Evil Genes

by Barbara Oakley

  Dr. Li called Mao's condition “neurasthenia,” acknowledging that the term is no longer recognized in the United States but explained it as a psychological malaise that manifests itself physically through insomnia, headaches, chronic pain, dizziness, anxiety attacks, high blood pressure, depression, impotence, skin problems, intestinal upsets, anorexia, and bad temper, among other symptoms.

  One early example of Mao's neurotic, borderline-like reaction to setback—as well as his deeply Machiavellian lack of ideological commitment—was his response to being asked by the Communist Party to integrate himself into the opposing Nationalist Party. Mao performed the integration with such enthusiasm that he was eventually dismissed from the Communist Central Committee as being too right-wing. The switch demonstrated the low ideological commitment of Christie's archetypical Machiavellian. The dismissal deeply affected Mao, who grew thin and ill; he retreated home for eight months to recuperate. A housemate and colleague said that Mao had “‘problems in his head…he was preoccupied with his affairs.’ [Mao's] nervous condition was reflected in his bowels, which sometimes moved only once a week.”44

  This type of affective instability is well described by Martin Bohus and his colleagues in their research related to the neurobiology of borderline personality disorder.

  Individuals with BPD have profound emotion vulnerability, experiencing accentuated sensitivity to aversive emotional stimuli, intense emotional reactions, and slow return to baseline emotional arousal. In a vicious cycle, the use of dysfunctional behaviors…to modulate aversive emotions is negatively reinforced by a short-term reduction in the intensity or experience of these emotions. Emotion dysregulation occurs across the entire emotional system, impacting executive functions and affective learning processes. In turn, the behavioral, physiologic, cognitive, and experiential subsystems of emotional responding are affected. The emotionally dysregulated patient may experience inflexibility in cognitive perspective, along with difficulty controlling impulsive behavior in response to strong positive and negative affect. Further, when emotionally aroused, individuals with BPD may have considerable difficulty organizing and coordinating activities to achieve non-mood-dependent goals and may freeze or shut down under very high stress.45

  Drug and Sexual Addictions

  Those suffering from both borderline and antisocial personality disorders are prone to addictive behavior; Mao was little different in this regard. This related in part to his difficulties with insomnia—his body clock appeared to be set for a twenty-seven-hour day, sometimes even longer, so that he was occasionally unable to sleep for up to forty-eight hours at a time.46 Dr. Li felt that Mao's biological clock might always have been askew. (Research has uncovered the relationship between mutations in the clock gene and lengthened, or even chaotic, sleep cycles.)47 While trying to resolve his sleeplessness, Mao became addicted to sleeping pills: veronal in the 1930s, then sodium amytal, a powerful barbiturate, which he took more and more, and finally a mixture of sodium seconal with sodium amytal. Ultimately, he discovered chloral hydrate, and became addicted to the euphoria. He took the pills when receiving guests and attending meetings as well as at dance parties. These addictions, as Li noted, could have exacerbated Mao's preexisting symptoms. And, of course, drug addictions frequently accompany personality disorders.

  In related addictive behavior, Mao's depraved and unending dalliances with young women eventually brought him venereal disease—for which he refused to be treated. “If it's not hurting me, then it doesn't matter. Why are you getting so excited about it?” he told Dr. Li.48 Li remarked on Mao's delight in sharing multiple simultaneous women. Men, too, were a target—Mao insisted on nightly groin massages from his handsome young male attendants. At first Li thought Mao might be homosexual—but he later concluded that Mao simply possessed an “insatiable appetite for any form of sex.”49

  Sexual addiction is a disorder that is thought to have similarities to both alcohol and drug addiction as well as to compulsive gambling. Sex addicts are believed to react strongly to the neurochemical changes that take place in the body during sexual behavior—somewhat like becoming hooked on heroin. One researcher in the area, Dr. Patrick Carnes, states, “Contrary to enjoying sex as a self-affirming source of physical pleasure, the sex addict has learned to rely on sex for comfort from pain, for nurturing or relief from stress. This is much like an alcoholic's use of alcohol.”50 Although sexual addiction is little understood, several studies have shown that it appears to be very commonly found in conjunction with substance abuse, anxiety, and general mood disorders. In the few imaging studies that have been done to date, certain areas of the brain have been shown to be deactivated during response to sexual stimuli with arousal. Serotonin levels are also thought to play a key role.51

  Mao's hypocrisy about sex was breathtaking. “Mao required his people to endure ultra-puritanical constraints. Married couples posted to different parts of China were given only twelve days a year to be together, so tens of millions were condemned to almost year-round sexual abstinence.”52 While ordinary citizens were being sent to labor camps for having had illicit sex, Mao was romping daily with beautiful women—the Chinese Communist equivalent of groupies. Even in his midseventies he was known to invite “three, four, even five of them simultaneously” to share his oversized bed.53

  Cognitive-Perceptual Impairment

  One of the three key dimensional traits of borderline personality disorder is cognitive-perceptual impairment. Mao appears to have displayed dramatic symptoms of this trait. During the Great Leap Forward, from 1958 to 1960, Mao implemented a policy that diverted all human resources into industry rather than agriculture in a misguided and disastrous attempt to catch up with the industrialized West. During the Great Leap, tens of millions of workers were diverted to produce one commodity—steel—in inefficient backyard production facilities. It is estimated that some thirty million died as a result of the ensuing famine—some peasants were reduced to eating each other's children to avoid eating their own.54 Mao's general reaction to the devastating effects of his policies was to pretend that they weren't happening. His staff, all too aware of what could happen to them if they revealed the truth, served to insulate him even further. But the situation deteriorated so drastically that the truth could not be hidden. Dr. Li describes his insider's perspective on Mao's reactions.

  Mao…seemed psychologically incapable of confronting the effects of the famine. When I told him that edema and hepatitis were everywhere, he accused me of inventing trouble. “You physicians have nothing better to do than scare people,” he snapped. “You're just out looking for disease. If no one were sick, you'd all be unemployed.”…I thought Mao was ruthless to close his eyes to the illness that was everywhere around him. But I allowed him his illusions and never mentioned the subject again, behaving in his presence as though hunger and disease had miraculously disappeared.55

  Dr. Li notes: “Mao was loath to admit his mistakes. His was a life with no regrets…I am convinced Mao never really believed he had done anything wrong.”56

  Writing in the late sixties, psychologist Robert Jay Lifton dubbed the policies of the Great Leap, as well as those of the later Cultural Revolution, “psychism.” He defined the term as “the attempt to achieve control over one's external environment through internal or psychological manipulations, through behavior determined by intra-psychic needs no longer in touch with the actualities of the world one seeks to influence.”57 Psychologists have since termed this phenomenon “magical thinking”—a trait commonly found in schizophrenia. Magical thinking appears to be associated with unusual features concerning the fusiform gyrus—an area that wraps underneath the brain in the temporal lobe and assists in face, word, and number recognition.58

  Even Mao noticed and was puzzled by his perceptual impairments—particularly his inability to handle criticism and the input from others. In his youth, he was self-aware enough to tell a friend: “I constantly have the wrong attitude and always argue, so that people
detest me.”59 To one of his former teachers he confessed: “I am too emotional and have the weakness of being vehement. I cannot calm my mind down, and I have difficulty in persevering. It is also very hard for me to change. This is truly a most regrettable circumstance!”60

  Mao's distorted cognitive processes were also apparent in his propensity for saying one thing but doing another. “Mao did not believe a lot of what he proclaimed in public,” writes Ross Terrill. “No other Communist leader, perhaps no leader in twentieth-century politics, was a match for Mao in this breathtaking insincerity. We find it in small matters and in large.”61 After becoming chairman, Mao, for example, became the premier advocate of traditional Chinese medicine, but as Dr. Li would discover, Mao refused to use it himself.62 While advocating the “learning-from-the-Soviet-Union” policy, many Chinese studied Russian. Not Mao—who was disgusted by the Russians and instead studied English. Indeed, while telling the Chinese people that America was the apotheosis of evil, Mao privately said good things about America. He said of himself, “My words and my deeds are inconsistent.”63 Some wags may point out that inconsistent words and deeds are always characteristic of politicians. But Mao's inconsistency appears pathological. There is no evidence, for example, that British prime minister Winston Churchill “secretly admired the Nazis or despised Roosevelt.”64

  Mao's decisions to continue with obviously flawed programs such as the Great Leap Forward might be due not only to his innate borderline characteristics but the worsening of those symptoms as a result of subtle, drug-related dysfunction in his prefrontal cortex. This might have reduced Mao's ability to experience “gut feelings” and thus eliminated his ability to make logical, commonsense decisions that were obvious to everyone else.

  As Li notes, “To this day, ruthless though he was, I believe Mao launched the Great Leap Forward to bring good to China…. The twentieth century was marching forward and Mao was stuck in the nineteenth, unable to lead his country. Now he was in retreat, trying to figure out what to do.”65 Tragically, the cognitive equipment Mao was using to do his “figuring” with was—different.

  Control and the Purges

  One oft-noted characteristic of those with subclinical borderline personality disorder is their extraordinary need for control. This trait was typical of Mao, who had to be in control of every situation—from decisions at the highest reaches of political power to the most mundane details of his everyday life. Nothing that occurred within Zhongnanhai, the former royal garden within the grounds of the old Forbidden City, where Mao lived and worked, happened without Mao's consent, not even the clothing chosen for his wife to wear. Mao expected to be consulted on virtually every major—and minor—decision in China.66

  Mao's controlling efforts were carried to the ultimate in the form of his purges. His earliest full-blown purge was started in late November 1930, immediately after he learned that Moscow had decided to support him as their primary Chinese leader in pursuit of Communist hegemony. This purge was designed to eliminate thousands—anyone who had opposed Mao—while simultaneously generating such terror that “no one would dare disobey him from now on.”67 Other purges followed—each building momentum for a still larger purge to come.

  One of Mao's favored mechanisms for eliciting purge victims was to urge people to speak out, pledging there would be no retribution. The worst of these deathly false promises occurred in April of 1956, when Mao called for intellectual debate under the slogan “Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.” Naive intellectuals, encouraged by signs of liberalization, climbed aboard and began criticizing the party. Privately, Mao told party cadres, “This is not setting an ambush for the enemy, but rather letting them fall into the snare of their own accord.”68 After allowing for several months of seeming freedom, Mao cracked down. Quotas ranging between 1 and 10 percent were set of intellectuals to be persecuted and purged. Many who had said nothing were pulled in just to fill Mao's quotas. Mao bragged that one province, Hunan, “denounced 100,000, arrested 10,000, and killed 1,000. The other provinces did the same. So our problems were solved.”69 Mao's Boswell, Dr. Li, remarked on how, although Mao accused others of creating conspiracies, he was the “greatest manipulator of all.”70

  Control slides into vengeance. Mao waited decades, if necessary, to retaliate against those who had differed with him. Thus was born the Cultural Revolution—the parent of all purges, during which at least three million people died violent deaths; another one hundred million are thought to have suffered from the persecutions.71 Foreign minister Chen Yi was to forthrightly dub the Cultural Revolution “one big torture chamber.”72 Mao closed all schools and encouraged students to join Red Guard units, which persecuted Chinese teachers and intellectuals and enforced Mao's cult of personality. Special enforcers screened millions of officials to explore whether they had ever resisted Mao's orders, even passively. At the top was a special secret group chaired by Zhou Enlai (Chou En-lai), with torturer extraordinaire Kang Sheng as his deputy. This group investigated people personally designated by Mao. Differing from Stalin, who quickly hustled purged victims out of sight via prisons, gulags, or summary liquidation, “Mao made sure that much violence and humiliation was carried out in public, and he vastly increased the number of persecutors by getting his victims tormented and tortured by their own direct subordinates.”77

  Social Dominance and Control

  Social dominance is a key component of both human and nonhuman primate sociality that is intimately related to neurotransmitters and hormones. The phenomenon seems to walk hand-in-hand with both narcissism and the need for control. Studies have shown that when males climb the social totem pole, their testosterone levels increase, whereas if they slip back down the pole, their testosterone levels also slip. This effect is so widespread that several studies have even shown that male fans of a winning football team have higher testosterone levels after the game than the fans of the losing team.73

  Many studies have found a strong relationship between serotonin and dopamine levels and a primate's level in its social hierarchy.74 Manipulating these neurotransmitters can cause a monkey to move either up or down in the social hierarchy.75 It's reasonable to suppose that Mao's rise to the top of his social structure could have swung his neurotransmitter levels into even higher gear. This in turn would have caused a rise in self-confidence—the same rise in self-confidence observed in primates with purposefully manipulated neurotransmitter levels. Ultimately, this could have helped shut down Mao's already limited abilities to accept criticism from others. As Mao biographer Philip Short writes: “By the mid-1950s, Mao was so convinced of the essential correctness of his own thought that he could no longer comprehend why, if people had the freedom to think for themselves, they would think what they wanted, not what he wanted.”76

  Perhaps ambition is simply an attempt, in those with certain biochemical predispositions, to self-medicate. This would provide a neurobiological basis to the idea that, at least for those with the proper underlying genetics, absolute power does indeed corrupt absolutely.

  Sadism

  According to Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao discovered early on a gut affinity for sadism, which is believed by many researchers to be affiliated with the strongest forms of psychopathy. While on a tour of the provinces, he approvingly described the ability of local bosses to toy with and break their victims:

  A tall paper hat is put on [the victim], and on the hat is written landed tyrant so-and-so or bad gentry so-and-so. Then the person is pulled by a rope [like pulling an animal], followed by a big crowd…. This punishment makes [victims] tremble most. After one such treatment, such people are forever broken.

  The peasant association is most clever. They seized a bad gentleman and declared that they were going to [do the above] to him…. But then they decided not to do it that day…. That bad gentleman did not know when he would be given this treatment, so every day he lived in anguish and never knew a moment's peace.78

  In wr
iting his report afterward, Mao waxed enthusiastically about the brutality he saw: “It is wonderful. It is wonderful!” He felt “a kind of ecstasy never experienced before.” Soon, he himself was ordering “[o]ne or two beaten to death, no big deal.”79

  Mao's favorite method in the early years of his direct involvement in purges was public execution. Slow killing during public executions was a particular favorite. He enjoyed the use of suo-biao—a sharp, twin-edged knife with a long handle like a lance. Even local bandits, used to gruesome methods of their own, were frightened by Mao and his organized terror.

  Fig. 9.3. One of the many forms of death by slow execution common in Mao's youth. The prisoners are being asphyxiated as the weight of their bodies stretches their necks.

  Ability to Charm

  Those with borderline personality disorder, as well as many psychopaths, are well known for their ability to charm. Mao, along with Russia's Stalin, was well known for his abilities in this area. Mao biographer Jonathan Spence writes: “When American advisory groups came to Yan'an and began to explore the possibilities of using the Communists more systematically against the Japanese, Mao was able to charm a new constituency with his earthy ways and his easy laugh. He also knew how to lobby skillfully for supplies and aid, posing his ‘democratic’ peasant society against the landlord tyrannies of Chongqing. And always his reach and his mandate spread.”80

  Dr. Li observed Mao's methods for obtaining loyalty from his retainers. He writes: “Incapable himself of affection for others, Mao expected no such feelings toward him. Repeatedly in my years with Mao I watched him win loyalty from others in the same way he had won it from me. He would begin by charming people, winning their trust, getting them to open up, to confess their faults…Mao would then forgive them, save them, and make them feel safe. Thus redeemed, they became loyal.”81