain he did not dismiss that nation's most powerful minion, the Church, and did not even localize it or reward a South American separate branch to loyalty or do anything at all (except extort money from it) to an organization which continually worked for Spain as only it could work — on every person in the land in a direct anti-Bolivar reign of terror behind the scenes. You either suborn such a group or you take them out when they cease to be universal and become or are an enemy's partner.

As the Church held huge properties and as Bolivar's troops and supporters went unpaid, even of the penny soldiers' pay, if one was going to overlook the Royalist estates, one could at least have seized the Church property and given it to the soldiers. General Vallejo did this in 1835 in California, a nearly contemporary act, with no catastrophe from Rome. Or the penniless countries could have taken them over. You don't leave an enemy financed and solvent while you let your friends starve in a game like South American politics. Oh no.

He wasted his enemies. He exported the "godos" or defeated Royalist soldiers. They mostly had no homes but South America. He issued no amnesties they could count on. They were shipped off or left to die in the "ditch" — the best artisan in the country among them.

When one (General Rodil) would not surrender Calloa fortress after Peru was won. Bolivar after great gestures of amnesty failed to obtain surrender and then fought the fort. Four thousand political refugees and four thousand Royalist troops died over many months in full sight of Lima, fought heavily by Bolivar only because the fort was fighting. But Bolivar had to straighten up Peru urgently not fight a defeated enemy. The right answer to such a foolish commander as Rodil as Bolivar did have the troops to do it, was to cover the roads with cannon enfilade potential to discourage any sortie from the fort, put a larger number of his own troops in a distant position of offense but ease and comfort and say, "We're not going to fight. The war's over, silly man. Look at the silly fellows in there, living on rats when they can just walk out and sleep home nights or go to Spain or enlist with me or just go camping," and let anybody walk in and out who pleased, making the fort Commander (Rodil) the prey of every pleading wife and mother without and would-be deserter or mutineer within until he did indeed sheepishly give up the pretense — a man cannot fight alone. But battle was glory to Bolivar. And he became intensely disliked because the incessant cannonade which got nowhere was annoying.

Honors meant a great deal to Bolivar. To be liked was his life. And it probably meant more to him than to see things really right. He never compromised his principles but he lived on admiration, a rather sickening diet since it demands in turn continuous "theatre". One is what one is, not what one is admired or hated for. To judge oneself by one's successes is simply to observe that one's postulates worked and breeds confidence in one's ability. To have to be told it worked only criticizes one's own eyesight and hands a spear to the enemy to make his wound of vanity at his will. Applause is nice. It's great to be thanked and admired. But to work only for that? And his craving for that, his addiction to the most unstable drug in history — fame — killed Bolivar. That self offered spear. He told the world continually how to kill him — reduce its esteem. So as money and land can buy any quantity of cabals, he could be killed by curdling the esteem, the easiest thing you can get a mob to do.

He had all the power. He did not use it for good or evil. One cannot hold power and not use it. It violates the power formula. For it then prevents others from doing things if they had some of the power so they then see as their only solution the destruction of the holder of the power as he, not using power or delegating it, is the unwitting block to all their plans. So even many of his friends and armies finally agreed he had to go. They were not able men. They were in a mess. But bad or good they had to do something. Things were desperate, broken down and starving after 14 years of civil war. Therefore they either had to have some of that absolute power or else nothing could be done at all. They were not great minds. He did not need any "great minds", he thought, even though he invited them verbally. He saw their petty, often murderous solutions and he rebuked them. And so held the power and didn't use it.

He could not stand another personality threat. The trouble in Peru came when he bested its real conqueror (from the Argentine), La Mar, in a petty triumph over adding Guayaquil to Colombia. Bolivar wished to look triumphant again and didn't notice it really cost him the support and Peru the support of La Mar — who understandably resigned and went home, leaving Bolivar Peru to conquer. Unfortunately, it had already been in his hands. La Mar needed some troops to clean up a small Royalist army that was all. La Mar didn't need Peru's loss of Guayaquil — which never did anybody any real good anyway!

Bolivar would become inactive when faced with two areas' worth of problems — he did not know which way to go. So he did nothing.

Brave beyond any general in history on the battlefield, the Andes or in torrential rivers, he did not really have the bravery needed to trust inferior minds and stand by their often shocking blunders. He feared their blunders. So he did not dare unleash his many willing hounds.

He could lead men, make men feel wonderful, make men fight and lay down their lives after hardships no army elsewhere in the world has ever faced before or since. But he could not use men even when they were begging to be used.

It is a frightening level of bravery to use men you know can be cruel, vicious, and incompetent. He had no fear of their turning on him ever. When they finally did only then he was shocked. But he protected "the people" from authority given to questionably competent men. So he really never used but three or four generals of mild disposition and enormously outstanding ability. And to the rest he denied power. Very thoughtful of the nebulous "people" but very bad indeed for the general good. And it really caused his death.

No. Bolivar was theatre. It was all theatre. One cannot make such errors and still pretend that one thinks of life as life, red-blooded and factual. Real men and real life are full of dangerous, violent, live situations and wounds hurt and starvation is desperation itself especially when you see it in one you love.

This mighty actor, backed up with fantastic personal potential, made the mistake of thinking the theme of liberty and his own great role upon the stage was enough to interest all the working, suffering hours of men, buy their bread, pay their whores, shoot their wives' lovers and bind their wounds or even put enough drama into very hard pressed lives to make them want to live it.

No, Bolivar was unfortunately the only actor on the stage and no other man in the world was real to him.

And so he died. They loved him. But they were also on the stage too, where they were dying in his script or Rousseau's script for liberty but no script for living their very real lives.

He was the greatest military general in any history measured against his obstacles, the people and the land across which he fought.

And he was a complete failure to himself and his friends.

While being one of the greatest men alive at that. So we see how truly shabby others in leaders' boots amongst men must be.

The tragedy of Manuela Saenz as Bolivar's mistress was that she was never used, never really had a share and was neither protected nor honored by Bolivar.

Here was a clever, spectacular woman of fantastic fidelity and skill, with an enormous "flaire", capable of giving great satisfaction and service. And only her satisfaction ability was taken and that not consistently nor even honestly.

In the first place, Bolivar never married her. He never married anybody. This opened up a fantastic breach in any defense she could ever make against her or his enemies who were legion. So her first mistake was in not in some way contriving a marriage. That she had an estranged husband she had been more or less sold to was permitted by her to wreck her life obliquely.

She was too selfless to be real in all her very able plotting.

For this marriage problem she could have engineered any number of actions.

She had the solid friendship of all his trusted advisers, even his old tutor. Yet she arranged nothing for herself.

She was utterly devoted, completely brilliant and utterly incapable of really bringing off an action of any final kind.

She violated the power formula in not realizing that she had power.

Manuela was up against a hard man to handle. But she did not know enough to make her own court effective. She organized one. She did not know what to do with it.

Her most fatal mistake was in not bringing down Santander, Bolivar's chief enemy. That cost her everything she had before the end and after Bolivar died. She knew for years Santander had to be killed. She said it or wrote it every few days. Yet never did she promise some young officer a nice night or a handful of gold to do it in a day when duelling was in fashion. It's like standing around discussing how the plainly visible wolf in the garden that's eating the chickens must be shot, even holding a gun, and never even lifting it while all one's chickens vanish for years.

In a land overridden with priests she never got herself a tame priest to bring about her ends.

She was a fantastic intelligence officer. But she fed her data to a man who could not act to protect himself or friends, who could only fight armies dramatically.

She did not see this and also quietly take on the portfolio of secret police chief. Her mistake was waiting to be asked — to be asked to come to him, to act. She voluntarily was his best political intelligence agent. Therefore she should have also assumed further roles.

She guarded his correspondence, was intimate with his secretaries. And yet she never collected or forged or stole any document to bring down enemies either through representations to Bolivar or a court circle of her own. And in an area with that low an ethic, that's fatal.

She openly pamphleteered and fought violently as in a battle against her rabble.

She had a great deal of money at her disposal. In a land of for-sale Indians she never used a penny to buy a quick knife or even a solid piece of evidence.

When merely opening her lips she could have had any sequestrated Royalist estate she went to litigation for a legitimate legacy never won and another won but never paid.

They lived on the edge of quicksand. She never bought a plank or a rope.

Carried away by the glory of it all, devoted completely, potentially able and a formidable enemy, she did not act.

She waited to be told to come to him even when he lay dying and exiled.

His command over her who never obeyed any other was too absolute for his own or her survival.

Her assigned mistakes (pointed out at the time as her caprice and play acting) were not her errors. They only made her interesting. They were far from fatal.

She was not ruthless enough to make up for his lack of ruthlessness and not provident enough to make up for his lack of providence. The ways open to her for finance, for action, were completely doorless. The avenue stretched out to the horizon.

She fought bravely but she just didn't take action.

She was an actress for the theatre alone.

And she died of it. And she let Bolivar die because of it.

Never once did Manuela look about and say, "See here, things musn't go this wrong. My lover holds half a continent and even I hold the loyalty of battalions. Yet that woman threw a fish!"

Never did Manuela tell Bolivar's doctor, a rumoured lover, "Tell that man he will not live without my becoming a constant part of his entourage, and tell him until he believes it or we'll have a new physician around here."

The world was open. Where Theodosius, the wife of Emperor Justinian II of Constantinople, a mere circus girl and a whore, ruled harder than her husband but for her husband behind his back — and made him marry her as well, Manuela never had any bushel basket of gold brought in to give Bolivar for his unpaid troops with a "Just found it, dear" to his "Where on Earth . . . .?" after the Royalist captives had been carefully ransomed for gaol escapes by her enterprising own entourage and officer friends. She never handed over any daughter of a family clamoring against her to Negro troops and then said, "Which oververbal family is next?"

She even held a colonel's rank but only used it because she wore man's clothing afternoons. It was a brutal, violent, ruthless land, not a game of musical chairs.

And so Manuela, penniless, improvident, died badly and in poverty, exiled by enemies and deserted by her friends.

But why not deserted by her friends? They had all been poverty-stricken to a point quite incapable of helping her even though they wanted to — for she once had the power to make them solvent. And didn't use it. They were in poverty before they won but they did eventually control the land. After that why make it a bad habit?

And so we see two pathetic, truly dear, but tinsel figures, both on a stage, both far removed from the reality of it all.

And one can say, "But if they had not been such idealists they never would have fought so hard and freed half a continent," or "If she had stooped to such intrigue or he had been known for violent political actions they would never have had the strength and never would have been loved."

All very idealistic itself. They died "in the ditch" unloved, hated and despised, two decent brave people, almost too good for this world.

A true hero, a true heroine. But on a stage and not in life. Impractical and improvident and with no faintest gift either one to use the power they could assemble.

This story of Bolivar and Manuela is a tragedy of the most piteous kind.

They fought a hidden enemy, the Church; they were killed by their friends.

But don't overlook how impractical it is not to give your friends power enough when you have it to give. You can always give some of it to another if the first one collapses through inability. And one can always be brought down like a hare at a hunt who seeks to use the delegated power to kill you — if you have the other friends.

Life is not a stage for posturing and "Look at me!" "Look at me." "Look at me." If one is to lead a life of command or a life near to command one must handle it as life. Life bleeds. It suffers. It hungers. And it has to have the right to shoot its enemies until such time as comes a golden age. Aberrated man is not capable of supporting in his present state, a golden declared age for three minutes, given all the tools and wealth in the world.

If one would live a life of command or one near to a command, one must then accumulate power as fast as possible and delegate it as quickly as feasible and use every humanoid in long reach to the best and beyond his talents if one is to live at all.

If one does not choose to live such a life then go on the stage and be a real actor. Don't kill men while pretending it isn't real. Or one can become a recluse or a student or a clerk. Or study butterflies or take up tennis.

For one is committed to certain irrevocable natural laws the moment one starts out upon a conquest, either as the man in charge or a person near to him or on his staff or in his army. And the foremost law, if one's ambition is to win, is of course to win.

But also to keep on providing things to win and enemies to conquer.

Bolivar let his cycle run to "freedom" and end there. He never had another plan beyond that point. He ran out of territory to free. Then he didn't know what to do with it and didn't know enough, either, to find somewhere else to free. But of course all limited games come to end. And when they do their players fall over on the field and become rag dolls unless somebody at least tells them the game has ended and they have no more game nor any dressing room or houses but just that field.

And they lie upon the field, not noticing there can be no more game since the other team has fled and after a bit they have to do something and if the leader and his consort are sitting over on the grass being rag dolls too, of course there isn't any game. And so the players start fighting amongst themselves just to have a game. And if the leader then says, "No, no" and his consort doesn't say, "Honey, you better phone the Baltimore Orioles for Saturday", then of course the poor players, bored stiff, say, "He's out." "She's out." "Now we're going to split the team in half and have a game."

And that's what happened to Bolivar and Manuela. They had to be gotten rid of for there was no game and they didn't develop one to play while forbidding the only available game — minor civil wars.

A whole continent containing the then major mines of the world, whole populations were left sitting there, "freed". But none owned any of it though the former owners had left. They weren't given it. Nor were they made to manage it. No game.

And if Bolivar had not been smart enough for that he could at least have said, "Well! You monkeys are going to have quite a time getting the wheels going but that's not my job. You decide on your type of government and what it's to be. Soldiers are my line. Now I'm taking over those old estates of mine and the Royalist ones near by and the emerald mines just as souvenirs and me and Manuela we're going home." And he should have said that 5 minutes after the last Royalist army was defeated in Peru.

And his official family with him, and a thousand troops to which he was giving land would have moved right off smartly with him. And the people after a few screams of horror at being deserted would have fallen on each other, sabered a state together here and a town there and gotten busy out of sheer self protection in a vital new game, "Who's going to be Bolivar now?"

Then when home he should have said, "Say those nice woods look awfully Royalist to me, and also those 1,000,000 hectares of grazing land, Manuela. Its owner once threw a Royalist fish, remember? So that's yours."

And the rest of the country would have done the same and gotten on with the new game of "You was a Royalist". And Bolivar and Manuela would have had statues built to them by the TON at once as soon as agents could get to Paris with orders from an adoring populace.

"Bolivar, come rule us!" should have gotten an "I don't see any unfree South America. When you see a French or Spanish army coming, come back and tell me."

That would have worked. And this poor couple would have died suitably adored . in the sanctity of glory and (perhaps more importantly) in their own beds, not "in a ditch".

And if they had had to go on ruling they could have declared a new game of "pay the soldiers and officers with Royalist land". And when that was a gone game, "Oust the Church and give its land to the poor friendly Indians".

You can't stand bowing back of the footlights forever with no show even if you are quite an actor. Somebody else can make better use of any stage than even the handsomest actor who will not use it.

Man is too aberrated to understand at least 7 things about Power:

1. Life is lived by lots of people. And if you lead you must either let them get on with it or lead them on with it actively.

2. When the game or the show is over, there must be a new game or a new show. And if there isn't somebody else is jolly well going to start one and if you won't let anyone do it the game will become "getting you".

3. If you have power use it or delegate it or you sure won't have it long.

4. When you have people use them or they will soon become most unhappy and you won't have them any more.

5. When you move off a point of power, pay all your obligations on the nail, empower all your friends completely and move off with your pockets full of artillery, potential blackmail on every erstwhile rival, unlimited funds in your private account and the addresses of experienced assassins and go live in Bulgravia and bribe the police. And even then you may not live long if you have retained one scrap of domination in any camp you do not now control or if you even say, "I favour Politician Jiggs." Abandoning power utterly is dangerous indeed.

But we can't all be leaders or figures strutting in the limelight and so there's more to know about this:

When you're close to power get some delegated to you, enough to do your job and protect yourself and your interests, for you can be shot, fellow, shot, as the position near power is delicious but dangerous, dangerous always, open to the taunts of any enemy of the power who dare not really boot the power but can boot you. So to live at all in the shadow or employ of a power you must yourself gather and USE enough power to hold your own-without just nattering to the power to "kill Pete", in straightforward or more suppressive veiled ways to him as these wreck the power that supports yours. He doesn't have to know all the bad news and if he's a power really he won't ask all the time, "What are all those dead bodies doing at the door?" And if you are clever, you never let it be thought HE killed them — that weakens you and also hurts the power source. "Well, boss, about all those dead bodies, nobody at all will suppose you did it. She over there, those pink legs sticking out, didn't like me." "Well," he'll say if he really is a power, "why are you bothering me with it if it's done and you did it. Where's my blue ink?" Or "Skipper, three shore patrolmen will be along soon with your cook, Dober, and they'll want to tell you he beat up Simson." "Who's Simson?" "He's a clerk in the enemy office downtown." "Good, when they've done it, take Dober down to the dispensary for any treatment he needs. Oh yes. Raise his pay." Or "Sir, could I have the power to sign divisional orders?" "Sure."

7. And lastly and most important, for we all aren't on the stage with our names in lights, always push power in the direction of anyone on whose power you depend. It may be more money for the power, or more ease, or a snarling 'defense of the power to a critic, or even the dull thud of one of his enemies in the dark, or the glorious blaze of the whole enemy camp as a birthday surprise.

If you work like that and the power you are near or depend upon is a power that has at least some inkling about how to be one, and if you make others work like that, then the power-factor expands and expands and expands and you too acquire a sphere of power bigger than you would have if you worked alone. Real powers are developed by tight conspiracies of this kind pushing someone up in whose leadership they have faith. And if they are right and also manage their man and keep him from collapsing through overwork, bad temper or bad data, a kind of Juggernaut builds up. Don't ever feel weaker because you work for somebody stronger. The only failure lies in taxing or pulling down the strength on which you depend. All failures to remain a power's power are failures to contribute to the strength and longevity of the work, health and power of that power. Devotion requires active contribution outwards from the power as well as in.

If Bolivar and Manuela had known these things they would have lived an epic, not a tragedy. They would not have "died in the ditch", he bereft of really earned praise for his real accomplishments even to this day. And Manuela would not be unknown even in the archives of her country as the heroine she was.

Brave, brave figures. But if this can happen to such stellar personalities gifted with ability tenfold over the greatest of other mortals, to people who could take a rabble in a vast impossible land and defeat one of Earth's then foremost powers, with no money or arms, on personality alone, what then must be the ignorance and confusion of human leaders in general, much less little men stumbling through their lives of boredom and suffering?

Let us wise them up, huh? You can't live in a world where even the great leaders can't lead.