The Emperor
“The Emperor represents total power, the divine masculine, the cosmic father. He is authority and order, regulation and rationale. He reigns over systems of knowledge, discipline, strategy, and law. His rule is resolute, yet paternal. The Emperor relies upon structure and control to create security and stability. He protects and commands. He has clarity of vision and equilibrium of mind. He demands loyalty and order, and leads with calm and principled strength.” (The Library of Esoterica’s TAROT, written and edited by Jessica Hundley)
The Emperor is a card about power, authority, structure, stability. So why does it send a chill down my spine?
In an ordinary Tarot reading, The Emperor might indicate a promotion at work, a financial windfall, an influx of confidence, a winning strategy. But one of the things I love about Tarot is how, depending on the circumstances of your life in the moment you turn over a card, there are a million different interpretations to latch on to. In this moment in my life, The Emperor feels like a warning.
I spent the delicious week of suspended time between Christmas and New Years on a beautiful beach overlooking the Caribbean in Tulum, Mexico. As my children boogie boarded with new friends they’d made on the beach, I lay on a lounge chair reading books about QAnon, Timothy McVeigh, and the Trump administration’s disastrous response to COVID. Once I finished those, I cracked open the new Michael Lewis book about Sam Bankman-Fried and his crypto crimes.
I’m not doing research per se. These were all “for fun,” though often when I find myself immersed in some disturbing topic, there is an idea simmering in my subconscious. It remains to be seen whether an idea will boil forward into my conscious mind, or if it will remain for years in the background. But as of now, there was no “reason” I spent my vacation reading about some of the most disturbing shit in this world that scares me, except that I felt compelled to, like a child reaching out to touch a flame.
If there’s a common theme in these books, it’s the human desire for power, and how feelings of powerlessness can lead people to do terrifying things. I say “feelings of powerlessness,” rather than “powerlessness,” because the worst atrocities are committed by young, white men, who have more than enough power in this society but who have gobbled up racist rhetoric convincing them that the power they believe is their birthright is being stolen out from under them. White men have been sold a version of their lives in which every man has the capacity to be an emperor — not just a father or a businessman, but a titan of industry, a world-shaper, a galactic conqueror, Musk and Bezos in a race to conquer the stars.
Now, listen, I say “white men,” but I am not immune from the desire for power and control. If you did a random poll of every child who grew up in my Connecticut neighborhood between the years of 1990 and, say, 1998, they’d tell you I was a bossy child. In fact, take a poll from any one of my cousins (I have twenty-two) — especially the ones who were my age or younger, and you’ll find a group of individuals scarred by the sheer magnitude of performances they were forced to participate in. Don’t ask my brother; I’m too afraid of what he might say.
I wish I could say I was benevolent, but the truth is: I was exacting. Perfectionistic. Punishing and relentless in pursuit of my vision. I wrote plays, sometimes, but more often musicals, where I’d compose the book, lyrics, and music (though you’d have to listen to me sing it at you and then find a way to parrot it back, there was no “sheet music” or, for that matter, a “script”). I was avant-garde, an auteur in braids and a backwards baseball cap.
For my tenth birthday, my dad and I wrote a musical together (a re-telling of Romeo and Juliet using popular music with rewritten lyrics). Kids were dropped off at my house by their parents thinking they were attending a birthday “party.” They were not. They were attending an hours long rehearsal that would end with a performance when their parents came to pick them up.
There were lots of things about being a kid that felt uncomfortable to me. I was a professional child actor, so in many ways, I felt like an adult. I knew how to take direction, how to be quiet and good, how to listen and do what I was told (WHY DIDN’T THE OTHER KIDS IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD!?!?). I was a bossy child for a lot of reasons. My personality, being an oldest sister to a younger brother, and sure, yes, a feeling that I spent a lot of time being told what to do, and it was fun every now and then to turn the tables.
The Emperor implores you to consider your relationship to power, and how you wield whatever power and privilege you have. While the Emperor promises stability and order, it’s important to ask yourself if your comfort comes at a cost to others (under capitalism, the answer to that question is almost certainly yes).
I have two versions of The Emperor inside me, as we all do. One is the Bad Emperor, motivated by a desire for control above all else, filled with imposter syndrome and ego, unable to look critically at my own shortcomings for fear of being labeled a fraud. The Bad Emperor is childish and operates from a place of fear and anxiety. This Emperor wants to write everything by herself, wants to control every single part of the creative process. This Emperor can’t listen, because if she does, she might hear something she doesn’t like, something that forces her to see something she doesn’t want to see.
The existence of the Bad Emperor is the reason I’m grateful I didn’t have a show made when I was twenty-five. At twenty-five, I was all bluster and bravado, but still a child in a thousand different ways. I was terrified to ask for help because I thought it would make me look weak. I talked a lot more than I listened. I pretended to know everything (perhaps even believed I did know everything or everything worth knowing at least), while the breadth of what I had to learn was unfathomable. The Bad Emperor couldn’t wait to get her hands on some power, to show everybody. The Bad Emperor sees power as revenge, entitlement, an ego boost.
Luckily, I didn’t become a boss until my Good Emperor was fully developed. The Good Emperor hires people who have the skills she lacks. The Good Emperor delegates and collaborates. The Good Emperor cares less about credit, and takes pride in creating a creative work environment where everyone has a voice. The Good Emperor understands that television is a collaborative medium, and that her job is to guide, not to dictate. The Good Emperor is leading a journey of many creative minds. Her job is to pick and choose, to encourage and push, to gather and highlight. Her job is not to serve her own ego, but the creative process. Her job is sometimes to delegate and step aside.
The Good Emperor inside of me has won when it comes to how I lead a writing staff or run a show. I take a lot of pride in creating an environment where other people’s contributions are not only valued but necessary. I believe that the best idea wins no matter where it comes from. I don’t care about hierarchy (my Bad Emperor cares a lot) and I love the feeling of rolling up our sleeves together to make something we can all be proud of.
Occasionally the Bad Emperor pops up, on a particularly difficult notes call, for example. That’s one of the reasons I prefer written notes — it allows me to process the note, allow the Bad Emperor to kick and scream a little in the privacy of my own head, and let the Good Emperor be the one to figure out how to incorporate it and respond. I can recognize now that the Bad Emperor cares way more about preservation of ego and self than in the actual work. The Bad Emperor operates from fear, the Good Emperor from a well of creativity and a spirit of collaboration.
Parenting is where the Bad Emperor most frequently tries to get out. The Bad Emperor wants total control over the household, wants her subjects (children) to fall in line, to listen and follow rules. The Bad Emperor gets overwhelmed by loud noises, screaming, or whining, and wants to start screaming and whining herself. The Bad Emperor does not recognize the absurdity of screaming, “NO MORE SCREAMING!”
The Good Emperor is patient, loving, kind. The Good Emperor apologizes when she’s wrong, and sometimes even when she isn’t. The Good Emperor wants her children to feel connected and loved. She celebrates the individuality of her children and wants to raise good people, not obedient ones.
But! IT IS NOT EASY, especially in these unprecedented times we are living in, when so many things feel so desperately out of control. The Bad Emperor gets stronger in chaotic times, feeding off fear and anxiety, just as other Bad Emperors feed off the fear and anxiety of the wider world.
Trump is the best example of a Bad Emperor. A man who rode a wave of grievance all the way to the White House. I’ll show them, he thought in his addled racist brain at the White House Correspondence Dinner when journalists and celebrities laughed at President Obama’s jokes about him. I’ll show them is not a clarion call to leadership. If you ever feel the lure of “I’ll show them,” go to therapy, don’t throw your hat in the ring to be President of the United States.
There’s another reason The Emperor card sends a little chill down my spine. It’s the “stability” and “structure” part. Of course, we all want stability, comfort, safety. And we all deserve it. But the more chaotic and scary the world becomes, the more appealing it becomes to throw up our hands and hope that someone else is coming to save us. Desire for stability is an enormous hurdle to revolution.
Plenty has been written about Trump as the totalitarian strong man, full of bile and inauthentic masculinity, lying through his teeth that he is “the only one who can save us.” But Trump supporters are not the only voters for whom that type of leadership appeals. I’ll admit that beyond two days of door knocking in 2008, Obama’s years in office lulled me into a sense of safety and comfort that led to not nearly enough activism. I was relieved that someone so smart was in power, someone much smarter than I am who I believed was good and who would do the right thing. It’s comforting to imagine that there is someone powerful looking out for us, like Santa Claus, or God, or our parents. And like Santa Claus, Obama as Savior was fictional. He is and was a human man. Hero worship of the people in power leads only to complacency in a world that needs action.
There’s a big difference between power and leadership. The 2024 election looms in the near future, a choice between chaos and stability, but with not a lot of room for hope or possibility. I will absolutely vote for Joe Biden in November, and it scares the shit out of me how many people are saying that they won’t, but I also understand it. Because more and more I’m asking myself: Is this really all our leaders can offer us? Are we all just forced to vote for the lesser of two evils every time because one evil is so impossibly villainous and hateful that if he wins, democracy itself hangs in the balance? That’s not a choice at all.
I’ll vote, but my hope that some Big Daddy Good Emperor is coming to save us is gone, another relic of my childhood. Nobody’s coming. It’s up to us.
I made a choice to have children, two of them, who I love fiercely and completely, who have to live in this world long after I leave it. I want a peaceful world for them, a world filled with nature, a world that is kind and caring, a world with leaders who compassionately care for everyone they lead, leaders who listen, and who understand that their leadership wasn’t given to them by God or Money, but by people. Most of all, I want a world that hasn’t lost hope, that understands that voting is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we owe each other. The work doesn’t end with an election. That’s when it begins.
There’s a Good and Bad Emperor inside each of us. It’s our job to figure out the difference between the two, and to choose the path that leads us toward our best impulses. The Good Emperor sees a problem in the world and figures out a way to solve it, or better yet, finds out who has already started working toward a solution and joins the fight. The Good Emperor doesn’t need credit or recognition, she needs action. The Good Emperor recognizes when the Bad Emperor has been at work inside her head — none of us are immune from the desire to put our heads in the sand, to protect our own little kingdom, and ignore the problems other people face.
The Good Emperor in each of us pushes past the fear, and leads from a place of hope and optimism. Safety, comfort, and freedom belong to all of us, and none of us can truly be safe, comfortable, or free until we all are.
RECOMMENDATIONS!
Speaking of politics, in the past few years, I've gotten involved with the Working Families Party – a political party that works to elect true progressives. WFP is not the kind of third party that runs spoiler candidates against Democrats – their entire strategy is about helping the largest number of people. They're not interested in doing anything that helps Republicans win. They endorse Democrats who are true progressives, and help organize progressive candidates in primaries to ensure that there's a candidate on the ballot who isn't owned by corporations, and actually wants to fight for everyone. Donating to WFP is a great way to know that your money is going to help progressives win. They are true organizers, and it feels really good to get involved – I highly recommend it.
BOOK RECS
Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want To Be by Dr. Becky Kennedy – this a book to help you become the Good Emperor. I have learned so much from this book (and not just about parenting!!! also about myself! Highly recommend!)
In spite of all the shit talk about capitalism in the essay above, this playlist has serious Boss Bitch vibes. Listen to it before a big meeting or during a particularly grueling workout.