Commanding a Leviathan: Exploring Incommensurable Faults

There is a strange constant in human history: the greater the power, the lighter the sense of responsibility seems to become. As men rise into the spheres of command, they imagine themselves freed from the moral weight each person carries in ordinary life. They authorize decisions they would never assume in their private circle. They believe – or pretend to believe – that the State, geopolitical complexity, strategy, raison d’état, or historical necessity are enough to absolve them.

This illusion, however, is among the most dangerous. For the State is not a neutral machine. It is not a mere sum of offices, ministries, and officials. The State is a composite moral creature, a Leviathan, an oversized being of power that concentrates within itself every possible consequence. And each leader who takes its reins, even for a moment, commits his or her soul to choices of a scale beyond comprehension. To govern a State is to unleash a beast that acts in every direction, whose repercussions no human can foresee in their entirety.

The State, a Moral Monster with an Expanded Spectrum

We like to present the State as an instrument. We describe it as an apparatus, an administration, an abstract machine. But this bureaucratic fiction hides a brutal truth: the State acts, kills, lies, betrays, punishes, protects, chooses. And behind this impersonal mask stand men and women who order, who decide, who set the machine in motion.

When a man commands the Leviathan, he does not merely extend his will. He amplifies it to a scale beyond all human measure. The act becomes a multiplied echo, a reverberation spreading across thousands, sometimes millions of lives. The individual no longer directs an arrow; he triggers an avalanche. Moral responsibility is no longer proportional to intention. It explodes because of the sheer power of the instrument he has agreed to wield.

The Lie of the State Is Not a Simple Lie

When a man lies, he wounds a relationship, betrays trust, distorts truth. But when a State lies, it deforms reality itself. It can manufacture a collective narrative, rewrite history, shield a crime, justify a war, sustain an oppression. An individual lie remains within a limited sphere. A lie of the State contaminates millions of minds.

And yet, in offices and palaces, such lies are treated as normal. They are called “necessary secrets,” “strategic tools,” “talking points.” What leaders refuse to see is that scale changes the nature of the act. Lying to a friend is not the same essence as lying to a people. The words may be identical, but the moral weight is utterly different. The shockwave is no longer comparable.

The Tragedy of Strategic Sacrifice

Another common illusion: the supposed necessity of sacrifice. Textbooks, official speeches, and even heroic tales glorify the leader who can sacrifice a few for the good of the many. It is the image of the cold strategist, lucid and strong, ready to cut into flesh to save the whole.

But such reasoning presumes an impossible omniscience. To judge that a sacrifice is necessary, one would need to know what might have happened, what did not happen, what was truly preferable for all. In other words, one would need divine consciousness. For only God – or an absolute higher intelligence – could evaluate the totality of possible scenarios and weigh the exact significance of each choice in the fabric of the world.

By claiming such discernment, leaders commit an original fault. They usurp a place that is not theirs. They condemn their souls to bear not only the visible consequences of their decisions, but also the invisible consequences of all that might have been. Moral judgment is not confined to what is real. It extends to the entire field of possibilities contained in the chosen act.

Power: A Fault Consciously Accepted

To accept the governance of a Leviathan is not simply to take on a legal or political office. It is to contract an ontological responsibility. A responsibility inscribed in being itself, in the hidden memory of the world. And this responsibility is not reducible to legal codes or economic records.

We often believe fault disappears with good intentions, or is softened by compliance with the standards of the time. This is an error. The real question is not: did you do your best? It is: why did you accept to command the beast? What legitimacy did you have to believe you could dominate such a power without betraying justice?

Competence, goodwill, loyalty to the homeland are not enough. What is at stake is the colossal presumption of believing that a human being could carry on his shoulders a burden reserved for God. To govern a Leviathan is always to step into the forbidden zone of ethical sacrilege.

Justice Will Not Judge by Visible Outcomes

Leaders love to say that history will judge them. They imagine posterity will weigh their victories and defeats, their growth and recessions, their wars and peace treaties. But the judgment that matters does not belong to historians. It lies elsewhere.

That judgment will ask something else: not “Did you succeed?”, but “What did you choose among all the possibilities? And why?” It is not about evaluating observable results, but probing intention, presumption, blindness. True fault does not reside in balance sheets but in the abyss of invisible choices.

An order given to a State always contains an infinity of possible consequences. To govern is to unleash a cascade no human can measure. Moral judgment will not stop at the narrow circle of the counted dead and the saved living. It will extend to everything that might have been, to every life suspended within the field of possibilities.

Conclusion: No One Commands a Leviathan Without Consequences

Imagine a man who commands a dragon and orders it to breathe fire. When he is judged, it will not be only for the thirty direct victims of the blaze. Nor will it be for the gap between what he thought would happen and what actually happened. It will be for the entire set of possibilities contained in that order: the thousands who might have died, the cities that might have burned, the destinies he set in motion without ever knowing them.

For it is not immediate reality that grounds fault, but potentiality. The error is amplified by the power of the instrument. To govern a Leviathan is to unleash a creature whose force exceeds human consciousness. One cannot emerge unscathed.

To accept such command is to step willingly into a space where every decision engages the incommensurable. It is to place oneself in a position where even the smallest mistake becomes abyssal. It is, in truth, to commit a fault by the mere fact of having accepted to be there at all.

One must be nearly mad to take on such a charge. Or worse, one must have lost all sense of what true responsibility means. For no one can command a Leviathan without consequences. State power is an illusion, a mirage of mastery. In reality, it is nothing but a fault consciously accepted, an unbearable presumption, a wager no lucid spirit should ever embrace.