Ten ways you know your evil empire is doomed—and what to do about it

[blatherskite]

No evil empire ever fell without tidings of doom and other symptoms that a canny overlord learns not to ignore. These include:

1. Obscure prophecies have a way of turning out to be true: Hire a LARGE staff of overly credible people to monitor the ravings of prophets. Take their reports seriously. Rigorously monitor taverns, dance clubs, newsgroups, and Facebook pages using keywords from the prophecies. Forewarned is fore-armed!


2. Wise men begin flocking to some obscure hick town, bearing gifts with unpronounceable names (what the hell is myrrh anyway?): Send your Doom Troopers to check the stables. Eliminate any children. To be really safe, eliminate their parents too. Fuck it: eliminate the whole damn village. Any survivors can always live in your cities.


3. There’s a mythology (worse yet, a history) of individual heroes overcoming impossible odds: Start intensively training your soldiers to fight in coordinated teams of two or three rather than as individuals. Even heroes can’t overcome well-coordinated attacks by team players for long. If you can’t defeat them with individual heroics, beat them with numbers.


4. There are too many taverns per capita: (Too many = enough to hold all the drinkers. Fewer if you’re one of those whack jobs who believes that drinking is evil, but not so evil it’s good for you.) Taverns are breeding places for trouble. They’re particularly troublesome when they begin attracting numbers of quirky, idiosyncratic, oddly charming people who come together despite their mismatched backgrounds and goals. Saltpeter in the beer may help; encouraging the founding of special taverns for hipsters makes such individuals easier to monitor and suppress.


5. The bullet per confirmed casualty ratio begins climbing steeply: Confiscate the guns and issue spears, clubs, and brass knuckles. They’re much less expensive, and clearly more effective. Also, don’t buy your arsenal from Wal-Mart, no matter how good the price. (Costco? Check the expiry dates first.)


6. You’re surrounded by people appointed to positions of power solely because you owe them debts: Accidents will happen through random chance to even the most cautious person. Embrace random chance. If necessary, encourage random chance. The fewer debts you owe, the more room there is for competent minions.


7. Your master plan depends on avoiding one plausible but unlikely event: Eliminate the possibility of that event. Here, eliminate = reduce probability below zero. Better still, assume that event will happen and plan accordingly; if your Deathstar has any cooling vents, plug them; a little sweating is good for the minions. Litter the Internet with “alt” plans and blueprints cluttered with misleading “facts”. Drown the truth in a sea of misinformation! Hey, it worked for Trump, Time Magazine’s evil leader of the year!


8. Your fortress is described as “impregnable”: Remember the second meaning of the word (capable of being impregnated), and act accordingly. Hire a team of storytellers to describe how they’d “impregnate” your fortress, and immediately fill those holes in your security. Eliminate the storytellers once that’s done. If it’s been more than 40 years since the last successful rebellion, eliminate their parents too. You know how old folks love to ramble about the good old days.


9. The youngest, least-experienced member of your command team starts looking uncomfortable, as if she has something to say: Listen to her. Carefully. Dismiss (i.e., execute) any senior commanders who aren’t willing to listen closely and respectfully. Take her warnings seriously. (No female advisers? Ooh. Bad plan. Hire at least two immediately. See point 6 if you need to create any vacancies.)


10. The soundtrack playing only in your head changes to something upbeat and inspiring: Take a long, hard look at the people around you. Eliminate all or most of them, if necessary. Cancel your subscription to Spotify and renew your RIAA membership.

For additional inspiration, consult the Evil Overlord list.