Book review and interview by Joe Gandelman
The Moderate Voice
SAN DIEGO — Some political observers and historians feel that authoritarianism, like a phoenix rising from the ashes, is making a comeback in the United States and in Europe after being discredited and (in part) defeated during World War II. The questions are always: how does that happen? Is it the strength of personalities, or ideologies that become unstoppable? Where did it start and can’t we be comforted by all the powerful Kings and conquerors throughout history?
In his must-read, can’t-put-it-down book Kings, Conquerors, Psychopaths: From Alexander to Hitler to the Corporation, Joseph N. Abraham provides a fresh take on these and other questions, backing it up with solid (often shocking) research that concludes we can’t just blame authoritarians but those who follow, obey, and emulate them. It is virtually in humanity’s genetics. He convincingly makes (and documents) the case that despite often romantic images, kings and conquerors were vicious criminals — and the fact the they were psychopaths, narcissists, and sadists became whitewashed, almost in a form of mass hypnosis. Much of what they did and actually were like somehow vanished from cultural perceptions over time.
Abraham is an emergency medicine physician who has spent years seriously thinking about and meticulously documenting the genesis of how humanity nurtured and submitted to inhumanity (those disobeying were murdered and those conquerors defeated were often hideously butchered or sold into slavery) during mankind’s 10,000 year path. Kings, conquerors, psychopaths, narcissists were (and are) masters of manipulation. And, he argues, corporations often fit the same mold. He opens with the My Lai massacre. He not only raises these issues but fleshes them out with shocking facts about the degree of murder, sadism, gore, and lack of empathy. The book is written in a lively, thoroughly researched and well-thought out style (it is not written like a blog post, nor does it read like someone who is vomiting up cliches and generalizations after watching their favorite political entertainment media polarizer). The term “must-read” has been soooooo overused. But Kings, Conquerors, Psychopaths is a must read..must own..and, most of all, a must ponder.
The Moderate Voice interviewed Abraham:
TMV: If you had to summarize the key main themes in your book what would they be?
JA: For much of my life I have been fascinated by human illogic; why do we insist things are true when we cannot know that they are true, or worse, when we cannot see that they are obviously false? We are all of us prey to this, it is why we are warned not to discuss religion or politics. On those topics, almost everyone is nuts.
This book is an attempt to answer that problem of human illogic. The first theme in the book, and key to those that follow, is that life has been horrific throughout 10,000 years of civilization. (Actually, it’s been horrific from the beginning of life on the planet, and I also go into that.) The overwhelming majority of each generation died early deaths, often from privation and disease, but also from war, raiding, torture, and execution.
Which helps answer the question about illogic, and introduces the second theme: our irrational beliefs come from an attempt to survive the horror and hunger of civilization under the king. If our ancestors disagreed with the king, they were ruined, and quite probably executed. After ten millennia of this lethal force, our forbears who survived learned to not only agree with the king, but to ‘believe’ him.
That introduces the third theme, an explanation for the person who blindly attaches himself to a political strongman, aka ‘the authoritarian personality.’ Again, the best path to survival in the past was to give allegiance to the toughest gangster around, which was the king.
My last major point is that the modern corporation has replaced the king, and like the king, the corporation brutally exploits us. But we cannot see the injustice of the corporation any more than our ancestors could see that the injustice of the king. Both of them abuse us and trade our lives for profit.
2. How many potential dictators are around us today and where? I need to seriously note that humankind’s thesis of your book is evident to those who’ve lived in condos where sometimes people get on the board and become drunk-with-power dictators.
JA: I suppose it depends on how we define ‘potential’. There are many psychopaths, but to become a dictator requires several other severe dysfunctions, including a raging narcissism. But it also requires other abilities, including intelligence; a talent for political and social strategy; a fair amount of charisma, including the ability to speak well, and possibly to write well, in order to motivate others to follow; a proficiency for managing large organizations; and a fair amount of focus and self-discipline.
The person with all of these strengths and dysfunctions is fairly rare. So all around us are many people would love to be dictator, but most of them simply compete over power that will be delegated to them from someone else. The ability and willingness to grab power for one’s self — here I think of Napoléon snatching the crown from the Pope and putting it on his head — is very rare. (Actually, Napoléon put the crown on Joséphine’s head, because he had entered the cathedral wearing a Roman-inspired crown of golden laurel leaves.) The dictator grabs power for himself and by himself, and defers to no one.
3. TMV: A lot of your findings based on meticulous research suggests that today’s civilization and society is built on a foundation of a kind of mass hypnosis, selective amnesia of atrocities and an ever lingering threat of violence to the disobedient and that history as most people are taught it being quite selective. If you boil it down it seems globally we are what we are because of flawed assumptions being perpetuated from generation to generation. If you agree this is accurate, how do you think we’re trending so far in the 21st century?
JA: I worry.
I think that one of the reasons that people spoil to go to war, is that the last generation to see war disappears, or perhaps they remain silent. So knowledge of the horror of bloodshed fades, wisdom wanes. We collectively ‘forget’ how fragile peace and progress are. I have been reading Menand’s The Metaphysical Club, and I am struck by how American pragmatism emerges in large part from the ideological disgust of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., after he had experienced the senseless carnage of the U.S. Civil War.
Today, those of us in the advanced countries live in this microtome-thin slice of history, where we have never experienced privation and horror. All we know is the stability of the modern world; we assume that this is normal, and that it is the default condition for civilization. We do not realize that our luxury for the past 75 years is unprecedented in the history of humanity, and even in the history of life.
And so we are becoming reckless. Right-wing strongmen are emerging around the world urging authoritarian attitudes. In response, the liberal reactions are most illiberal: those who claim they want peace and reconciliation become as bellicose as those they oppose.
In all aspects of life, it is very easy to destroy, but very, very difficult to build. And right now, too many people are hot to destroy.
4. Expand a bit on one of your points: that there is a romanticism around kings and conquerors but they were actually butchers.
JA: Kings could have not been anything but butchers. There is simply no way that one man (or occasionally, one woman) steps forward, and compels millions do his bidding, unless he backs up his position with brutal and lethal force. That should be obvious, but it isn’t. Instead, we believe that everyone followed the king because he was wiser and better than everyone else. But that fairy tale is the rationale the king gave us, and anyone who questioned it, anyone who said the king was personally, intellectually, and ethically naked, was executed.
We always knew that brutal force backed up the king’s power: people were hung, beheaded, or even drawn and quartered, for stealing a loaf of bread, for hunting in the king’s forest, for disagreeing with the king and his clergy, or even for speaking ideas that did not match the accepted dogma. But we rationalize away all of that as kingly virtue: he was wiser than we were.
This is in part because the king’s chroniclers also lived under lethal threat, and so they wrote whatever the king wanted them to write. History is necessarily a cumulative discipline, and so historians today perpetuate the earlier myths and fairy tales, even though they have all read the descriptions of horror. We still live with our fairy tales.
5. How and when did you decide to write this book and why? And what kind of research did you do to do it? How long did it take to write this book?
The book was over two decades in the making, although for most of that time I had no idea it would be a book. After years of mulling over these ideas I began jotting them down, and some years after that, I began massaging my notes into chapter-like categories.
For research, I certainly read a lot of books and journal articles, but a lot of the work was done electronically. I had access to the library and databases at the University of Louisiana, but I did not have an office on campus, so it made quick reference to paper resources cumbersome.
Fortunately there are a plethora of on-line resources, including the Gutenberg Project; classical resources at MIT, Tufts, and others; Internet searches; and Google Books (publishers who do not allow Google Books to index the entirety of their lists are making an enormous mistake; they are missing a lot of potential citations). So I was able to get by.
6. One of the most gripping parts of your book is your exploration of history which shows that the brutality of the 20th century – particularly as seen in Nazi German and Stalin’s Gulag – was derivative of a time when it was the norm. The details you provide about some conquerors and kings about their viciousness and mercilessness are utterly shocking. Above, you explain why you think so much of this has seemingly become forgotten or ignored for so many years. Do you find historians are more diligent now?
JA: Intellectually, we have not changed as much as we think. I see this in my own areas of medicine and science. When I compare modern controversies to the prejudices of earlier thinkers, my colleagues often respond, “Oh, but we’re so much more open-minded today.” In my less charitable moments I reply, “How, and why? When did our educational paradigms change?” Our basic approach to education has not shifted significantly since the Middle Ages: memorize, don’t analyze; conform, don’t question. We still teach our students monumental truths, but today we simply call them ‘science’ instead of ‘theology’, and we cannot see that scientists can be as inflexible as theologians. Thomas Kuhn goes into this at length, pointing out that ordinary science is clerical and dogmatic, and that students of science have to be disabused of their scientific training before they are ready to study the philosophy and history of science.
Every generation thinks it has cornered truth, only to see the next generation overturn ideas that were considered monoliths. How much of what we are sure is true today will be laughable in 100 years? 1,000 years? Or even 1,000,000 years, assuming that we survive that long?
If this is a problem in the sciences where a hard proof is possible, then how much more of a problem must it be in the arts and humanities? Yes, historians are very diligent in their work; the problem is, diligence alone doesn’t cut it. We also have to be willing to challenge what we have been taught. Which is one of the points of the book: in general, we aren’t willing.
7. One reviewer claimed it was “(Donald) Trump on every page.” What’s your reaction to that and why? In fact, your chapter on The Authoritarian Personality seems to describe Trump, as it does other strongmen throughout history.
JA: Most national-level politicians are probably narcissists. The only recent president I can think of who did not seem to have a strong narcissistic streak was also one of our least effective, Jimmy Carter. So perhaps narcissism and effectiveness are related, because politics is a game of big egos and sharp elbows. Jimmy Carter either did not understand narcissism, and/or he refused to play the ugly games that statecraft demands.
Donald Trump is what his supporters claim he is: an unpolished, unvarnished politician. The problem is, in a government and a world overwhelmingly led by narcissists, polish and varnish are critical.
As is compromise. The effective politician knows how to tell people what they want to hear, and knows when to cut his losses. Bill Clinton’s critics call him ‘Slick Willie,’ and I think they are close to the truth. Clinton was the master politician, a combination of narcissism, salesmanship, and pragmatism. If he had been a Republican instead of a Democrat, the current opinions of him would probably all flip.
8. If in 1776 once we began removing the oppression of the noble classes, genius and progress emerged spontaneously and created the modern world, where are we now? Progressing, reverting? And why?
We think of liberal and conservative as antagonists, but they are really dancing partners. Conservatism is consistency and predictability, liberalism is innovation and progress. The question isn’t whether to be one or the other, but when, and how much. In the book I suggest that perhaps the ideal system is a capitalist framework with socialist pockets: government must step in to do those things which are profitable to all, but unprofitable to the lone entrepreneur. Chief among these common profits is a strong workforce, which means that robust education and healthcare are key to a nation’s competitiveness.
Right now, wealth and power are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people. 90% of all US media — books, newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, Internet — is controlled by just six corporations, half of which are not American. Those six, in turn, are controlled by just 15 billionaires. As I point out in the book, power is an aphrodisiac to the narcissist, but the problem is that his goal is self-promotion, not progress. And so we see corporations and multinationals in all fields increasingly strangling democratic government and the free economy, in order to wring out short-term profits while destroying the potential for long-term growth. In particular, they are undermining healthcare and education, and as a result, we are seeing crises in both.
So I think we are reverting.
9. Explain a little more about how corporations fit into your research.
The ‘noble’ hierarchy was always attractive to the self-serving narcissist. As noted, the narcissist has shifted to the corporation. What we miss, is that the corporation is, by design, narcissistic and psychopathic, it always focuses on short-term profits over progress and humane considerations. In the corporation, it is unimportant if the CEO is a narcissist, just as it is unimportant that the general is a sadist. When either of these step into their roles of leadership, their training and focus render both of them toxic.
Our lives are only important to the corporation in those ways that affect the short-term bottom line. We don’t see corporation in this way, of course. But we also didn’t see the king in that way, despite 10,000 years of perennial, recurrent subjugation, horror, and abuse. We are as blind to the problems of the corporation as we were to those of royalty.
10. You do offer a remedy with hope. You write that progress requires “an educated and social active electorate, and increased citizen participation” to protect us “from political and economic strongmen.” And, you write, without it we’ll “revert to the brutality of the past.” However, do you see that as too optimistic for 21st century America, where newspapers are closing, terse Tweets are preferred to serious analysis, and political entertainment media which aims at stirring up rage to deliver a demographic to advertisers has seemingly replaced “old school” journalism?
I address the problem of futurists: a few thousand futurists try to anticipate what will happen by assuming that progress will be a continuation of the present. The problem is, there are millions of innovators around the globe who are working to insure that the future looks nothing like the present. The futurist would appear to face a hopeless task.
The point to take from this is that we need to have some faith. The corporation is everywhere, or so it appears; but in reality, it is only everywhere in marketing and sponsored media. But while Google, Facebook, and Amazon grab increasing control of the Internet and our privacy, we still choose other paths, and other priorities; the constant game of money-power-fame that the narcissist sells us is stressful and fatiguing, and people seem to be slowly catching on.
In addition, I am watching as the Open Source movement quietly rises up to oppose the narcissistic corporation. The power of Open Source is evidenced by the fact that all three of the corporations I mentioned, and really all corporations, rely on not just Open Source software, but more and more on Open Source approaches. I think it is a biting irony that the first search return from the insatiable Google juggernaut is quite often not a website from some wealthy ad-buying corporation, but a link to a Wikipedia article. Google and the rest of them are worried about Wikipedia and the Open Source community with good reason, because, like Hopper in the animated film A Bug’s Life, they realize that if the little ants ever link arms, the grasshoppers are toast.
I suspect a reckoning may be coming. Once the Open Source community adds social change to its efforts in software and content production, it can quickly reduce the powerful corporations to a fraction of what they are now. Open Source can contain the narcissists by empowering the public and enforcing accountability.
Again, we have to have some faith. Things looks bad right now, in government, in commerce, and in our personal lives. We need to realize that all of the high-visibility media that currently soaks us with toxic messages do not guarantee success for the corporation. There are millions of people around the globe who are working to foster justice. And they have the numbers on their side.
We will have to see what happens.
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Gandelman is editor in chief of The Moderate Voice, which may be accessed via www.themoderatevoice.com