Mao also deliberately chose an influential American journalist, Edgar Snow, who wrote for the Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald-Tribune, to charm for the Western world. Snow swallowed Mao's fabrications wholesale, calling Mao and other party leaders “direct, frank, simple, undevious.”82 Mao's journalistic charm campaign had long-term payoffs for both Snow and Mao. Other prominent figures joined Snow in praising Mao and his regime. Harvard professor John K. Fairbank “returned from a visit to China and remarked: ‘The Maoist revolution is on the whole the best thing that has happened to the Chinese people in centuries.’ Feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir excused Mao's murderous regime by arguing that ‘the power [he] exercises is no more dictatorial than, say, Roosevelt's was.’ Jean-Paul Sartre, de Beauvoir's consort, celebrated Mao's ‘revolutionary violence,’ declaring it to be ‘profoundly moral.’”83
But Mao and the Communists’ ability to fool the press extended further, in unexpected ways. Because the Nationalists had a much freer press, where frank complaint and discussion could take place, the Nationalists’ own atrocities and blunders were magnified in people's minds. The contrast with the carefully controlled positive press coming from the Communist camp allowed many people to come to the conclusion that the Communists were the lesser of two evils. Nationalist captain Hsu Chen provides one example of an individual who had witnessed the terrors of Communist rule firsthand, becoming strongly anticommunist as a result. Coming home to Ningbo, near Shanghai, he found that people were in denial and did not want to hear his views: “I talked to every visitor, til my tongue dried up and my lips cracked…I told them about the heartless and bestial deeds of the Communist bandits…. But I was unable to wake them up from their dreams, but rather aroused their aversion.”84
Narcissism
Narcissism is frequently seen in both borderline and antisocial personality disorders. Mao's narcissism, however, was so extraordinary that it bordered on religion—he had near-mystical faith in his own role as leader. “He never doubted that his leadership, and only his leadership, would save and transform China…. He shared the popular perception that he was the country's messiah.”85 Mao's personality cult, which he strongly encouraged behind the scenes, began to emerge in the 1940s. The new preamble to the Constitution of the Communist Party was ultimately written to affirm that “[t]he Chinese Communist Party takes Mao Zedong's thought…as the guide for all its work, and opposes all dogmatic or empiricist deviations.”86 As Mao himself said: “The question is not whether or not there should be a cult of the individual, but rather whether or not the individual concerned represents the truth. If he does, then he should be worshipped.”87
It's difficult for someone with a Western upbringing to understand how completely a national personality cult can overtake people's minds. In Mao's China, toddlers chanted, “We are all Chairman Mao's good little children.” Mao wasn't venerated—he was indeed worshiped: “The ‘Little Red Book’ of his aphorisms was ascribed the power to work miracles. Chinese newspapers reported how medical workers armed with it had cured the blind and the deaf; how a paralytic, relying on Mao Zedong Thought, had recovered the use of his limbs; how on another occasion, Mao Zedong Thought had raised a man from the dead.”88
Unusual insight into Mao's brand of narcissism comes from a set of commentaries he wrote while in his mid-twenties: “I do not agree with the view that to be moral, the motive of one's action has to be benefiting others. Morality does not have to be defined in relation to others…. People like me want to…satisfy our hearts to the full, and in doing so we automatically have the most valuable moral codes. Of course there are people and objects in the world, but they are all there only for me.”89
Reading Mao's own words gives insight into an earlier issue. If Machiavellianism is most closely related to borderline personality disorder of all the personality disorders, why is the correlation only a 0.40 instead of close to a perfect 1.0? The answer lies in the wording of some of the questions on the Mach-IV test. By looking at Mao's own thoughts as he described them in his commentaries, it's clear that Mao—that most Machiavellian of men—would have answered the question “One should take action only when sure it is morally right,” for example, with the seemingly low-Mach “strongly agree.”90 Mao's commentaries clearly stated his feeling that his own moral codes were the most valuable. Given his profound narcissism, we can reasonably assume Mao felt morally justified in doing whatever he wanted.
Remember the “wisdom of crowds” and the value of using different framing lenses to come to the optimal solution to complex problems? By stifling dissent and ensuring all eyes were turned only to him for all decisions, Mao effectively made a hundred-million-fold cut in the effectiveness of planning and governing in revolutionary China. It's no wonder the Chinese economy stuttered into reverse.
Fig. 9.4. In this 1966 photograph, Little Red Books are waved as Mao clearly relishes the adulation.
Narcissistic Personality Disorder
The DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for narcissistic personality disorder consist of a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or in behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy. It has been found to be the most strongly heritable of all the personality disorders.91 The disorder begins by early adulthood, and is indicated by at least five of the following:
a grandiose sense of self-importance (patient exaggerates own abilities and accomplishments)
preoccupation with fantasies of beauty, brilliance, ideal love, power, or limitless success
belief that personal uniqueness renders the patient fit only for association with (or understanding by) people or institutions of rarefied status
need for excessive admiration
a sense of entitlement (patient unreasonably expects favorable treatment or automatic granting of own wishes)
exploitation of others to achieve personal goals
lack of empathy (patient does not recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others)
frequent envy of others or belief that others envy patient
arrogance or haughtiness in attitude or behavior
Subclinical narcissists, on the other hand, are often happy people who take stress in stride. Psychology Today writer Carl Vogel writes: “Mild narcissism also seems to help people recover from accidents or other trauma—it gives them an unrealistic sense of their own invulnerability, and they believe that they will be able to handle whatever else life throws at them. As one researcher put it, being somewhat narcissistic is like driving a huge SUV: you're having a great time, even while you hog the road, suck up extra resources and put other drivers at higher risk.”92
Paranoia
Another of the key traits the DSM-IV uses to define borderline personality disorder involves transient, stress-related paranoid thinking.e.93 Paranoia, in fact, became an increasing problem for Mao as he grew older. Dr. Li first noticed it in relation to a special swimming pool designed especially for Mao, which Mao became convinced was poisoned (although he happily encouraged others to use it).94 By 1965, in conjunction with his excessive consumption of sleeping pills (more than ten times the usual amount), Mao's paranoia began to tighten its grip. He began to feel that his guesthouse was poisonous, and he had to move. But, as Li noted, “the only poison was political, the intrigue and backstabbing at the highest levels of communist power.”95
In his final days, Mao spent hours going over diatribes he had written thirty-three years before against one of his most loyal and zealous followers, Zhou Enlai. Zhou was dying of bladder cancer—Mao had refused permission for an operation during the early stages, when it was still curable. Mao relished the old insults he had written, which he had never felt wise to publish, and cursed Zhou afresh, along with other people who had crossed him over the years.
Forensic psychologist J. Reid Meloy, expands on the type of behavior Mao displayed:
[A person with paranoid personality disorder has] a remarkable capacity to remember slights or insults, perhaps delivered ina
dvertently, many years after they occurred…. [He is] much more deeply wounded…than normals, because he is much more narcissistically sensitive to such slights. He is very thin skinned, because the underbelly of narcissistic pathology, which the paranoid individual has in abundance, is covered by an emotional epidermis of shame and humiliation. Hurtful words or actions of others, quickly forgotten by normals, will become a source of preoccupation for this individual. He thinks about them again and again, and as he ruminates, feelings of anger, even hatred, are stirred, and begin to constellate around the memory of the insult. As time passes, these insults, now consciously mixed with unpleasant feelings, begin to fester.96
Mao's Manipulation
Mao could be exceptionally subtle in his attempts to manipulate and split his colleagues. One of his favorite techniques was to refuse to issue a categorical ruling—allowing a measure of doubt to subsist. In this fashion he “placed his colleagues before a situation where they had to make a choice, and then stood back and waited to see which way they would jump.”97 He could then in his paranoid fashion find anyone guilty, often flip-flopping his interpretation midstream to catch people on both sides of the fence. Supporters of Mao's hand-selected successor, Lin Biao, drew up a document with a devastatingly accurate assessment of Mao's political tactics:
Today he uses this force to attack that force; tomorrow he uses that force to attack this force. Today he uses sweet words and honeyed talk to those whom he entices, and tomorrow he puts them to death for some fabricated crimes. Those who are his guests today will be his prisoners tomorrow. Looking back at the history of the past few decades, is there anyone he supported initially who has not finally been handed a political death sentence?…His former secretaries have either committed suicide or been arrested. His few close comrades-in-arms or trusted aides have also been sent to prison.98
By the end of his life, Mao had vilified nearly every one of his closest colleagues, even those who had been at his side for decades. “After 1971,” writes biographer Philip Short, “general cynicism prevailed. Only the young (and not all of them), and those who had profited from the radical upsurge, still believed in Mao's revolutionary new world.”99 As psychiatrist Vamik Volkan points out: “[T]he narcissist in power has special psychological advantages in terms of sustaining his grandiose self-image. He can actually restructure his reality by devaluing or even eliminating those who threaten his fragile self-esteem.”100
DID MAO BELIEVE IN COMMUNISM?
Mao's early willingness to ride whatever horse would allow him power and his later ebb and flow of political ideology make his actual belief in conventionally defined communism unlikely. Psychiatrist Jerrold Post astutely notes:
It is hard to identify the narcissistic personality with any consistent beliefs about the world because his beliefs tend to shift. More than any other personality type, what the narcissistic personality says should be viewed as “calculated for effect.” The only central and stable belief of the narcissist is the centrality of the self. What is good for him is good for his country.
The conscience of the narcissist is dominated by self-interest. Unlike the sociopath, who is without an internal beacon, without an internalized body of scruples and principles, the narcissist does indeed have a conscience, but it is a flexible conscience. He sincerely believes himself to be highly principled and scrupulous, but can change positions and commitments rapidly as “circumstances change.” The sincerity of his beliefs is communicated, so that the unwary may be completely persuaded of the trustworthiness of the narcissist; and indeed, at that moment, he is. The righteous indignation with which he stands in judgment of the moral failure of others often stands in striking contrast to his own self-concerned behavior, which seems hypocritical to the outside observer.101
ENDGAME AND AFTERMATH
After causing the deaths of so many millions, Mao was to die quietly in his bed, aged eighty-two, his body ravaged with an incurable, and ultimately fatal, motor neuron disease—amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—Lou Gehrig's disease. “I felt no sorrow at his passing,” noted Dr. Li.102
After more than a quarter of a century of Mao's rule, seventy million Chinese had died needlessly, often gruesomely, at his behest. China's economy was in a shambles; its agriculture based on inefficient, backbreaking hand toil; its industrial base worthless, turning out heaps of defective equipment. As a military power, China's only claim to fame was a multitude of warm bodies. There were entire fleets of planes that could not fly and a navy that could barely navigate the seas. (Of course today, with the free-market reforms initiated by Mao's successor, Deng Xiaoping, things are quite different.)
Mao's many pathologies that led to China's sad deterioration were almost certainly rooted in his genetic predisposition. If his obstreperous, argumentative temperament was present early on, which is natural to suppose, it would have had a particularly poor fit with his father's brutal authoritarianism. The resulting stress could have worsened the worst of Mao's already problematic character traits. But Mao's less savory characteristics were also undoubtedly worsened through the years as his neurochemistry was thrown further awry with drug usage and the intoxicating positive feedback of the cult of personality he himself had created.f.103
But early on, at least, Mao had a few redeeming virtues—perhaps the very virtues that allowed his wife Kaihui and his mother to love him so deeply. Judging from the evidence of Mao's occasional acts of real kindness, Dr. Li, the man who knew him best, was probably right to think that at least a few of Mao's programs were conceived with a vague sense of decency behind them. As biographer Ross Terrill writes:
The “late Mao” described by Dr. Li was different from the early and middle Mao. He had not always been vain, insincere, vindictive, arrogant, or duplicitous. In middle age, to take examples from the testimony of his most impressive secretary, Tian Jiaying, Mao was not immodest. When commended for his opening speech at the Eighth Party Congress, he said, “Do you know who wrote my speech? A young scholar—Tian Jiaying.” The Mao of 1949–50 read all of the many letters that reached him from the general public, but the later Mao lacked a sense of the general public's problems and views. The Mao of 1950 could cry over the suffering of individuals from the grass roots, but the Mao of the Cultural Revolution did not. The Mao of 1951 called the sending of gifts and silk banners in homage to the government a “waste” and an “error,” but the later Mao could not get enough homage. In 1962 at the 7,000-cadres conference, after words of outrageous flattery of Mao were uttered by Lin Biao, Mao said, “Lin Biao's words are always so clear and direct. They are simply superb. Why can't the other party leaders be so perceptive?”…Tian Jiaying could testify that Mao changed, for the change wrecked Tian's career and ended his life.104
As Mao grew older, his increasingly disturbed neurological underpinnings damped out his already poor ability to take in and act upon critical feedback. In point of fact, Mao, like Milosevic, seems to have had little neurological capability of processing criticism. And perhaps in the same fashion that memories can be purposefully suppressed, Mao seemed perfectly capable of suppressing what little empathy he was able to feel. Like Joseph Newman's violent—and nonviolent—psychopaths, Mao had a strangely warped attention; one that allowed him to leave an inconveniently distant wife and family, or ignore the fall of a child acrobat, or discourage attempts to bring his focus to the plight of those suffering from his policies.
Mao used his native intelligence and dysfunctional qualities to great advantage in making his way to the top. He was aided by a society in turmoil as well as by often inept opposition. And he was given cover by an unchecked Communist political party that gained followers through its unabashed idealism and ability to provide the poor and working classes revenge against those they worked for, owed money to, or were simply jealous of. (Of course, many a right-wing dictator has been able to create similarly unchecked powers under cover of “democracy.”)
Even taking maximum advantage of every dollop of favorable c
ircumstance, however, Mao's rise was never certain. At any number of junctures, particularly early on, he might have been caught and summarily executed. Here Mao's paranoid tendencies, perhaps rooted in his hints of schizotypy, served him in good stead. In fact, virtually every borderline, psychopathic, and narcissistic tendency in his arsenal proved useful: Mao's supernal gaslighting abilities were used to throw his opponents into disarray; his sadism and vindictiveness shocked his opponents to silence; his black-and-white thinking kept people scrambling to prove themselves as being on Mao's good side; while his explosive temper became a key tool for manipulation. Projection kept the spotlight off him when the problems he created became too widely known to suppress. Eventually, his narcissism would lead the great bulk of the population to literally worship him. As Terrill writes: “The imperial-plus-Leninist system acted as a magnifying glass, giving huge dimensions to each of Mao's personality quirks.”105
In a capitalist economic structure, Mao might have made his way to the top of a business enterprise. There, like a surprising number of managers today, he would have run roughshod over colleagues and subordinates while devising unreasonable programs even as he took out anyone who objected. If he would have chosen a religious vocation, his smooth charm would have found him a ready pulpit to snare both men and women to feed his sexual drives even as he preached chastity—much as he did in real life as China's chairman. If he had chosen democratic politics, his dictatorial style and ease with corruption, coupled with his modicum of idealism, might have emulated Louisiana's political “Kingfish,” Huey Long, who President Roosevelt himself labeled one of most dangerous men in America. Yet in any of these Western-style roles, most of which are constricted by a modicum of checks and balances, Mao's worst traits would have likely been kept in check, or possibly even exposed. An American-born Mao would have had to worry about a judicial system not entirely under his control and an open society that, although far from perfect, provided for some degree of illumination and accountability. Mao might have also had to worry about appeasing political constituents—spending time deflecting reporters and pesky law enforcement officers, and, if he became a major public figure, misdirecting reporters from Time, the Drudge Report, and gossip magazines. The higher he might have climbed, the more obvious any illegal activities could become—a pattern of suspicious deaths, for example, would inevitably have begun attracting attention. (Though cutthroat, American CEO types have been able to dispatch their adversaries without actually murdering them.)
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