Shakespeare's Brutal Truth About Leadership: Why We Keep Promoting the Wrong People

"What a terrible era in which idiots govern the blind." ― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

The sentence lands like a closed fist. No metaphor softens it. Shakespeare strips away poetry to deliver pure diagnostic truth—when those who cannot see choose those who cannot lead, civilization stumbles in coordinated darkness.

Shakespeare constructs this condemnation with surgical precision. "Terrible era" establishes the temporal scope—this isn't about one bad leader, but an entire age corrupted. "Idiots govern" inverts the natural order; leadership demands wisdom, yet here incompetence wears the crown. But the devastating turn comes with "the blind"—the governed aren't helpless victims. They're complicit. They cannot see what they're choosing, or perhaps worse, they've chosen not to see.

Shakespeare wrote Julius Caesar in 1599, during Elizabeth I's final years. England faced succession anxiety, factional politics, and questions about who deserved power. Through Roman history, he dissected his own moment—how crowds follow charisma over competence, how rhetoric blinds reason, how the ambitious exploit the uncertain.

You saw it happen in real time. That smooth talker in the corner office who never got his hands dirty—he rose while you stayed put, fixing his mistakes on weekends. You sat in meetings where the guy who'd never done your job explained how you should do it better. You watched pension promises evaporate while executives got bonuses. You trained your replacement from overseas, smiled through the handshake, then cleared your desk. The pattern wasn't subtle. The competent did the work; the incompetent took credit and moved up. You learned that expertise made you useful, not promotable. Speaking up made you a "team problem." So you did your job, watched the idiots govern, and wondered if anyone else noticed. They did. They just stopped saying it out loud.

Now your kids complain about the same thing, but they call it "hustle culture" and "toxic workplaces." Same blind leading, different terminology. The difference is they quit. You couldn't—you had mortgages, tuition, aging parents counting on you. You learned to survive terrible eras by becoming strategically invisible. The cost was watching incompetence compound for decades.

Shakespeare knew. Four centuries later, we're still choosing our favorite liar over the uncomfortable truth-teller.