by Bandy X. Lee
The upcoming tyrant dreams of becoming as great as and preferably greater than his favorite tyrannical role models; and if those role models are alive, the tyrant-in-the making can be expected to curry favor with the existing ones while plotting their demise and besting them in the tyrants’ world rankings. To accomplish this, though, he must obtain a position of ultimate power within his own nation first.
This brings us to the second leg of the tyrannical beast …
The Tyrant’s Supporters
The process through which the tyrant gains popularity and power usually baffles the outside observers and historians looking at it from the perspective of time, as its main ingredient, narcissism, somehow remains invisible to both participants and observers.
The tyrant’s narcissism is the main attractor of his followers, who project their hopes and dreams onto him. The more grandiose his sense of his own self and his promises to his fans, the greater their attraction and the stronger their support. As Plato wrote in The Republic, “The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness.”
Through the process of identification, the tyrant’s followers absorb his omnipotence and glory and imagine themselves as powerful as he is, the winners in the game of life. This identification heals the followers’ narcissistic wounds, but also tends to shut down their reason and conscience, allowing them to engage in immoral and criminal behaviors with a sense of impunity engendered by this identification. Without the support of his narcissistic followers, who see in the tyrant a reflection and vindication of their long-nursed dreams of glory, the tyrant would remain a middling nobody.
The interplay of grandiose hopes and expectations between the tyrant-in-the-making and his supporters that suffuses him with power and helps propel him to a position of political authority is an example of narcissistic collusion: a meshing of mutually compatible narcissistic needs. The people see in him their long-awaited savior and a father substitute, hinting at the narcissistic abuse implicated in the authoritarian upbringing that demands obedience and worship of the all-powerful parental figure. In their faith and unquestioning admiration, he in turn receives a ready line of narcissistic supply, thousands of mirrors reflecting his greatness.
Describing the narcissistic collusion between the tyrant and his supporters, Erich Fromm (1980) stressed the elements of submission to and identification with the strongman:
The highly narcissistic group is eager to have a leader with whom it can identify itself. The leader is then admired by the group which projects its narcissism onto him. In the very act of submission to the powerful leader, which is in depth an act of symbiosis and identification, the narcissism of the individual is transferred onto the leader. The greater the leader, the greater the follower. Personalities who as individuals are particularly narcissistic are the most qualified to fulfill this function. The narcissism of the leader who is convinced of his greatness, and who has no doubts, is precisely what attracts the narcissism of those who submit to him. The half-insane leader is often the most successful one until his lack of objective judgment, his rage reaction in consequence to any setback, his need to keep up the image of omnipotence may provoke him to make mistakes which lead to his destruction. But there are always gifted half-psychotics at hand to satisfy the demands of a narcissistic mass.
Jerrold Post (2015) underscored the authoritarian parenting aspect of that identification when discussing Hitler Youth:
Especially for the Hitler Youth Movement, which was at the forefront of Hitler’s support, Hitler’s externalizing hate-mongering rhetoric was a comforting and inspiring message, and Hitler provided the strong inspiring father figure that these children could not find within their own families. But, in rebelling against their own families, they submitted uncritically to Hitler’s authoritarian leadership. Importantly, Adolf Hitler’s unleashing of the demons of war was turning the passive humiliation of defeat [in World War I] into the active experience of redemptive action.
The narcissistic mixture of elevated expectations, resentments, and desire for revenge on specific targets and/or society in general for not meeting those expectations is what sociologist Michael Kimmel (2013) called aggrieved entitlement. Although Kimmel talked specifically about white American men in the twenty-first century, some form of aggrieved entitlement has been driving tyrants and their supporters, as well as organized and “lone wolf” terrorists, the world over since time immemorial.
The tyrant makes many good-sounding—but also openly unrealistic, bordering on delusional—promises to his supporters, and usually has no intention or ability to fulfill most of them (if any). He holds his supporters in contempt, as he does “weaker” human beings in general, and uses them only as props in his domination- and adulation-oriented schemes.
The narcissistic collusion between the tyrant and his supporters is also driven by the latter’s need for revenge, for the tyrant is always chosen to perform this psychically restorative function: to avenge the humiliations (narcissistic wounds) of his followers and punish those who inflicted them.
However, as the wounds often date to the supporters’ personal ancient past and more often than not are perceived rather than real, the choice of the object of this vengeful punishment is not based on reality. Rather, it is based on the displacement and projection characteristic of the scapegoating process that becomes an inextricable part of the narcissistic collusion between the tyrant and his followers.
The scapegoating designates the Others as an object upon which the narcissistic revenge will be inflicted. The Others always represent the split-off, devalued, and repressed parts of the narcissistic individual’s own psyche, which are projected onto them. These projections are shared and augmented through a narcissism of small differences (Freud 1991), which allows us to focus on and enlarge insignificant differences between ourselves and the Others in order to solidify our negative projections and justify our contempt and aggression toward them.
The tyrant and his followers typically choose as vessels for their negative projections and aggression the members of society who are not just different but weaker. The tyrant fuels that aggression in order to solidify his power but also to deflect it from himself, shield his own narcissism, and repair his own narcissistic injuries dating to his childhood. The figure of the narcissistic parental abuser/tyrant is protected through the scapegoating and the return to the authoritarian, order- and obedience-based mode of social functioning promised by the tyrant, as he himself assumes the mantle of father-protector and directs his own and his supporters’ aggression onto the Others, who have nothing to do with those supporters’ real and perceived wounds.
The tyrant’s own narcissism hints at the level of woundedness in his supporters. The greater their narcissistic injury, the more grandiose the leader required to repair it. While his grandiosity appears grotesque to non-narcissistic people who do not share his agenda, to his followers he represents all their denied and thwarted greatness, which now, under his rule, will finally flourish. Hitler’s bizarre dream of a Thousand-Year Reich spread upon the world did not seem at all preposterous or dangerous to so many Germans suffering from the pain, humiliation, and privations inflicted upon them by the fiasco of World War I, just as Stalin’s vision of communism as dictatorship of the working class taking over the world did not appear strange or dangerous to his beleaguered followers. Narcissism is blind to itself.
The natural consequence of scapegoating that stems from the projections of the narcissist’s devalued parts of himself is dehumanization of the Others, which then justifies all kinds of atrocities perpetrated on them. The ease with which this attitude spreads in narcissistic groups is frightening, and indicative of a narcissistic rage that fuels it, a rage focused on purging, psychically and physically, all that is weak and undesirable from the narcissists’ inner and external worlds.
That rage, along with dreams of glory, is what makes the bond between the tyrant and his followers so strong that it remains imp
ervious to reality. It also makes the tyrant’s rule easier, as he does not have to exert himself much to infect his followers with contempt for the dehumanized Others and incite aggression against them. In fact, the tyrant’s permission for such aggression appears to be a large part of his appeal to his blood- and revenge-thirsty followers.
The tyrant’s and his followers’ projections always reveal much about their own pathology. In his private notes about Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland, Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, wrote that they were “not people anymore” but “beasts of prey equipped with a cold intellect” (Gellately 2007), the latter description obviously more applicable to Goebbels and the Nazis themselves than their victims (who, it must be stressed, were observed by Goebbels in captivity, under dehumanizing conditions of ghetto life).
Once we dehumanize the Others and imbue them with a murderous motivation directed at us, we can easily rationalize any act of violence we perpetrate upon them as self-defense. And so, removing en masse and without mercy those “beasts of prey” became one of the main goals of the Nazis, who believed that Jews, Poles, Gypsies, and other non-Aryans threatened their existence. The fear, whether genuine or faked, stemming from this false belief was used as a sufficient justification for mass murder on a scale unseen previously in the modern world.
It must be noted that the tyrant’s supporters and especially sycophants within his closest circle tend to share his character defect. The sycophantic echo chamber around the tyrant magnifies but also hides his pathology. His surrogates usually serve as ego substitutes to his rampaging id, and are responsible for introducing and implementing his destructive plans in ways that would seem rational and acceptable to the public.
Their role becomes more important with time, as he psychologically decompensates, which inevitably happens to narcissistic psychopaths in positions of ultimate power. As his paranoia, grandiosity, and impulsivity grow, his aides, family members, and surrogates, fearful for their positions and often their lives, scramble to preserve an image of his “normalcy” and greatness for public consumption to the very end. Their loyalty can be fierce and undying, unlike that of the tyrant himself.
The Society
Tyrants do not arise in a vacuum, just as tyranny does not spring on the world unannounced. It takes years of cultivation of special conditions in a society for a tyranny to take over. Those conditions invariably include a growing and unbearably oppressive economic and social inequality ignored by the elites who benefit from it, at least for a time; fear, moral confusion, and chaos that come from that deepening inequality; a breakdown of social norms; and growing disregard for the humanity of a large portion of the population and for higher values. In effect, we could see that the pre-tyrannical societies, whether nominally democratic or based on other forms of political organization, exhibit signs of a narcissistic pathology writ large. Those involve the inevitable split into their grandiose and devalued parts, including those of the society’s self-image, and a denial of their shadow, which is projected outward onto Others.
Oppressive, dehumanizing (narcissistic) systems, like narcissists themselves, cultivate their delusions of superiority on the basis of that internal, unseen, and unspoken split between the grandiose blameless I/Us and the devalued, inferior Others. The Others become repositories of the narcissists’ repressed vices, just as the tyrant is the vessel for their grandiose beliefs about themselves.
Another narcissistic aspect of such societies is the growing and ruthless competition, jealousy, and aggression within its borders, but also directed externally toward other nations in a scapegoating mechanism that is meant to prevent an internal breakdown of a society by redirecting its narcissistic rage onto external objects. Oftentimes, these vulnerable societies reel from some form of a narcissistic injury, such as the humiliation of a lost war, international sanctions, or treaties perceived as unfair, as Germany did after the Treaty of Versailles after World War I.
None of these processes is openly acknowledged or even noticed by the members of the society, save by a few typically ignored Cassandras. Just as individual narcissists are incapable of experiencing guilt, taking responsibility for their vices, or making genuine efforts to set things right in their lives, narcissistic societies also persist in their self-destructive blindness. While the chaos and discord brew in the underclasses, the elites, ensconced in their narcissistic bubbles, remain oblivious to the suffering of their fellow citizens and the fate it portends for the nation.
Fritz Stern (2005) has said that “German moderates and German elites underestimated Hitler, assuming that most people would not succumb to his Manichean unreason; they did not think that his hatred and mendacity could be taken seriously.” Hitler was seen by many as a bombastic but harmless buffoon, while many others, including members of clergy, intellectual elites, and the wealthy were nevertheless mesmerized by his grand visions of Germany’s future glory, and eagerly supported his agenda.
Narcissism of the elites makes them as well blind to the encroaching tyranny. It is a convenient—and yes, narcissistic—myth that only the dispossessed and uninformed would support the tyrant. It is not the economic or educational status that determines such susceptibility, but one’s narcissism, and that cuts across socioeconomic strata. Dorothy Thompson describes it brilliantly in her 1941 essay, “Who Goes Nazi?,” in which she identifies those threads of frustrated grandiosity, resentments, and hatreds in the well-heeled individuals’ characters that make them fall for tyrannical ideologies and movements. She also observes those who would naturally resist the toxic pull of Nazism, noting their humility and depth.
Stern (2005) quotes a letter from philosopher and Nobel Prize–winning physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, who confessed to him “that he had never believed in Nazi ideology but that he had been tempted by the movement, which seemed to him then like ‘the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.’ On reflection, he thought that National Socialism had been part of a process that the National Socialists themselves had not understood. He may well have been right. The Nazis did not realize that they were part of a historic process in which resentment against a disenchanted secular world found deliverance in the ecstatic escape of unreason.”
Note that the process that the Nazis themselves had not understood is the very narcissistic collusion, a near-psychotic infection with this virus of grandiosity and rage on a mass scale. It is rarely grasped, not even from the perspective of time, as our blindness makes it impossible to acknowledge it, which renders our narcissism the last taboo in a world that has dispensed with taboos. Our denial and social amnesia further entrench our incomprehension and ensure that history repeats itself.
Part of our forgetting involves distortions of historical and psychological facts. Safely removed, time- and distance-wise, from the latest tyranny-caused mayhem, we tend to imagine tyrants as instantly recognizable evil beings and tyrannies as something exotic enough never to happen to us. But as history and experience demonstrate, power-hungry narcissistic psychopaths do not look different from normal people; and if they stand out, it is often for socially approved reasons: their resolve, charisma, decisiveness, and ability to inspire others.
No tyrant comes to power on the platform of genocidal tyranny, even though such ideas may be brewing already in the recesses of his mind. Each and every one of them promises to bring back law and order, create better economic conditions for the people, and restore the nation’s glory.
These empty promises—for the tyrant has little desire and even less ability to fulfill them—are always tied together with the thread of scapegoating Others, a necessary component that channels the narcissistic rage outward and increases the society’s cohesion. But the tyrant sows discord and division among his own peoples as well. He cannot help it: pitting people against one another satisfies his irrepressible sadistic urge and makes it easier for him to dominate and control them.
The tyrant shows up in a society that is already weakened by disorder, blind to it, and
unable and/or unwilling to take corrective measures that would prevent a tyrannical takeover. Once he and his sycophantic cabal assume power, they deepen and widen the disorder, dismantling and changing the society’s norms, institutions, and laws to fully reflect their own pathology.
Andrew Łobaczewski (2007) discusses at length the formation and progression of pathocracies, political and other systems run by characterologically impaired individuals, predominantly psychopaths and narcissists. He describes how pathocracies change the society by the introduction of paralogisms, ways of distorting reality and truth; and paramoralisms, methods of perverting moral values. Under tyranny, paralogisms and paramoralisms are unleashed on a large scale through various propagandist means that include repetition of flat-out lies, accompanied by denials and obfuscations served through the increasingly centralized and controlled media. Fortified by magical thinking and contempt for reason, these distortions lead to the creation of the kind of absurdist unreality well known to people raised in authoritarian regimes, where up is down and black is white, and where what one knows to be true may have nothing to do with the officially sanctioned version of the truth.
We can see the tyrant’s own pathology influencing every area of a society’s functioning, from politics through culture and social mores to science and technology. What is being seen, said, and studied, and what’s ignored and silenced, depends on the tyrant’s whims, and soon enough the society itself and its ideology are structured in ways that meet his pathological needs for power and adulation. The implementation of this ideology is usually a gradual process, one that is eventually reinforced by the use of violence against persistent objectors.
As freedom of speech, the press, and assembly disappears and the tyrant’s destructive “reforms” take hold, an ethos of the New Man, an ideal of a human being compatible with the disordered ideology, is forced upon the populace.