4 ideas
In 1973 tens of thousands died in Ethiopia's Wollo famine while the court treated reports of it as insolence and kept the Emperor's rituals unchanged. Kapuściński tells this through anonymous courtiers' testimony; critics dispute how much of their wording he invented, but the collapse and the famine are documented.
The Emperor preferred to promote people of low birth and no independent base, so that every rank, salary, and privilege they held existed only by his personal favor. A courtier who owes everything to the ruler cannot defect without losing everything, which makes servility rational rather than merely cowardly. The result is a court selected for obedience instead of competence.
Read the palace's minute ceremonies, such as the cushion-bearer who slipped a pillow under the short Emperor's feet or the servant who wiped dignitaries' shoes after the imperial dog urinated on them, as a system rather than as eccentricity. Each ritual trained courtiers to tell rank and favor apart with great precision and to ignore conditions outside the palace. Once flattery and protocol become the main work of the elite, bad news cannot travel upward.
To appear progressive, the Emperor sent young people abroad to study and built a modern army and university, creating an educated class that could see how backward and corrupt the court was. The reforms were too small to satisfy that class but large enough to give it the tools and vocabulary to revolt. Partial liberalization therefore made the regime less stable than either real reform or strict isolation would have.