TYRANNICAL MINDS

Psychological profiles of the “despots, tyrants, and terrorists
[who] have been responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of innocent
people.”

In his latest, science writer Haycock (Murderous Minds:
Exploring the Criminal Psychopathic Brain: Neurological Imaging and the
Manifestation of Evil, 2014) takes on the big nasties with fascinating
portraits of history’s greatest villains, including Hitler, Stalin, Mao,
Hussein, Idi Amin, bin Laden, and Kim Jong-un. He emphasizes that
intelligence services of all major governments work hard analyzing foreign
leaders, an ad hoc process that proceeds without adequate data or personal
interviews—and often across cultural barriers. As the author writes, it’s “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.” Apparently, very few
dictators were actually psychotic, except perhaps Idi Amin. All showed common
unpleasant personality traits but so intensely that psychologists have named
them the “Dark Factors of Personality” or D-factors. These include
Machiavellianism (use of deception, lying, and exploitation), narcissism (an
inflated image of oneself), sadism, callousness, absence of empathy, and
spitefulness. Haycock is no historian; his biographies skim the surface, but he
has done his psychology homework, so readers will receive a painless education
in the elements of human personality, especially when it becomes pathological.
Those curious about how this applies to today’s leaders will receive a jolt
when the author turns his attention to Donald Trump, devoting a large portion
of the book to the current president. Haycock and his experts are not the first
to detect in the president more than the average degrees of narcissism, a love
of autocrats, a hatred of critics, and a distressing lack of empathy, but they
have little to add.

A compelling analysis of the mental processes of notable tyrants
that eventually gets bogged down under the weight of Trump.