Daily Times

“He cracked down on the opposition and on the media. People who stood up to him often found themselves on the run — or dead. Putin made it abundantly clear what he wanted from the oligarchs: He wanted them to share their wealth with him and his allies, and he wanted them to stay out of politics. Those who refused would not be around to complain” (Source: Masha Gessen in The Wrath of Putin, Vanity Fair, April 2012, p. 183).

Mirror, mirror on the wall: who is the fairest of them all?

Would it be Vladimir Putin, who, so one might suppose after reading Moscow-based journalist Masha Gessen’s political biography, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin , has plundered more state and private enterprises than any western corporate raider alive?

Would it be Syria’s President Bashar Al-Assad whose army spent much of winter 2011-2012 attacking opposition-held villages and cities?

Would it be Paul Biya of Cameroon whose leisured travels in France with Chantel and entourage in 2009 racked up a bill approaching $ 800,000 ($ 40,000 per day for 43 hotel rooms according to a BBC report) while, according to one recent Trading Economics chart, between 30 and 54 percent of his constituents lived in poverty?

Such have been and still are the fair and pretty men who doll themselves up in leather, bodyguards, crooked lawyers and judges, and deeply corrupted generals, and who are so wonderful in their own eyes as to miss seeing their states’ children eating deadly crawling things on their watch—or not eating at all.

As is reported, so good has Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe been in this regard that he may be credited with single-handedly reintroducing cholera to his country by withholding funds for water sanitation facilities with the intention of spoiling the reputation of a rival. Writing on behalf of Physicians for Human Rights, Chris Beyrer and Frank Donaghue noted in a Washington Post op-ed, “ . . . we found something much more disturbing even than cholera: A people facing an array of health threats in a country where the most basic functions of the state — clean water, sanitation and health-care delivery — have collapsed.”

Of course, no outsider need tell a Pakistani reader about dictators. However, one may relay to readers in Pakistan and elsewhere a perhaps useful concept for forestalling the rise and subsequent installation of a next “president for life”: Behold the malignant narcissist.

Would the term were mine, but awareness of ‘malignant narcissism’ has been around a while. The credit has been given both to social psychologist Erich Fromm (1964, says one Wikipedia entry) and to 84-year old Otto F. Kernberg, presently Director of the Personality Disorders Institute at the New York Presbyterian Hospital, Westchester Division, and Professor of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College.

Erich Fromm, according to Wikipedia, described “malignant narcissism” as a “severe mental sickness” representing “the quintessence of evil” and “the most severe pathology and the root of the most vicious destructiveness and inhumanity.” Any directly subject to the whims of a given dictator — or malignant narcissist of lesser rank — would seem to have known as much.

How about a description? In the course of his long career, Otto Kernberg had published by 1975 a core set of four components descriptive of malignant narcissism. Here they are as relayed in a 1993 overview.

Dr. Jerrold M. Post, Professor of Psychiatry, Political Psychology, and International Affairs at the George Washington University, Washington, D.C:

Grandiose narcissism with such extreme self-absorption that there is an incapacity to empathise with the pain or suffering of others; a defective superego or conscience; ego syntonic aggression — i..e.. the subject’s use of aggression in the service of his own needs is unconstrained;

a paranoid outlook — highly suspicious and ready for betrayal, the subject views himself as surrounded by enemies (which in truth he often is) but does not comprehend his own role in creating those enemies. He then justifies his aggression in pursuit of his own unbounded needs as required by the enemies without. (‘Ego syntonic’ refers to the acceptability to a person of ambitions and impulses based on their fitting the self-concept of the same).

In any case, “…incapacity to empathise with the pain or suffering of others…”, “…defective conscience …”, “…does not comprehend his own role in creating… enemies…”

Sound familiar?

There is no need to name names but rather heed the warning that for any society, autocratic leadership, corruption, exploitation, injustice and violence may in part represent the expression and end products of having made way for the demands of a malignant narcissist.

An in-bounds narcissism may be part of the prerequisite for leadership — every would-be leader has to have the want of the role, the ambition to pursue it, and some good feelings vision about seeing himself in it and modestly heroic — but the leap into the grandiose travels far beyond that. Consider, for example, Saddam Hussein’s genocidal persecutions of the Kurds and of the Marsh Arabs taking place beside the construction of Tikrit Palace and the building or maintenance of another 80 similarly opulent residences.

Themes to watch: loss of containment or self-restraint, especially in regard to the pursuit of cruel, unjust, and sadistic habits, policies, and practices; lack of affect, concern, or empathy associated with the fate of others, especially those in the path of self-aggrandizing ambitions; finally, charges and maneouvres corresponding to the fear of critics and criticism and of the empowerment of irrationally suspect others, a paranoia that may start with some basis in reality but grow to have no bounds, no ends, no meaning other than that of signaling the depths of the sociopath’s interior damage and the burgeoning extent of his derangement.

Once installed in power or provided access to critical machinery — especially a state’s military or treasury — any given malignant narcissist in the role of leader or acting in his name may become a monster most fearsome.

A good mirror would have an answer for each autocrat preening before it. But it may not tell how fair or pretty that person looks once stuffed on the blood, suffering, and ‘leveraged’ wealth of others: Instead, a mirror experienced in such flattery as dictators seek might truthfully say, “Oh please face it — you are just another ordinary malignant narcissistic sociopath!”

Would that that alone spell the end of the rise of a certain type of despot?

The writer is a freelance columnist and can be reached at commartjso@gmail.com