Evil Genes

by Barbara Oakley

  Fig. 11.1.

  It can sometimes be difficult to know whether a political, religious, business, or scientific leader is cognitively disturbed or instead an avant-garde visionary who sees the truth others are missing.e.74 Or perhaps both. Churchill, for example, was rightly characterized as depression-prone and at times dependent on alcohol. But he was correct to see Hitler's menace when other British politicians settled for a groupthink of appeasement. As in Churchill's case, will history prove correct those who now see similar menace in the Machiavellians who have found purchase in fundamentalist Islam? Will well-intentioned policies of cultural relativism, in the long run, prove equivalent to Chamberlain's similarly benign, seemingly rational, and humane policies of appeasement—policies that led willy-nilly to genocide?

  PERSONALITY UNDERLIES IDEOLOGY

  In the end, illusion, delusion, happy optimism, or other forms of cognitive dysfunction or seeming dysfunction may be good or bad—depressives have often been found to be more realistic—but they are certainly not necessary to outstanding leadership. George Washington, for one, was highly respected and effective in large part because he was a supreme realist, “temperamentally incapable of tilting at windmills or living by illusion” and carrying an “instinctive aversion to sentimentalism and all moralistic brands of idealism.”75 Washington, as biographer Joseph Ellis reminds us, was “that rarest of men: a supremely realistic visionary…. His genius was his judgment.”76

  Perhaps surprisingly, Ellis cites as the cause of Washington's judgment his lack of schooling—his “mind was uncluttered with sophisticated intellectual preconceptions.” And there may be some truth to Ellis's notion. But a number of leaders with minimal schooling—Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, Stalin, and Ceausescu spring immediately to mind—taught themselves with entirely different outcomes. While these ultimately evil dictators voraciously absorbed the idealistic teachings of Marx, which they then used to mask for their self-interested behavior, Washington was busy bringing himself to the opposite conclusion that “men and nations were driven by interests rather than ideals.”77 Ideology, it seems, whether liberal, conservative, Communist, capitalist, or religious, is often seized by people of certain temperaments, for their own purposes, whether for good or for ill.

  Although pinned to opposite ends of the political spectrum, how very similar Hitler's fascist Germany was to Stalin's Communist Russia.

  And how very different Washington's moral and rational leadership was from Mao's.

  AMBITION AND CONTROL

  We've talked about the mixed advantages of narcissism, temper, and cockeyed cognition. But what about the desire for control and its often conjoined twin, ambition? Certainly we know that an obsession with power and control is one of the most common traits of tyrannical dictators. For example, after wrecking Zimbabwe's strong economy and relatively sound human rights record, tyrannical dictator Robert Mugabe “made no attempt to deal with any of the calamitous economic and social issues facing his government. All that mattered to him was the exercise of power…. Whatever the cost, his regime was dedicated towards that end.”78

  Likewise, biographer Robert Waite summarizes apropos Hitler: “[T]he most basic single characteristic of both his personal life and his system of government can be reduced to one overriding need: to force others to do his will.”79 Attaining and maintaining control was also a central tenet of Stalin's existence. His closest circle and top generals had naturally devolved to those with a gift for acquiescing and brown-nosing. Stalin's lackeys studied Stalin “like zoologists to read his moods, win his favour and survive.”80

  But, like so many other traits, controlling behavior, when mixed with, for example, sensible cognition, can be a winning combination in a much more positive sense. “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher, for example, the first female prime minister of Great Britain, has earned both love and loathing for her controlling revamp of British economic policies. Much like Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Washington, Thatcher's ambition, not to mention her egotistical certitude, was boundless—she could hold her own with anyone.f.

  Her style was built on domination. None of her colleagues had ever experienced a more assertive, even overbearing, leader. That had always been her way of doing business, and it became much more pronounced when, having defeated all her male rivals in 1975, she needed to establish a dependable ascendancy over them. With her command of facts and figures and her reluctance ever to lose an argument, she seemed so damnably sure of herself that nobody could suppose there lurked much uncertainty anywhere in her makeup.81

  Unlike Hitler and many other despots, and much like George Washington, Thatcher used “a ‘thinking’ or ‘rational’ solution to problems rather than a ‘feeling’ or ‘emotional’ response.”82 And, unlike the typical chameleon-like Machiavellian, Thatcher's identity was stanchion-solid—as she said, “We don't change our tune to whoever we are talking.”83 (An echo of Ataturk's in-your-face public law-breaking in Islamic Turkey as he quaffed fiery raki and proclaimed, “Hypocrites and frauds of old used to drink a thousand times more, secretly in hovels as they indulged in all sorts of nastiness. I am not a fraud. I drink to my nation's honor!”)84 Perhaps most importantly, the policies that Thatcher chose to pursue ultimately emphasized moving away from unitary control by any one person or group in government—including herself. It seems that Thatcher's desire for control was nuanced by practical cognition that, Churchill-like, saw through the groupthink of economic appeasement of labor unions as well as idealistic but ultimately detrimental government handout policies that had overgrown their original beneficial purposes.

  On the other hand, labor unions and government handout policies have proven themselves at times to be of vital importance. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, characterized by one British politician as having the “cunning of a schemer and the ambitions of a genuine altruist,”85 used his cool intellect and keen desire for control to ram through work and relief programs that helped ease millions of destitute families through the crisis of the Great Depression. And there is no doubt that the labor unions Roosevelt helped champion, although imperfect, helped serve as counterweights to some of the more outrageous offenses of employers. Different times and situations call for different solutions—but under almost any circumstances, ambition and desire for control play a role.

  THE SURPRISING ATTRIBUTES

  As is perhaps becoming clear in our discussion of shades of gray, Machiavellian attitudes alone do not necessarily make for an individual's success (or sinister success). Many individuals, Machiavellian or not, and no matter their flavor of political or religious orientation, compete for positions that provide power or gain. Those who make it to the top of any given social ladder often have a number of non-Machiavellian traits that give them significant advantages over their competitors. Only a few of these non-Machiavellian traits will be described here, even so, these examples give a sense of the advantages certain personality traits can provide in achieving either the fame of a Gandhi, or the notoriety of a Hitler.

  Native intelligence obviously lies among those advantageous traits, as, perhaps more surprisingly, does a good memory. Selecting examples from the fascist side of politics, “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who enjoyed watching torture by peeking through an eyehole from a neighboring room, had “a reputation for great intelligence.”86 Paraguayan Nazi-sympathizer Alfredo Stroessner was “darkly brilliant” in his ability to profit as a dictator from the mistakes of others, as were any number of other right-wing dictators, many of whom retained power because of US support for their anticommunist stance.87

  Underlying Hitler's extraordinary speaking skills, which are often cited as the key to his rise to power, was his memory. Biographer Robert Waite explains:

  Everyone who knew Hitler was struck by his incredibly retentive memory and the extraordinary range of his factual knowledge. He could remember the trademark and serial number of the bicycle he had used in 1915; the names of the inns where he had stayed overnight 20 years previously; the street
s down which he had driven during past political campaigns; the age, displacement, speed, strength of armor, and other data of every capital ship in the British and German navies; the names of the singers and their roles in the operas he had seen in Vienna as a youth; the names of his commanders and their precise armaments down to the battalion….

  Hitler also used his data bank as a defensive weapon to ward off displeasing arguments. When field commanders on the Eastern Front pointed out the strength of the enemy, Hitler would either dismiss their argument as irrelevant—his steel-like will would overcome all problems—or overwhelm the doubter with production statistics and precise weaknesses in the armament of the enemy. Or he would undercut and embarrass commanders by demanding from them information that they simply could not remember. If, for example, they raised objections to a tactical plan, he would bombard them with questions such as the name and rank of each of their subordinate commanders or the military decorations each was entitled to wear. When a field commander admitted ignorance of these matters, Hitler would provide the answer triumphantly and announce that he had more knowledge of their sector than they had.

  He had little interest in coming to grips with difficult intellectual problems, and had the habit of repeating the same question about a complex historical event without making an effort to investigate the answer.88

  In general, people associate a steel-trap memory with high intelligence, although the two qualities don't appear to be necessarily linked (witness idiot savants). A sharp memory can easily be used as a manipulative tool by the less bright, but more Machiavellian among us. Thus, for example, Mussolini used his prodigious memory to fool people into thinking that he had an exceptionally wide knowledge of science and philosophy. In reality his knowledge was often limited to what he'd happened to skim a few pages of—but which he could recite practically verbatim.89

  On the Communist side, repressive dictator Fidel Castro early on showed far more interest in sports than in academics, but he caught the attention of his teachers with his remarkable memory, which he used to easily memorize entire books.90 And if communism's grand progenitor, Stalin, was different from many dictatorial wannabes, it was only in his intellect and, perhaps most importantly, his “rolodex of a memory.”91 One railways commissar who had reported to Stalin hundreds of times pointed out, “One felt oppressed by Stalin's power, but also by his phenomenal memory and the fact that he knew so much. He made one feel even less important than one was.”92 Mao and Milosevic were similarly blessed with remarkably good memories.

  A retentive memory also plays a surprisingly important role in such factors as charm and charisma. Who is not delighted to discover that he is important enough that his name is remembered, even after a meeting that lasted only seconds many years before? Teachers with extraordinary memories can hold students mesmerized with their ready command of facts and be endeared for their ability to remember student names. (As Philip Wankat notes in The Effective, Efficient Professor, “The most important single activity you can do to show students that you are interested in them is to learn and use their names.”) Famed Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton, popular with his crew (and consequently disliked by fellow explorer Robert Falcon Scott), delighted everyone with his wonderful memory and “amazing treasure of most interesting anecdote.”93 Many top political leaders with good or great reputations—and remarkable memories—include Mahatma Gandhi, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Margaret Thatcher,g.94 and Chinese president Hu Jintau, as well as business leaders such as Warren Buffett, Jack Welch, and Bill Gates. Other top business leaders with a different sort of reputation—but no less remarkable a memory—include indicted Hollinger CEO Conrad Black, convicted former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling, convicted CEO Martha Stewart, and (if you consider mob bosses to be business leaders), dreaded capo di tutti i capi Toto Riina.95

  President Bill Clinton, with his marvelously retentive memory, could cover gaffes such as being given the wrong speech for his first State of the Union address through recollection and ad-libbing—no one ever guessed what was going on until later. And President Ronald Reagan was a near-professional raconteur, with ready quips always at hand to loosen tension; he could quote long passages from memory of books that had impressed him. It was Reagan's extraordinary memory that underpinned his moniker of “The Great Communicator” (which makes his later Alzheimer's all the more tragic). Charismatic, straight-from-the-heart speeches are easier for someone who doesn't necessarily need to look down at papers or slightly askew at teleprompters for reminders.

  One other useful attribute shared by many top leaders, Machiavellian or not, is an indefatigability that hints of hypomania. (Hypomania is a mild manic state that, in more extreme forms, can shade into bipolar disorder.) Gandhi, for example, could display almost supernatural endurance, walking enormous distances with little food or rest, or embarking on lengthy, well-publicized fasts of self-purification to bring attention to causes he believed in. Margaret Thatcher would say, “I've never had more than four or five hours sleep. Anyway, my life is my work. Some people work to live. I live to work.”96 Kemal Ataturk could stay up all night reading a book he found interesting or partying with friends and then still be on top of his duties the next day.

  Virtually every “evil” dictator who founded his own regime shared a similar hypomanic intensity, including Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, Ceausescu, Castro, Papa Doc Duvalier, and Robert Mugabe. Each of these individuals was capable of almost superhuman efforts—as long as the work pertained to the all-consuming desire to achieve control.

  SO, ARE THE SUCCESSFULLY SINISTER REALLY DIFFERENT?

  Quite commonly, people appear to succeed—not only in politics, but also in the arts, the sciences, business, and even in religious leadership—because of a healthy dollop of “evil genes.” As sociologist Daniel Chirot notes: “The competition for power is rarely won by those who are considerate of their enemies, who lack self-confidence, or who think they do not have something important to contribute to the problems of the group they want to rule.”97

  But is deeply sinister, Machiavellian behavior just an extreme version of “regular” dysfunctional traits—the tail end of the Gaussian curve for nastiness? Or is being successfully sinister one of those emergenic qualities—something that, like genius, springs forth as far more than the sum of its parts?

  It seems the answer may involve the combination of extreme traits and emergenic qualities. Churchill and Ataturk displayed broad indications of narcissism, temper, and mood disorders—yet both went out of their way to process and act responsibly on information whether or not it was something they “wanted” to hear. In other words, whatever dysfunction they might have had, had little relationship with that of the conventional evil dictator who manipulated underlings to bring facts that would only make them happy.

  Moreover, it appears to be individuals with a widespread dysfunction that involves not only narcissism, impulsivity, and mood disorders but also identity disorders, cognitive dysfunction, and, sometimes, sadism who emerge with the markedly different personalities seen in the successfully sinister. Such a borderpathic constellation of personality characteristics can be as distinct in its own Machiavellian way as bipolar disorder, autism, and schizophrenia are in theirs. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Milosevic, and other nefarious dictators shared many borderpathic characteristics, as undoubtedly do some present-day leaders in a variety of fields. (One must be wary of naming names, however, as the National Enquirer's episode with the tyrannical Martha Stewart made clear.) Such distinctive Machiavellians can leave a trail of fear, loathing, and lawsuits even long after their deaths. Woe betide those, for example, who delve too deeply into the life of—well, my publisher won't let me tell you who.

  NAIVETE

  Credulity involving deceptive, deeply pathological behavior crops up everywhere. Indeed, it's difficult for many people to understand how emergenically different the successfully sinister can be—we just can't believe these pe
ople can be that different from us. Historian Robert Waite describes the wonderful impression Hitler made on others: “To the sophisticated French ambassador, he appeared as ‘a well-balanced man, filled with experience and wisdom.’ An intellectual found him ‘charming,’ a person with ‘common sense’ in the English sense. The British historian Arnold Toynbee came away from an interview thoroughly ‘convinced of his sincerity in desiring peace.’ The elegant and precise Anthony Eden was impressed by Hitler's ‘smart, almost elegant appearance’ and found his command of diplomatic detail ‘masterful.’”98

  Sadly, we have plenty of current examples as well. George W. Bush initially thought subtly devious Russian president Vladimir Putin was “straightforward and trustworthy.” Media mogul Ted Turner agreed, dropping in to spend an hour with his “old friend” Putin during a visit that was heavily covered on CNN. (CNN didn't cover the nearly simultaneous armed raid on Putin's nemesis—news source Media Most Group—by masked men armed with automatic weapons claiming to be “tax inspectors.” The many recently liquidated critics of Putin's regime would also testify to Putin's chameleon-like nature.)99

  Fig. 11.2. Hitler in 1938. Nothing beats a photo op with kids for portraying kindness.

  President Jimmy Carter, arguably a decent man, befriended and feted Nicolae Ceausescu, handing a propaganda coup to one of the world's nastiest dictators. Carter has also made a post-presidential habit of being conned: befriending career terrorist Yasir Arafat, singing the praises of brutal North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung, and certifying as fair and aboveboard many a questionable third world election.