Lear's action at the start of the play is one of renouncing power. Yet he still expects to be treated as a king, not realizing that he's made himself vulnerable through his abdication. What begins as an act of presumed selflessness precipitates the tragedy. The message is not necessarily that power is something one must cling to at all costs, but rather that the conventional form of it is a kind of illusion. The two men who are outwardly disempowered, Kent and Edgar, are victorious in the end. Edmund seeks and gains power but is defeated, though in his case it comes down to the prowess of individual men in combat, as if ultimately the decisive factor is brute force, or physical power. Edmund has manipulated Gloucester, Goneril, Regan, Cornwall, and even Albany, but all of this becomes meaningless or backfires. The results show that there is, presumably, a moral principle that operates in the world. The frequent interpretation of King Lear as expressing an extreme form of pessimistic nihilism is therefore not sustainable by the outcome, in which Edmund, Goneril, Regan, and Cornwall are all humiliated and defeated.