Political or Pathological?

This from Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined (2013): In discussing the psychology of leaders and the association with potential violence he writes, "

The socially constructed nature of dominance can help explain which individuals are most likely to take risks to defend it. Perhaps the most extraordinary popular delusion about violence of the past quarter-century is that it is caused by low self-esteem. That theory has been endorsed by dozens of prominent experts, has inspired school programs designed to get kids to feel better about themselves, and in the late 1980s led the California legislature to form a Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem. Yet Baumeister has shown that the theory could not be more spectacularly, hilariously, achingly wrong. Violence is a problem not of too little self-esteem but of too much, particularly when it is unearned.(fn 123) Self-esteem can be measured, and surveys show that it is the psychopaths, street toughs, bullies, abusive husbands, serial rapists, and hatecrime perpetrators who are off the scale. Diana Scully interviewed many rapists in their prison cells who bragged to her that they were “multitalented superachievers.”124 Psychopaths
and other violent people are narcissistic: they think well of themselves not in proportion to their accomplishments but out of a congenital sense of entitlement. When reality intrudes, as it inevitably will, they treat the bad news as a personal affront, and its bearer, who is endangering their fragile reputation, as a malicious slanderer.

Violence-prone personality traits are even more consequential when they infect political rulers, because their hang-ups can affect hundreds of millions of people rather than just the unlucky few who live with them or cross their paths. Unimaginable amounts of suffering have been caused by tyrants who callously presided over the immiseration of their peoples or launched destructive wars of conquest. In chapters 5 and 6 we saw that the tail-thickening wars and dekamegamurders of the 20th century can be attributed in part to the personalities of just three men. Tin-pot tyrants like Saddam Hussein, Mobutu Sese Seko, Moammar Khaddafi, Robert Mugabe, Idi Amin, Jean-Bédel Bokassa, and Kim Jong-il have immiserated their people on a scale that is smaller but still tragic.

The study of the psychology of political leaders, to be sure, has a deservedly poor reputation. It’s impossible to test the object of investigation directly, and all too tempting to pathologize people who are morally contemptible. Psychohistory also has a legacy of fanciful psychoanalytic conjectures about what made Hitler Hitler: he had a Jewish grandfather, he had only one testicle, he was a repressed homosexual, he was asexual, he was a sexual fetishist. As the journalist Ron Rosenbaum wrote in Explaining Hitler, “The search for Hitler has apprehended not one coherent, consensus image of Hitler but rather many different Hitlers, competing Hitlers, conflicting embodiments of competing visions. Hitlers who might not recognize each other well enough to say ‘Heil’ if they came face to face in Hell.”(125)

For all that, the more modest field of personality classification, which pigeonholes rather than explains people, has something to say about the psychology of modern tyrants. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association defines narcissistic personality disorder as “a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and a lack of empathy.”(126) Like all psychiatric diagnoses, narcissism is a fuzzy category, and overlaps with psychopathy (“a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others”) and with borderline personality disorder (“instability in mood; black and white thinking; chaotic and unstable interpersonal relationships, self-image, identity, and behavior”). But the trio of symptoms at narcissism’s core— grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy—fits tyrants to a T.(127)

It is most obvious in their vainglorious monuments, hagiographic iconography and obsequious mass rallies. And with armies and police forces at their disposal, narcissistic rulers leave their mark in more than statuary; they can authorize vast outlays of violence. As with garden-variety bullies and toughs, the unearned self-regard of tyrants is eternally vulnerable to being popped, so any opposition to their rule is treated not as a criticism but as a heinous crime. At the same time, their lack of empathy imposes no brake on the punishment they mete out to real or imagined opponents. Nor does its allow any consideration of the human costs of another of their DSM symptoms: their “fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love,” which may be realized in rapacious conquest, pharaonic construction projects, or utopian master plans. And we
have already seen what overconfidence can do in the waging of war.

All leaders, of course, must have a generous dose of confidence to have become leaders, and in this age of psychology, pundits often diagnose leaders they don’t like with narcissistic personality disorder. But it’s important not to trivialize the distinction between a politician with good teeth and the psychopaths who run their countries into the ground and take large parts of the world with them. Among the pacifying features of democracies is that their leadership-selection procedure penalizes an utter lack of empathy, and their checks and balance limit the damage that a grandiose leader can do. Even within autocracies, the personality of a leader—a Gorbachev as opposed to a Stalin—can have an enormous impact on the statistics of violence." (pp 560-2)

It is interesting to contemplate this in the light of the impending inauguration of Donald Trump.  Is he an example of "good teeth" or more of a pathologue?  If it is the latter, Pinker may be overly confident about the "pacifying features of democracies" and their ability to "penalize an utter lack of empathy."  We can only hope (and work hard to ensure) that is not overly confident in "their checks and balance"s that "limit the damage that a grandiose leader can do."