It can be argued that psychopathy is the psychological root of evil. Psychopaths vary in what motivates them. Some psychopaths want money, power or fame. Others are sex addicts who have innumerable liaisons and may commit rape and even murder. Yet others are compulsive gamblers, scam artists or crooks. But they all share one thing in common: a quest for power. To control others, psychopaths seduce them. Seduction doesn’t have to be sexual in nature. The narrow definition of “seduce” is, indeed, “to persuade to have sexual intercourse.” Many psychopaths enjoy this form of seduction because it naturally combines physical pleasure with control over another person’s body and emotions. But the etymological root of “seduction” signifies, more broadly, “to lead away from duty, accepted principles, or proper conduct.”
In this sense of the term, psychopaths enjoy exercising power not only over their sexual partners, but also over their parents, their siblings, their children, their so-called friends, their employees and their colleagues. Some of them become leaders of cults, luring members with their charisma, promises, isolation and mind-control. Through a fatal combination of opportunity and machination, a few become leaders of entire nations. They take over the minds and wills of the masses. Their lack of principles and disordered mentality can be contagious. It spreads like a virus throughout the country.
As a political theorist whose scholarship focuses on totalitarian movements and as someone who’s experienced first-hand, as a child, life under the psychopathic dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in communist Romania, I’ve studied ruthless leaders of totalitarian regimes. What I find most remarkable about such individuals is not only the vastness of their destruction of healthy social institutions and of fellow human beings, but also their unscrupulous and opportunistic methods. Because psychopaths lack any underlying convictions and loyalties, they’re willing to get power by whatever means necessary. To give an example from my field, Allan Bullock shows in Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives that Stalin only appeared to have a solid allegiance to the Bolshevik movement and to Lenin’s political legacy. In reality, however, he used communist rhetoric to gain control over Russia, then over the countries and territories that became the Soviet Union and eventually over the entire Eastern Europe. To him, the means—shifty allegiances, mass indoctrination, staged show trials, forced confessions as well as torture and murder of unprecedented proportions–always justified the ends, which was absolute control. This goal was only instrumentally related to communist ideology, as Stalin’s temporary alliance with Hitler, his former archenemy, would prove.
Nor did Stalin exhibit any loyalty towards his supposed friends and allies. He switched political and personal alliances, turning first against the left wing of the communist party (Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev), then against the right (Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky). In his insatiable quest for power, Stalin forged alliances and later broke them. He imprisoned, tortured and murdered former allies. He shrewdly reversed his position and retreated when necessary, only to charge forward again at a more optimal moment. Because he was a psychopath, Stalin could be more ideologically flexible than his dogmatic rivals, such as Trotsky (on the left) and Bukharin (on the right). He took everyone by surprise with the extent of his duplicity and ruthlessness. For psychopathic leaders like Hitler and Stalin, other people existed only as tools to be used in their quest for control or as obstacles to be removed from their path. As Bullock observes,
“Stalin and Hitler were materialists not only in their dismissal of religion but also in their insensitivity to humanity as well. The only human beings who existed for them were themselves. The rest of the human race was seen either as instruments with which to accomplish their purposes or as obstacles to be eliminated… Both men were remarkable only for the roles they assumed. Outside those, their private lives were insignificant and impoverished. And each of the roles was consecrated to a vision of a world that, however great the differences between them, was equally inhuman—a world in which whole populations could be moved about; whole classes could be eliminated; races enslaved or exterminated; millions of lives sacrificed in war and even in time of peace…”(Hitler and Stalin, 382)
Having done extensive research on the psychopathic dictator Nicolae Ceausescu for my last book on communist Romania, Velvet Totalitarianism: Post-Stalinist Romania, I’ve arrived at the conclusion that, given the choice between ruling over a nation of strong individuals and ruling over a nation of slaves, psychopathic leaders would much rather take the latter. This is the only way to explain the malice with which such dictators propose policies intended to ruin the country economically, isolate its people from the rest of the world and destroy any sign of individuality. To use my own childhood experience as an example, conditions in Romania during the so-called “Epoch of Light” were notoriously miserable. People had to wait in long lines for meager supplies of food, clothing and household goods. There was limited heat and hot water. By the late 1970’s, the Secret Police, colloquially called the Securitate, had installed microphones in virtually every home and apartment. The whole population lived in fear. As a Romanian citizen said to a French journalist following the fall of the Ceausescu regime, “It was a system that didn’t destroy people physically—not many were actually killed; but it was a system that condemned us to a fight for the lowest possible level of physical and spiritual nourishment. Under Ceausescu, some people died violently, but an entire population was dying.” Strong, healthy individuals in a prosperous nation would pose a potential threat to psychopathic rulers. They might be confident enough to challenge their regimes. When people are reduced to fighting for survival and deprived of power, however, they’re much more likely to relinquish their rights and freedoms without putting up a fight. While Ceausescu preferred to rule over a nation of beggars, Stalin chose to govern a nation of slaves. His Reign of Terror not only undermined people’s spirit and independent thought, but also claimed many of their lives.
The human cost of psychopathic dictators, especially during the Hitler-Stalin era, is one of staggering proportions and unimaginable suffering. Bullock documents, “Not counting the millions who were wounded or permanently maimed, the estimated number of premature deaths between 1930 and 1953 reached a figure in the order of forty to fifty million men, women and children. Suffering on such a scale is beyond the imagination’s power to comprehend or respond to.” (Hitler and Stalin, 969) What makes such suffering particularly reprehensible, at least from a moral perspective, is that unlike natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes and epidemics, the harm was deliberately inflicted, unnecessary and man-made. Granted, the mass murder of tens of millions of innocent civilians can’t be attributed solely to the psychopathic leaders in charge. The wrongdoing of many individuals made it possible. As Hannah Arendt demonstrates in The Origins of Totalitarianism, totalitarian dictators are a necessary, but not sufficient, explanation of complex historical, economic and social phenomena. Yet without a Hitler, a Stalin, a Mao or a Ceausescu–which is to say, without psychopathic leaders who attain total control of a country–this suffering would not have occurred, at least not on such a massive scale.
Claudia Moscovici, psychopathyawareness
Dangerous Liaisons: How to Identify and Escape from Psychopathic Seduction
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