Dean A. Haycock - Tyrannical Minds: Psychological Profiling, Narcissism, and Dictatorship

TYRANNICAL 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.

O ne thing I dont 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 its 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 brutalityintimidation, repression, imprisonment, torture, and murderto 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 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 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 nave 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.