Table Of ContentTYRANNICAL MINDS
Psychological Profiling, Narcissism, and Dictatorship
Dean A. Haycock, Ph.D.
For the victims: past, present and future; and for those who resist: past, present,
and future.
CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction
ONE Hitler’s Bedfellow
TWO An Arcane and Secretive Field
THREE Dangerous Combinations of Traits
FOUR Predict the Tyrant
FIVE “The Nature of His Rule was So Personal”
SIX Was Mao Zedong a Monster?
SEVEN The “Black Box”
EIGHT “There Must Be People Who Have To Die.” “My People Love Me.” —
Idi Amin and Muammar Gaddafi
NINE “I Know They Are Conspiring To Kill Me Long Before They Actually
Start Planning To Do It.” —Saddam Hussein
TEN It Can’t Happen Here
ELEVEN Could It Happen Here?
TWELVE Conclusions and Warnings
Appendices
Sources and Recommended Reading
Acknowledgments
Endnotes
Index
About the Author
PREFACE
O
ne thing I don’t understand about many dictators is why they like to do the
stuff they do” a friend wrote to me after I told him I was writing this book. “For
example, I get up in the morning and think about what I would like to do: play
guitar, go boating or kayaking, etc. They wake up and think, ‘Maybe I will
attack another country, so I can have their stuff, etc.’”
Like my friend, many others who lack dictatorial ambitions have been
perplexed by the behavior of men who in the past have dominated millions of
their subjects and murdered millions more. Many of us are equally perplexed by
living dictators and would-be dictators who threaten those of us who just want to
“play the guitar” or “go boating.”
The goal of this book is to informally place the contribution of the
psychology of tyrants into the list of factors that explains the rise of such men.
All of the tyrants considered here lived within the last 100 years. All happen to
be men, a fact that accounts for the frequent use of the pronoun “he” when
referring to them. (As Queen Mary I of England and Ireland, known as “Bloody
Mary” to her Protestant enemies, Ranavalona I, Queen of Madagascar, and
others, reminds us, however, not all tyrants or dictators throughout history have
been male.)
A dictator is a person who holds “complete autocratic control: a person with
unlimited governmental power,” according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary.
While it’s possible a dictator could be benevolent, often rulers with absolute
powers rule in absolutely oppressive ways. “Benevolent” dictators like Lee Kuan
Yew, who ruled Singapore for nearly three decades starting in 1959, and Josip
Broz Tito, who ruled Yugoslavia for nearly four decades starting in 1944, are
often cited as examples of this less common type of authoritarian ruler.
Far more often, the dictator is a tyrant or despot, a ruler who uses brutality—
intimidation, repression, imprisonment, torture, and murder—to maintain power
and achieve his or her goals. In this book, the label dictator, tyrant, and despot
are used interchangeably since benevolent dictators appear less frequently.
“Getting inside the heads” of foreign leaders and terrorists is one way
governments try to gain an advantage when dealing with them. Government
agencies of many nations hire psychiatrists and psychologists to study foreign
leaders and to prepare psychological profiles of their opponents. The Central
Intelligence Agency, the U.S. State Department and their equivalent
organizations in both friendly and unfriendly countries hope these profiles will
help them understand, predict, and influence the actions of friendly foreign
leaders as well as unfriendly dictators and terrorists of all ranks. To illustrate
how intelligence agencies have profiled foreign leaders and how the information
has been used to advance United States interests, studies of some legitimate, and
non-tyrannical, heads of state are discussed in detail in Chapter 2 and referred to
elsewhere in the book.
The importance of this applied psychology is obvious when you consider
that, in the past century alone, despots, tyrants, and terrorists have been
responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of innocent people. They have
disrupted or ruined the lives of the hundreds of millions more. Together, the
actions of Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, Idi Amin, Muammar
Gaddhafi, Saddam Hussein, and Osama bin Laden have affected millions of
lives directly and indirectly. Their murderous orders issued forth from
headquarters, palaces, and hideouts where they lived and, in some cases, hid,
protected by their secret police or devoted followers.
How do these killers differ from their victims? How can we explain their
behaviors, including their urges to dominate, subjugate, torture, and slaughter?
Many of them share similar abnormal personality traits and, in a few
instances, possible mental disorders, that predict and explain their behavior.
Psychologists working for intelligence agencies who routinely analyze the
mental states of pathological leaders find that these men frequently have clusters
of traits which are included in labels like “The Dark Triad,” “The Dark Tetrad,”
malignant narcissism, psychopathy, and paranoid personalities. Recognizing
these defining personality traits in tyrants provides important insights into their
motivations and actions. These insights have in the past allowed governments to
predict the behavior of adversaries and have provided important clues to help
explain how and why these men behave the way they do.
These psychological profiles, however, have not always been accurate,
particularly in the mid-twentieth century. Since then, leading psychiatrists like
former Central Intelligence Agency analyst Jerrold M. Post, MD, have greatly
improved the reliability of these efforts to figure out how foreign leaders, friend
and foe, see the world and how they might react in situations that could affect
and foe, see the world and how they might react in situations that could affect
national security.
Psychological profiling is a practice that tries to merge two “soft” sciences,
psychology and political science, into a tool that can provide the ability to
understand, and more importantly, predict, the behavior of foreign leaders.
Presumably, skilled psychologists capable of deciphering the quirks and
disorders, the psychological strengths and vulnerabilities of foreign heads of
state, could provide significant and tangible benefits to their countries.
Understanding how a foreign leader thinks and behaves, understanding his or her
motivations and fears, could provide advantages in trade and other negotiations.
It would allow governments to develop effective strategies for dealing with
friendly and unfriendly nations. It could provide crucial advantages during crises
situations and help in undermining the strengths of foes.
The state of mind of a ruler or head of state is clearly a legitimate topic for
study. It would be naïve to ignore the mental states of rulers ranging from
Caligula to Mahatma Gandhi, from Winston Churchill to Richard Nixon, from
John F. Kennedy to Donald Trump, and hundreds of others, when attempting to
explain their approach to governing, and their successes and failures.
The unusual and controversial presidency of Mr. Trump made it impossible
to exclude him from this book. As discussed in later chapters, some mental
health care providers are convinced that he poses a danger because he has a
personality disorder. Others make no claims regarding a diagnosis but insist that
his behavior makes him a threat. Still others claim that he is not mentally ill, that
he is a showman and provocateur, a person who admittedly exaggerates claims
and always “gets even” for insults and displays of disrespect, all of which he
admits in his books.
I am not qualified to say which of these, if any, apply to the president. Ann
Serling, daughter of writer Rod Serling quotes her father: “Whenever you write,
whatever you write, never make the mistake of assuming the audience is any less
intelligent than you are.” I go a bit further and assume that my readers are more
intelligent than I am. I assume they combine the information I provide with what
they already know and learn from further research. I count on them to reach their
own conclusions, because I want to believe in them.
INTRODUCTION
T
oday we need psychology for reasons that involve our very existence,” Carl
Gustav Jung wrote more than 75 years ago. He included the quote in his last
book, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, published in 1961. “We stand perplexed
and stupefied before Nazism and Bolshevism because we know nothing about
man, or at any rate have only a lopsided and distorted picture of him. If we had
self-knowledge that would not be the case. We stand face to face with the
terrible question of evil and do not even know what is before us, let alone what
to pit against it. And even if we did know, we still could not understand ‘how it
could happen here.’”1
Nazism, as a state power at least, crumbled into ruins like bombed out Berlin
above Hitler’s underground bunker in 1945. Versions of communism, distant
descendants of Bolshevism, are still around, but took a crippling blow when the
Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s. And yet, Jung’s quote is just as
relevant today as it was when he wrote it.
As long as nations command weapons of mass destruction, our very
existence is threatened. As long as violent non-state actors covet weapons of
mass destruction, our very existence is threatened. “The terrible question of evil”
remains a defining question about our species, about human nature.
There is, however, one lament in Jung’s pessimistic assessment where we
have made progress. We now know how repressive dictatorships like Hitler’s
Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao Zedong’s China, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq
and scores of others throughout history can happen. And we now know “how it
could happen here.”
TYRANNICAL MINDS
