Why We Elect Narcissists and Sociopaths- And How We Can Stop!
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which point Germans faced increased unemployment, financial insecurity,
and social and political instability.
Some think that until Hitler fanned these flames of resentment, the
German people might have been only mildly anti- Semitic, and that the typi-
cal Nazi was not “specifically anti- Semitic,” as described in Chapter 1. How-
ever, other historians believe that he simply took advantage of the virulent
anti- Semitism that already existed.99 We will never know.
But, as Dorothy Thompson, one of the most famous American journal-
ists of the time, wrote after she interviewed Hitler and read Mein Kampf,
“The Jews are responsible for everything…[T]ake the Jews out of Hitler’s
program, and the whole thing…collapses. ”100
In 1925, Hitler’s Mein Kampf was published. It quickly proved popular
and made Hitler a millionaire. By the end of the 1920s, he was getting more
and more attention. At the time, he played up his anti- Communist rheto-
ric and played down his anti- Semitism to the American journalists, who he
spoke to regularly and who took a keen interest in him. He was very decep-
tive about his ambitions:
Instead of clarifying what he was for, Hitler dwelled on what he was
against, including the Jews who had attained, as he put it, wildly dispro-
portionate power and influence. “I am not for curtailing the rights of the
Jews in Germany, but I insist that we others who are not Jews shall not
have less rights than they, ” he said.101 (emphasis added)
In this way, Hitler cleverly disguised what he was doing and eased the
German people into resenting the “power and influence” of the Jews, rather
than openly teaching hatred. They could deny being prejudiced at all. We will
see this tactic used again and again by the other Wannabe Kings throughout
Part II of this book.
He perfectly positioned himself to split the voters into four groups (see
Chapter 3) by recruiting many people from the Disenchanted Dropouts
to become Loving Loyalists, while he attacked both the Social Democrats
(Moderates) and the Communists (Resisters) as villains because they were
somehow both controlled by the Jews. He would be the new hero.
The Fantasy Hero
Hitler openly taught the German people that the democratic government
was swindling them and that they would be better off with a dictatorship.
But after 1924, which he spent in prison for trying to start a revolution at a
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66 Part II: The Fantasy Crisis Triad Worldwide
beer hall (known as the Beer Hall Putsch), he decided to try to get elected
to power:
No longer was there to be a march on Berlin. The people were to “awaken”
and Hitler’s movement was going to vote dictatorship in! In itself a fasci-
nating idea. Imagine a would- be dictator setting out to persuade a sover-
eign people to vote away their rights. 102 (Italics in original) In 1933, after President Hindenburg appointed Hitler as chancellor,
because he was head of the largest party, some of those in government believed
that they could control him. One even declared “We’ve hired Hitler. ”103
A month after he was appointed chancellor, a small, easily contained fire
broke out in the Reichstag (parliament) building. It was the act of a single
mentally ill man from Holland who had been a member of a Communist
youth group. Hitler claimed this incident (forever after known as the “Reich-
stag fire”) was a Communist attempt to destroy parliament. 104
This fantasy crisis enabled him to become the fantasy hero and allowed
him to convince lawmakers to give him full legislative power. From then on,
Hitler was able to make all of Germany’s laws and rules. Six months later,
Hindenburg died and Hitler assumed the post of president as well, claiming
that he needed all political and military powers, allegedly because there was
a (fantasy) plot against him, which “nobody believes” according to an Amer-
ican reporter in Berlin.105
High- Emotion Media
The Nazis, and especially Hitler, spoke publicly ten times as often as all other
German politicians.106 On a regular basis, Hitler spoke on the radio directly
to citizens in their homes. In these speeches, he argued openly that what
Germany most needed was a strong dictator, not a democracy.
He had movies made of his large rallies, which showed how powerful he
was and how thousands of people deferred to him. Then he had these films
shown in theaters throughout Germany.
5 5 5
Josef Stalin
Russia was firmly ruled by the Romanov Tsars until the communist revolu-
tion of February 1917. Tsar Nicholas II abdicated his throne in the face of
widespread protests and violence driven by major losses in World War I and
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widespread hunger. A broad provisional government took over, endorsing
numerous liberal reforms, including freedom of speech and assembly. This
government set elections for a broad constituent assembly in October 1917
to represent every citizen, regardless of class, which would have included all
revolutionary parties, urban and rural. 107
But it was a chaotic year, and before the October elections could take
place, Vladimir Lenin’s tightly- run Bolshevik Party of urban workers, sail-
ors, and soldiers stormed the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, the seat of the
Russian Provisional Government. They arrested government ministers as
betraying the revolution, but members of the legislature walked out in pro-
test and the civil service, post office, and banks went on strike. Regardless,
the end result is that the Bolsheviks were in charge of St. Petersburg.
When the election for the constituent assembly came, the Bolsheviks
only won 24 percent of the vote. But because they were the most centrally
organized party and had the strength of the workers and military in Moscow
and St. Petersburg, they shut down the constituent assembly after only one
day and took total control of the whole government, establishing a Congress
of Soviets that they said was superior to the constituent assembly. This is
known as the Bolshevik Coup or the October Revolution.
Stalin’s Early Years
Josef Stalin was born in 1878 in Georgia, a recent addition to the Russian
empire at that time.108 His father was a notorious drunk and gave young
Stalin many undeserved beatings. One boyhood friend said his father made
Stalin learn to hate people. 109
On the other hand, early on, his mother loved him and spoiled him, and
she eventually became the mistress of another man who became a kinder
substitute father.110 But as he grew up, Stalin became so hard to control that
his mother also ended up beating him, which helped him cement his belief
in violence as being the way to manage relationships.111
But during this childhood, Stalin loved to study books and his mother
sensed that he
was gifted.112 He also enjoyed hanging out in his neighbor-
hood during this time, which was one of the roughest places in Georgia, on
the edge of Russia.
Gori was one of the last towns to practice the “picturesque and savage
custom” of free- for- all town brawls with special rules but no- holds- barred
violence. . . . The saloon- bars of Gori were incorrigible stews of violence
and crime. . . .113
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Psychological historians attribute much of Stalin’s development to his
drunken father, but learning to become skilled as a fighter in this street fight-
ing culture probably played an important role as well.114
As an adult, after many false starts—including a stint at a seminary—
Stalin became involved in revolutionary politics and joined the Communist
Party. He was especially regarded for his knowledge of Marxist writing and
theory. Stalin played a lesser role in the Bolshevik’s Communist Party, essen-
tially missing both revolutions, which he was constantly reminded of by his
peers. 115
By March 1922, Lenin named Stalin the General Secretary of the Com-
munist Party, an administrative position created for him, as he showed
promise with bureaucratic skills. In April, at the Central Committee con-
gress, Lenin
“organized a conspiratorial meeting in a side room, gathering his most
reliable followers, 27 people, to ensure election to the Central Committee
of his preferred candidates against Trotsky’s followers; Stalin’s name was
marked on Lenin’s list as “general secretary . . . .” All 27 names on Lenin’s
list were duly elected . . .116
When the vote was taken at the congress, Stalin received “193 votes in
favor, 16 against; the rest (273), more than half the voting delegates, effec-
tively abstained.” This means he got 40 percent of the vote—the consistent
percentage of all of our Wannabe Kings. It is notable that the collective lead-
ership “couldn’t see whom they were dealing with. ”117
High- Conflict Personality
Stalin always had an intense drive to dominate:
He was ruthless to other children, but protective of his vassals. . . . Stalin
constantly defied lads “older and stronger than himself.”
He displayed the will to power that remained with him until his last days.
“Soso [his nickname at the time] belonged to his local gang but he often
crossed to the opposing band because he refused to obey his own gan-
gleader . . . he developed a vengeful feeling against everyone positioned
above himself.” As soon as he was out of his mother’s control, Stalin, even
as a child, had to be the leader.118
That Stalin had a high- conflict personality from early childhood seems
quite clear—much clearer than Hitler. He also had the extreme aggressive-
ness that could not be contained by anyone, even his mother, from boyhood
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on. His ruthlessness fits well with the characteristics of a sociopath, and that
he had a narcissistic personality may have been demonstrated early on with
his “infectious confidence” that made people want to follow him.119
Even though his position as General Secretary was a purely adminis-
trative post, he used his aggressive personality and administrative skills to
transform his role into that of the Communist Party’s leader after Lenin died
in 1924. By 1929, he had seized all power. He was the Soviet Union’s all-
powerful dictator until his death in 1953.
The Fantasy Crisis
Stalin imagined many crises and created many crises. The solution he
offered for each crisis was to brutally attack one group of people (his Tar-
gets of Blame) while convincing the other Soviet citizens to trust and invest
unlimited power in him.
As briefly described in Chapter 2, the most dramatic example of his bru-
tality was the famines caused by his policy of collectivizing the peasants’
farms throughout the Soviet Union, including Russia and Ukraine. In the
early years after the revolution, the peasants in the countryside (who had
been subjugated and brutalized for hundreds of years before the Tsarist
system fell) had run the landed gentry off their land and divided it up among
themselves. They had become owners of their own small plots of land. They
made their own decisions about what to grow and how to spend their own
small funds. However, since those early years, the Communist government
had come to dominate them.
By 1927, the Communist government had not brought better times
to the workers and the peasants. “[L]iving standards in the Soviet Union
were still lower than they had been under the tsars. ”120 The government had
manipulated theoretically free market prices (industrial goods were set high
and agricultural products were set low), which had thrown off incentives for
farmers so that there were mounting shortages of food, especially grain, and
skyrocketing “private” prices.
Rather than blame these shortages of food on terrible government poli-
cies, he treated this as a fantasy crisis with fantasy villains.
But by 1931, Stalin envisioned an even bigger crisis.
He believed that another European war was coming, and that, in order to
survive it, backward Russia would have to industrialize. “We are fifty to a
hundred years behind the advanced countries,” he declared in 1931. “We
must make good this gap in ten years. Either we do it, or they will crush us.”
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Rapid industrialization would require that peasants deliver grain to the state
on a set schedule; it would also require that many peasants become indus-
trial workers. The U.S.S.R. needed large, mechanized farms, like those in the
United States. And the independent, landowning peasantry was a threat.121
Fantasy Villains
As explained in Chapter 2, kulaks was the term used for peasant farmers who
had slightly more than the poorer peasants. Stalin made them into the villains.
“Either we destroy the kulaks as a class,” Stalin said in 1929, using the term
for rich or greedy (“fist- like”) peasants, “or the kulaks will grow as a class
of capitalists and liquidate the dictatorship of the proletariat. ”122
The only solution, Stalin insisted, was to murder or exile this entire class
of people. State police shot and killed hundreds of thousands of kulaks;
hundreds of thousands more were deported. With most of the kulaks gone,
Stalin and the Soviet government were able to seize control of the country’s
agriculture. They then used the capital extracted from the countryside to
build manufacturing.
Stalin also frequently blamed crises on “enemies of the people.” This
phrase, which he repeated often, allowed each Russian to heartily agree with
Stalin, based on whatever group that person hated.
The Fantasy Hero
During World War II, Stali
n was caught by surprise when Hitler invaded
Russia in 1941. The Soviet dictator had assumed that he and Hitler were
friends, as they had even discussed going to war together in Europe. So he
ignored all the warnings, even those from Britain and the US.123 Yet, even so,
Stalin somehow marshalled his troops and beat back the Germans, but at a
terrible loss of life to the Soviet people.
Over the course of his rule, Stalin caused the deaths of approximately
20 million civilians within the Soviet Union.124 Yet enormous numbers of
Soviet citizens loved him, cheered him on, and felt that he was an ideal
leader. He had the classic “cult of personality” that is associated with aggres-
sive Wannabe Kings.
High- Emotion Media
No one could escape Stalin’s domineering presence in photos and on the
radio throughout the Soviet Union. With total control of the media, his
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6: How Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Took Over 71
emotional repetition was powerful—and in isolation, increasing its power
as I described in Chapter 4. The idea of the Iron Curtain around the Soviet
Union and its satellites included keeping out all outside competing opinions.
He was a prolific writer and loved to give speeches.
5 5 5
Mao Zedong
China was ruled by emperors for almost two thousand years, ending with
the nearly 300-year Qing dynasty (also known as the Manchu dynasty).
After years of unrest, famine, and corruption, it was overthrown by a revo-
lution and the establishment of the Republic of China in 1912. After a series
of military leaders and instability, a nationalist government was established
by Chiang Kai- shek in 1928. The country had no real history of democracy
and elections, so change and revolutionary fervor were in the air. The Com-
munist Party of China was new in the 1920s and opposed the nationalist
government.125
Mao’s Early Years
Mao Zedong was born in 1893. He had an easy childhood. His father worked
hard as a farmer and was thrifty, so he became one of the most well- to- do
peasants in their village. Mao was loved and indulged by his mother and
grandmother. He loved learning, had an excellent memory, and had a pas-
sion for reading. However, he also was headstrong and disobedient, which
resulted in him having clashes with his teachers and getting kicked out of