There’s an in-world story in the Stormlight Archive about exactly this. The emperor of an island nation is so fearful that no one dares enter his tower. They are generally totally peaceful, but brutally murder anyone that makes a mistake, because their “Emperor won’t suffer failure.”
The characters in the story go to confront the emperor because they can’t stand for these murders, and find that the emperor is just a desicated corpse because no one has been into the tower for like 50 years. The island is thrown into chaos as the people are forced to come to terms with the fact that they’ve been killing each other for decades for no reason.