Muammar Gaddafi continues to hold tightly to power even
as NATO bombs rain down on Tripoli. Syrian autocrat Bashar al-Assad has
killed more than 1,000 of his own people
in an effort to quash protests.
In Yemen, President Ali Abdullah Saleh has refused to step down despite months of unrest
that has intensified into near civil war this week. The question is, why do all these guys fight so hard to keep power? Why not
decamp to Saudi Arabia or Venezuela and live out their lives in luxury before
being killed or held for trial like Hosni Mubarak?
Pride often bows to avarice, but dictators seem to have a
psychological propensity to fight for their titles at all costs. Any attempt to
diagnose a defining psychological feature of dictatorship would be facile. But
in the public record available on many of them — Stalin and Mao, Saddam Hussein
and Gaddafi himself — one can begin to see patterns that shape a dictatorial
personality. At least since the Office of Strategic Services (now known as the
Central Intelligence Agency) commissioned a secret profile called “A Psychological Analysis of Adolf Hitler,” which was
issued in 1943, psychologists have sought an
explanation for the authoritarian mind. New research has brought us closer than
ever to understanding how leaders become despots.
There are at least three explanations for dictatorial
behavior:
1. Dictators are psychopaths.
This is the simplest and most seductive psychological
explanation of dictatorship. It’s also the least helpful. Psychopathy is
defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
under the rather antiseptic term “antisocial
personality disorder.” Its features are, among others,
“repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest,” deceitfulness,
impulsivity and lack of remorse.
It’s difficult to think of a dictator who hasn’t
exhibited these traits. For instance, dictators not only lie to others as a
matter of course but also lie to themselves. “If ever [Stalin] called
somebody a traitor, it was not only the minds of others he was
manipulating,” writes Oxford historian Robert Service in his biography of
the dictator. Similarly, Gaddafi truly seems to believe not only that
opposition to his regime equals opposition to the very existence of Libya but
that, as he has said shortly after the uprising began, “All my people are
with me. They will die to protect me.”
But true psychopaths — think of serial killer John Wayne Gacy — are not only liars and remorseless killers, but
they seem to lack any feelings whatsoever. Gacy used
various tools to torture his victims over hours — reviving them after they
passed out — before finally showing the mercy of murder. Most dictators don’t
carry out such brutalities, at least not in person.
Scott Atran is a University of
Michigan psychologist who has studied strongmen around the world for two
decades. He has spoken with KhaledMeshaal of Hamas; AbubakarBa’asyir,
erstwhile emir of the Southeast Asian militant group Jemaah Islamiyah; Hafiz Saeed of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the terrorist
group that operates from Pakistan; and William Pierce, the late leader of the white-supremacist
movement in the U.S. None of these stateless men can accurately be described as
dictators, but all have led organizations that valorize a muscular and often
brutal leadership style.
Atran’s main conclusion is that an impulse
toward morality, not sadism or greed, drives the strongman personality. Hitler,
he points out, refused the contemporary equivalent of hundreds of millions of
dollars in payoffs to reclassify a small group of Jewish Austrians as non-Jews.
Similarly, Atran and his team have recently published
papers mounting evidence that the Iranian regime ignores substantial offers of
aid to end its nuclear program out of a “sacred value” of
independence that trumps the practical concerns of its people.
2. Dictators are paranoid narcissists.
Most non-dictatorial leaders employ subordinates who are
empowered to question them. Dictators arrange their lives so that no one can
play this role. “What strikes me is not so much the instrinsic
psychopathy of some of these leaders but, rather, how absolute power changed
them over time,” said Frank Dikotter in an
e-mail. Dikotter is a professor at the University of
Hong Kong and author of Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most
Devastating Catastrophe. “Mao was in power for a long time, and abuses
got worse and worse. In the end, he lived in his own cocoon.”
Dictators also lose their ability to see themselves and
their relationships to others realistically. In a 2003 paper in the journal Psychological Review, three researchers
led by DacherKeltner
of the University of California, Berkeley, looked at how elevated power changes
the psychological makeup of those who have it. They found that powerful people
become more willing to take credit for accomplishments they didn’t achieve.
They also begin to see the world around them in “more automatic,
simplistic ways.”
But there is a neurological cost to ignoring the
realities around us. Like any neurological region, the paralimbic
cortex, where our emotions are processed and where our sense of self-control
lies, can stop functioning properly if it’s not regularly used. Gaddafi
deployed hundreds or thousands of agents who identified threats to his power
and eliminate them. In this he is similar to Stalin, whose security
commissariat, the NKVD, moved against whole swaths of Soviet society that might
oppose him, particularly pre-revolutionary elites. By muzzling any truthful
criticism opposition, dictators begin to inhibit their own paralimbic
systems, which is one reason they start to sound so crazy in their latter years.
Saddam Hussein is a good example, according to Renana Brooks, a Washington psychologist who specializes in
power and domination. Hussein refused to stop lying about whether he had
weapons of mass destruction even as bombers readied their approach to Baghdad.
“Dictators are willing to create a fantasy of their personal power,”
says Brooks. “They see themselves as heroic.” When that sense of
heroism is challenged, they become paranoid.
3. Dictators are more or less normal people who develop
mental disorders in the extraordinary circumstance of holding absolute power.
Zimbabwe’s despot, Robert Mugabe, was apparently a polite
ascetic as a young man. As Peter Godwin points out in his definitive 2010 book The
Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe, former aides say that
when Mugabe was younger, he wasn’t a wild-eyed tyrant but a careful listener
who rose early, did his push-ups and never drank.
How does such a man become a monster? At this point, it’s tempting to invoke Lord Acton and say that absolute power corrupted Mugabe. But how, exactly? What is the mechanism by which power
corrupts?
In a new paper called “How Power Corrupts,” a
Columbia University team of psychologists suggest that power doesn’t change the psychology of powerful people but, rather, their physiology. Lead author Dana Carney and
her team hypothesize that because power eases so many daily stressors —
dictators never have to worry about driving a car or paying a mortgage —
powerful people show persistently lower levels of cortisol, a hormone closely
associated with stress.
Typically, immoral behavior — even routine sins like
lying — is stressful. “A lie-teller must actively inhibit and suppress
many things including: the truth, internal monitoring of [his or her] moral
compass, social norms, fear of consequence, and consideration of others’
interests,” Carney and her colleagues write. “This suppression leads
to negative emotions, decrements in mental function, and physiological
stress.”
But because they have lower levels of cortisol, “the
powerful have an abundance of emotional and cognitive resources available to
use when navigating stressors as they arise.” In this way, dictators may become
immune to regret. When the Columbia team tested their hypothesis in a lab
setting, they found that study participants who were placed in large offices
and informed they were managers made difficult decisions much more easily than
those given the role of subordinates. Not only did the high-power group score
lower on psychological measures of stress; they also had lower levels of
cortisol in saliva samples.
None of this means we can excuse dictators for their
crimes. But our brains simply weren’t designed to wield absolute power.
Dictators may fight to the end because they don’t understand that any end is
possible. Gaddafi should stand down before he loses everything; Mubarak should
have left Egypt weeks before he resigned; Hitler could have brokered for peace;
Saddam Hussein could bargained for his life. But
dictators are too strong militarily and too weak psychologically to bargain.
That’s why they invite annihilation.
