Crowned in Smoke

Like many of you, I am a fan of ancient mythology. The stories of creation or how human beings came to be, or tales that involve gods and heroes and monsters, and sometimes just regular people who go through interesting sorts of events or travels or whatnot. And oftentimes these mythological stories are meant to impart lessons. We're supposed to learn something from them, what to do, what not to do. You're tempted to almost say at the end of all of them, and the moral of the story is, right, what are we supposed to learn from this?

Hunter S. Thompson used to call it in his columns the wisdom. And some of my favorite mythological stories are cautionary tales, examples of what can happen if we're not careful. And one of my favorite versions of that kind of story, that kind of mythological teaching tool, is the famous story of Daedalus and Icarus. If you know your ancient greek philosophy, you will recall that Daedalus is a master craftsman, an inventor.

He can seemingly make anything. He's the one who built the famous labyrinth that held the Minotaur. And it was the king of Minoa, the cretan area on the island of Crete, that had Daedalus build this for him. But at a certain point, he turns against Daedalus and imprisons Daedalus in Icarus. But of course, when you imprison one of the great inventors of all time, he's going to try to invent a way to get out.

And in this case, he does. He creates wings for he and his son, wings made of multiple different materials, including things like feathers and beeswax. And he and his son are going to be able to fly out of this prison. But Daedalus warns his son before doing so, he tells him not to get complacent and allow himself to fly too close to the water, because if you're too low, the moisture, he says, from the sea, will ruin the wings and you'll lose your power of flight and you'll crash. Conversely, he warns him about getting filled with hubris and forgetting how dangerous this is and allowing himself to fly too high.

Because if he does that, the sun will melt the beeswax that hold these wings together, and you'll plummet and fall. And of course, being an ancient greek mythological tale, how would it work if everything just went fine? And of course, it doesn't. Icarus forgets his father's warnings, gets taken sort of over by the enthusiasm that happens when a human being gets a chance to fly like a bird, allows himself to fly too high, and the sun melts, the bees wax, the wings fall apart, and Icarus plunges into the sea and dies.

The moral of the story, the takeaway from all this, is supposed to be a warning about ambition and allowing oneself to get too ambitious, right? To forget that there is a middle ground that everyone should shoot for. In philosophy, this is sometimes called the golden mean, and it involves things that are considered to be virtues when you have them in the right amount. But if you have them in the wrong amount, can turn into vices. And one of the examples that's often used in the ancient greek philosophies is courage.

The right amount of courage is a virtue. If you have too little of it, it's cowardice, and that's a vice. But if you have too much of it, it's recklessness, and that's a vice, too. The question of ambition is an equally interesting one. It's a very Goldilocks type concept, this golden mean.

Right? This porridge is too hot. This porridge is too cold. This porridge is just right. Well, if you're dealing with ambition and not porridge, where is the just right point?

It's not easy to pin down, is it?

The dictionary defines ambition as an ardent desire for rank, fame, or power. It's described as a character trait that involves people who are driven to succeed at lofty goals, right? It involves drive, ambition, tenacity, the pursuit of excellence, the desire to be the best. The interesting thing about the desire to be the best, though, is that that's a competitive thing. It means you're competing with other people who also want to be the best.

You're seeking distinction, right? Fame. You want to be seen as better than other people.

There's an interesting line. Edmund Burke once said that fame is the passion, which is the instinct of all great souls, right? They seek distinction. And to a certain degree, this is positive, unless it gets too intense. To steal a phrase that was originally used for something else, ambition is a bit like fire, a dangerous servant and a cruel master.

And you can see what happens when it gets out of control. In the case of a mythological figure like Icarus, his overambition or his hubris obviously cost him his life. And in most cases, where something like ambition is out of balance, right, where you have too much of it, it only burns the person who's trying to achieve the fame and distinction, right? If you're a runner and you want to be the fastest human being in the world, maybe you cut corners, maybe you cheat, maybe you take performance enhancing drugs, but at the end of the day, the person who paid the price for that is you. But what if when Icarus hubris gets the best of him and the sun melts his beeswax, holding the wings together, and he falls?

What if he falls on a crowd of people? What if it isn't just about Icarus anymore? What if the area where you seek fame and success and distinction involves the lives and destinies of lots and lots of people? That's when this question of this virtue of ambition or desire to be the best can become ultimately, at times, genocidal. I mean, take, for example, a figure like Julius Caesar from the roman republican era, right?

There's a great story about Caesar, and it very well may not be true. It's recounted in a couple of different sources, which doesn't mean it's true. The roman writer Suetonius recounts a version of this tale, as does the greek author Plutarch. But they talk about when Julius Caesar was stationed in Spain. He was about 32 years old at the time.

Suetonius says he's reading a history of Alexander the Great. Plutarch says he is sitting at the foot of a statue of Alexander the Great, who lived a couple of centuries before Caesar. Suetonius says he was sighing and had a vexing look on his face. Plutarch says he's out and out weeping. And when somebody says, why are you crying?

Caesar is supposed to have replied, don't I have good reason to at the age that I am now? Alexander the Great had conquered all these kingdoms, and what have I done of distinction? Showing that in Caesar's mind, he's not just competing with the other August figures of his own era, right? The other great human beings who are pushing the envelope of distinction and fame and notoriety and power in the ancient roman republic. Julius Caesar's competing on a celestial level.

He wants to be the best that ever was. And when you're playing on that level of rarefied turf, you're up against people like Alexander the Great. But when your over ambition sends you crashing to the ground, if you're Julius Caesar, you land on a lot of people. As author Tom Holland said about Caesar, he said Caesar's own ambitions were one day to consume the entire republic. Well, clearly, that never would have happened if Caesar's ambitions had been to become the best flute player in ancient Rome.

But he wanted to be the great ruler, conqueror, empire builder. And when that's what you want to be famous for, it means you're going to have to kill a lot of people to win the gold medal. In fact, if you look at the way the Roman Republic is set up, it's set up to encourage distinction between its greatest figures. And that worked for Rome for a long time. It was almost part of the plan, right?

Get your greatest figures desiring to outdo one another. And when they do great deeds, they pull the republic with them. There's also a built in mechanism to keep it from getting out of control. It's sort of a crabs in a bucket dynamic, where if any one figure starts to become too successful and almost climb out of the bucket, the other great figures, the other crabs pull them back down. And that works until it doesnt.

And eventually somebody barbecues the republic, and thats Julius Caesar. And the number of people who die because of that is legion.

The reasons for this are recognized by other people who tried to compete in this same kind of celestial historical event. There's a very interesting line from Napoleon Bonaparte, written in the 1790s, where he talks about the danger of ambition. And remember, Bonaparte's one of the few people that you could call a peer of a guy like Alexander or Julius Caesar, if they were going to be tried in the celestial court of historical justice, and you had to have a jury of your peers, Napoleon could be one of those people sitting on the jury. And he once said that ambition, which overthrows governments and private fortunes, which feeds on blood and crimes, ambition is like all inordinate passions, he wrote, a violent and unthinking fever that ceases only when life ceases like a conflagration, which, fanned by a pitiless wind, ends only after all has been consumed. And the poster child for the dangers associated with outsize, out of control ambition.

Right? The geopolitical, real life example of an Icarus in global affairs is Alexander the Great.

Of course, Icarus clearly failed at what he was trying to do. If you're trying to fly across the water and instead you crash into the sea and die, that's not success. In Alexander's case, measuring how well he did depends on what he was trying to do in the first place, doesn't it? If he was trying to become eternally famous, achieve glory, conquer lots of places, and write his name in the sands of time more deeply and enduringly than anyone else ever, you might have to give the guy an a. After all, he lived more than 2300 years ago, and he's probably, I mean, biblical personages aside, the most famous early figure in history that most people, if you brought a microphone and started asking them on the street of any major city in the world, that most people would recognize, don't you think the guy still has books coming out about him or some aspect of his life or career?

Like so many towering figures in history who did extraordinary things, Alexander benefited from great privilege. He was born into royalty, handed the machinery of conquest by his father, Philip II of Macedon—himself a brilliant statesman and general who laid the foundation for empire. Alexander simply lit the fuse.

It’s tempting to think of men like Caesar, Napoleon, or Alexander as self-made giants. But the truth is, they often began their ascent on the shoulders of systems built before them. That doesn't diminish their ambition—but it reminds us that ambition alone isn’t what alters history. It needs tools, timing, and, sometimes, a bit of inherited momentum.

And yet, whether driven by inherited opportunity or sheer will, ambition—when untethered—can consume not just the man who harbors it, but entire civilizations.

The story of Icarus isn’t about failure. It’s about fire. The kind that gives warmth when tempered—and burns the world when it isn’t.