Integrity cannot mistake vice even when clothed in brocade or perchance crowned with gold... Vices may stand in high place, but are low for all that. Men can see that many a great man has great faults, yet they do not see that he is not great because of them. The example of the great is so specious that it even glosses over viciousness.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
Status has a laundering effect: the same act looks like a flaw in an ordinary person and like a bold style in a powerful one. The maxim insists on clear sight, refusing to let rank re-label a vice as a virtue. The subtler danger is in the last line, about imitation. We watch successful people and copy them wholesale, absorbing their faults along with their strengths, because success makes the whole package look like the formula. It is not. Many great people succeeded despite their faults, not because of them, and the follower who copies the arrogance or the ruthlessness along with the discipline has learned exactly the wrong lesson. See the fault clearly, name it as a fault whoever wears it, and copy only what is actually worth copying.
Practice
- Judge acts by their nature, not the actor's rank; a lie is a lie and cruelty is cruelty whether the person is powerful or not.
- When copying a successful person, separate what made them succeed from what they succeeded despite; do not import the faults as if they were the method.
- Watch the laundering in yourself; if you excuse in a senior what you would condemn in a peer, rank has clouded your judgment (maxim 49 reads clearly).
Use this when
- Use this when learning from admired figures; take the discipline, leave the arrogance, and know which is which.
- Use it in assessing leaders and institutions; the gloss of success hides faults that would be obvious in anyone smaller.
Ignore this when
- Don't turn clear sight into disrespect or public denunciation; recognising a fault is for your own judgment, not necessarily for announcement (maxim 43 routes the truth carefully).
- Don't discard everything about a flawed great person; the fault being real does not make the strengths fake, and the task is to sort them.
A picture of it
Idolising a famously successful executive, a young manager copies everything, including the trait everyone privately winces at: the public humiliation of subordinates, mistaken for decisiveness. He imports it wholesale, believing it is part of the formula. It is not; the executive succeeded despite it, on the strength of genuine judgment the young manager did not also copy. Two years on, the executive is retiring loaded with honours and the young manager is known only for the cruelty, having learned the one thing that was never worth learning. The brocade had made a low act look like a high style, and he had believed the brocade.
Rank launders nothing. Copy the strengths, name the faults, and never mistake what a person overcame for how they won.