All Hail the Megalomaniac!

Megalomania is a virus. The Megalomaniac is the vector that prowls communities in monochrome robes peddling simple remedies to messy and complicated human relationships.

The only ones amongst us immune to this virus are those blessed and inoculated with self-esteem, discernment, humility, common sense, and empathy.

What is common to all megalomaniacs — regardless of their gender, color, social or geographical appurtenance — is their conviction that they are God’s gift to mankind and that what they know, think, or believe is the only thing that matters; that without them, the world and humankind are reduced to nothing. This deluded conviction of their importance and indispensability provides a priori justification for everything they do.

The megalomaniac is a dementor who gets pleasure from tormenting the weak, the vulnerable, and the already downtrodden. He has no sense of shame, for he is incapable of admitting fault and taking responsibility for his words and actions. Only others can be and do wrong.

The megalomaniac is also a mythomaniac; he does not know or care about the difference between truth and falsehood. If the truth comes out of him, it is largely in spite of him. He is equally bereft of that moral and mental compass which allows us to gauge the real-life impact of our words and actions on others.

The megalomaniac relishes and thrives on chaos (psychological, social, and military), for the absence of it allows people to see through him, the emperor without clothes. Real order comes from the ability to predict with a high degree of certainty what will happen tomorrow, whereas chaos is often engendered by feelings of uncertainty. Given his obsession with control, the megalomaniac may appear to privilege order over disorder. Ironically, though, his very need to keep people guessing and dependent on him, inevitably places people around him on tenterhooks, hence prone to muddling things, which in turn will trigger his need to intervene and rectify the situation.

Moreover, because he lacks the moral authority that confers legitimacy on the leader, the megalomaniac can only depend on violence, calumny, and coercion to elicit obedience.

For these and many other reasons, megalomaniacs constitute the single greatest threat to humanity. Accordingly, because they may present one or more forms of antisocial personality disorder, megalomaniacs are better off under the care and supervision of a mental health professional than in positions of power over others.

There are megalomaniacs everywhere. On the school playground, in bleachers and locker rooms, in our homes, places of worship, and in our workplaces. Wherever a few people are gathered, there is a chance at least a megalomaniac is present.

While I acknowledge mini megs — those causing mini mayhems in their mini circles — as well as the terrible impact of their actions on those around them, my focus in this piece is on the mega meg. The Megalomaniac (with a capital M). The one otherwise called dictator, populist, tyrant, despot, autocrat, authoritarian, Nazi, Fascist, totalitarian, color-coded supremacist, and many other names of that ilk. The humorless, brooding, insensitive, feckless, uncouth, cowardly, egomaniacal, uncharitable, petty, lying, and shameless one who has somehow managed to rise to the summit of state power, whence he can combine the resources (and legitimacy) of the state with his illusion of grandeur for greater mayhem. The one in whose hands the bully pulpit becomes the wrecking ball.

To be sure, megalomaniacs come in all genders and sexes. However, for the sake of convenience, and the fact that the vast majority of megalomaniacs in power have been and are men, I will use masculine pronouns in the rest of this piece to refer to them.

“L’état c’est moi!” The Sun King

When the leader of a people conflates his personal interests with the interests of the nation, we no longer have a democracy, but a dictatorship led by a megalomaniac.

Adolph Hitler believed himself to be acting in the interest of Germany and the so-called Aryan race.

Mussolini saw himself as the restorer of his people’s Roman glory.

When he persecuted his own people, including many of Asian descent living in Uganda, Idi Amin Dada swore he was acting in the interests of Ugandans and all black people.

So did the Rwandan purveyors of genocide, the Butcher of Bosnia, and Bashar Al-Assad! They all saw or see themselves as the anointed saviors of their people.

In the best of worlds, the interest of the leader should align perfectly with those of the governed. However, because human beings cannot be entirely trusted to act selflessly, democratic systems of checks and balances were invented. Conflict of interest considerations exist as signposts, so leaders concerned about the appearance of impropriety can be reminded of their sacred duty to the collective and to decency.

Megalomania is the worst form of jealousy.

The Megalomaniac does not want you to think. He does not want you to be like him. Because if you are like him, you are equal to him. And he cannot abide that, for it means he cannot be sure of having control over you. There has to be only one, him. He wants you to be and do exactly as he wants you to. No more, no less. If you do less, you are not loyal enough. If you do more, you are a threat to him. Like a ventriloquist, the Megalomaniac wants to be in control all the time. As marionettes to the ventriloquist are people to the Megalomaniac; they never outlive their usefulness. While he demands unconditional loyalty, the Megalomaniac cannot give loyalty, for he is completely incapable of loving or caring for anything or anyone other than himself. And since the idea of doing good to another person is anathema to him, if his actions produce good, it is most probably in spite of him.

The Megalomaniac’s ego stretches across time and space.

Thinking himself alpha and omega, he seeks to live forever, to succeed and repeat himself a thousand times over. “It is our wish and will that this State and this Reich shall endure in the millenniums to come. We can be happy in the knowledge that this future belongs to us completely,” sayeth Hitler.

The Megalomaniac is a low man. Hombre pequeñito, as Alfonsina Storni calls one of his avatars in her eponymous poem. A man with exceedingly low or no self-esteem or sense of self-worth. The only thing mega about him is his ego. Because he is a low man, he measures his worth by making others lower than he is. The narcissist that he is, the Megalomaniac will not rest until he has made everyone kneel before him, transforming everyone and everything into the mirror reflecting back to him the grandiose image he has of himself. The illusion of his power must be constantly alimented by the visible powerlessness of everyone else around him. But as the incomparable Toni Morrison reminded us, “If you can only be tall because somebody is on their knees, then you have a serious problem.”

Yet, by and by, the Megalomaniac ends up taking an entire nation hostage. But this he cannot do alone. No human being, however powerful, can hold an entire nation captive without the acquiescence of his fellow citizens. So how, exactly, does the Megalomaniac get to the position from which he can unleash the greatest evil?

“Every object persists in its state of rest or uniform motion­ in a straight line unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed on it.” Newton

Behind the Megalomaniac, there is a motley gang of zealots, bigots, malcontents, minions, sycophants, and a multitude of people afraid or unwilling to do the right thing. Let us examine some of these categories of people the Megalomaniac can count on for the furtherance of his noxious scheme.

The afraid: At his first inaugural address in 1933, FDR famously declared, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Though the newly elected president was referring to the Great Depression, he might as well have been talking about the Great Dementor, otherwise known as Adolf Hitler. Coincidentally, as FDR was getting ready to dig America out of the Depression, Hitler was getting ready to plunge the world into greater depression. Before and after the Enabling Act of 1933 that gave the Reich government a blank check, Hitler unabashedly deployed fear as a powerful instrument of governance and control, by capitalizing on the human instinct for self-preservation. An example of this is depicted in the opening scene of Inglorious Basterds. In Nazi-occupied France, Monsieur Lapaditte, a decent farmer harboring a Jewish family underneath the floor of his house is forced by SS Colonel Hans Landa to give up his Jewish wards in exchange for the safety of his own family. M. Lapaditte does this even if logic tells him no one is or can be truly safe from the ravenous appetite of Nazi megalomania.

The indifferent and the fence-sitters: Among the indifferent are those who do not appreciate the amplitude of the evil the Megalomaniac incarnates and propagates, as well as those who do not care, either because they do not think it touches them directly or do not feel for those touched by it. And then there are those who sit on the proverbial fence.

In times of terror, we tend to think of ourselves as having three choices: join the terror, oppose it, or sit on the fence. Sitting on the fence is often presented as choosing not to choose between two conflicting sides. Nevertheless, sitting on the fence, like anything else we do or do not do, is a choice. How can and does one sit on the fence in a time of great bigotry and hatred? Does one straddle the fence? Or does one sit with both feet on one side, and the rest of one’s body leaning toward or away from one side or the other? One way or the other, you make a choice. Sitting on the fence does not mean you are truly neutral; it means you are holding your cards close to your chest to see the way the ‘game’ ends. Or it could simply be a cover for a more sinister, profiteering agenda, as we know in the case of Switzerland’s complicity in the Nazi terror and plunder of European Jewry. On matters of morality and principle, there is no sitting on the fence.

Collaborators and Puppets: These include elements from among the oppressed who, out of fear or sheer self-interest, facilitate the Megalomaniac’s fraudulent and diabolical agenda. History books are replete with collaborators, individuals and governments alike. For the effective functioning of its concentration camps, the Nazi government made use of Kapos (or trustee inmates, some of whom were Jewish) as supervisors. By every account, some of the Kapos were as ruthless as their Nazi counterparts were. At the state level, Pétain’s Vichy France from 1940–44 is a good example. The American Civil Rights period produced its own cohort of collaborators. A prominent example being black televangelist, Elder Lightfoot Solomon Michaux, who colluded with J Edgar Hoover’s FBI to discredit Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Appeasers: Today, all around the world, we see the appeasement of dictators and tyrants, from the Americas to Africa, from the Caucasus to Asia, passing through Europe and Russia. All in repetition of the biggest appeasement in human history.

Giving an account of his November 1937 parley with Hitler at the Dictator’s hideout in Berghof, British foreign secretary, Viscount Halifax wrote to his boss, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain: “Unless I am wholly deceived… Hitler was sincere when he said he did not want war.” Ten months later, Britain, France, and Italy signed the Munich Agreement, giving the Sudetenland (the predominantly German populated borderlands of Czechoslovakia) to Germany. For all who cared to see them, Hitler’s real intentions from the outset were as clear as the bleak clouds jockeying to devour the light of day.

Men like Hitler have no principle, no properly functioning moral compass, so nothing you do can appease them. With such men, you have two main options: 1) war now or war later, as Winston Churchill and few others believed, or 2) principled non-violent resistance, as Gandhi and MLK practiced in response to the state-sanctioned megalomania of their own time and place. When it is not self-delusion, appeasement is a policy of cowardice, indifference, and moral weakness parading as realpolitik. To believe Hitler was appeasable is to believe Vladmir Putin intends to stop at the Crimea. Or that the American xenophobic and homophobic cabal will be content with just building a real or metaphorical ‘us-versus them’ wall.

The Underestimators: This is arguably the single most consequential category of active and sleeper cell enablers of the Megalomaniac. When Hitler came to power, many in the West saw him more as a vulgar buffoon than a menace to humanity. London’s Daily Herald described him as a “stubby little Austrian with a flabby handshake, shifty brown eyes and a Charlie Chaplin mustache.”

The Megalomaniac is at his most dangerous in the moments he appears most innocuous, like a buffoon. He is like the rabid dog that may cower in your presence until you drop your guard, and then pounces for your jugular.

Comparisons have been made between Hitler and a good many heads of state, including certain American presidents. Some have expressed concern that comparing world leaders to Hitler risks trivializing the scale of Hitler’s evil. While this is a legitimate concern, we should worry less about exaggerated or trivialized comparisons and more about evil itself. Many in Germany and elsewhere told Jews (and other prescient Germans) they were exaggerating when they said years before the Shoah that Hitler was a grave threat to the world. To be sure, there will never be another Hitler in the history of the world, just as we will never have the same hurricane twice; we will have either a lesser or greater evil than he. We do not need Hitler to unleash evil. All we need is a group of people who look upon other human beings as less than human, indeed as cockroaches or vermin. So it is perfectly fair to compare to Hitler any leader who has used, on more than one occasion, words like ‘animals’ and ‘infestation’ to talk about people of other races; or a leader who retweets and repurposes anti-Semitic propaganda and refuses to criticize his supporters who openly call for the expulsion or extermination of Jews and others. Or one who has words of praise only for authoritarians in North Korea, Russia, Egypt, or India. Bari Weiss is right in sounding the alarm, calling upon all “who cannot look away from what is brewing in this country and in the world” when she says: “That a Jew would see a storm threatening and warn of its gathering is not new. But it is an old tradition that I did not think would need to be taken up in this new century” (How to Fight Anti-Semitism).

As with any virus, we are better off overestimating megalomania than downplaying it.

Yes, Hitler the person, the megalomaniac, was defeated. Yet, what he stood for, the worst form of megalomania, homophobia, and racism humankind had ever seen, did not die with him. Evil has the same DNA in its infancy as it does in its adulthood. Evil grows, festers, and corrupts wherever it is under-estimated or ignored. The “Colonel” in the Amazon series Hunters put this quite plainly as her neo-Nazi team prepares for the launching of what they call the Fourth Reich (remember Hitler had already talked about the perpetuation of the Reich): “They underestimated us once, but it won’t happen again. For we will strike them in their slumber, in their homes, in their places of worship.”

Go tell a Jewish person then she is exaggerating when she expresses concern about potential catastrophe in the face of any instance of antisemitism. Tell a Tutsi she is exaggerating for worrying that an extremist Hutu group has initiated the wholesale purchase of machetes for a purported farming project. Tell Black people they are being paranoid when they mention slavery and Jim Crow in reaction to talk of taking America back to the ‘good old days.’ Since evil doesn’t grow from zero to adulthood in a blink, we must pay attention to it the moment it is born. Nazism, Slavery, Genocides were the explosions that blew the lid off the cauldron whose content had been brewing unheeded for a long time. Because history has taught us that what has happened before could happen again, the best way to protect ourselves against the return of evil and its fallout is to prepare for an evil of similar or grander scale. It is far better to be accused of exaggerating the threat level, than to be accused of having minimized it.

Intellectuals for the cause: These include ideologues, scientists, and other savant justifiers of the Megalomaniac’s agenda. They provide the theoretical and ideological framework and foundation of his irrational and one-dimensional vision of the world, thereby giving it a priori and a posteriori legitimacy.

Ostriches: Then there are those who, like the mythical Ostrich, bury their heads in the sand and hope the marauding virus will magically disappear and be quickly replaced by the sounds of kumbaya in the Beloved Community.

Foot soldiers: With the above groups securely behind him, all the Megalomaniac needs to carry out his plan fully is an army of expendables. A society of glaring inequities will inevitably engender not only its Megalomaniac, but also the support framework he needs. So from among the large mass of the dispossessed, disenfranchised, disillusioned, and disgruntled citizens, the Megalomaniac will build his army. “The mob always will shout for ‘the strong man,’ the ‘great leader.’ For the mob hates the society from which it is excluded, as well as Parliament where it is not represented,” warned Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism). The irony that the Megalomaniac is the worst manifestation of the status quo he decries is completely lost on his most ardent supporters and the ones more likely to lose under his reign, which renders this saga even more tragic. How strange, this recurring human urge to cut our nose to spite our face!

Verily, anyone who idolizes a fellow human being is a slave. I do not mean people made slaves by the edicts of their fellow human beings. I am talking about those who make themselves slaves, not because they have to labor for another to save a loved one; but because their sense of self-worth is so damaged, they are so adrift, that they will cling to any straw that comes along proclaiming itself their redeemer. As Morrison reminds us in A Mercy, “to be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing.” The greatest act of self-annihilation then is to relinquish one’s autonomy to another. The irony of it all is that the Megalomaniac, the one who asks others to bow before him, is the very epitome of low self-esteem. No one confident in himself will ever need to ask or force others to bow before him. “A tiger does not proclaim his tigritude, he pounces,” said Wole Soyinka.

Where do we go from here?

The Megalomaniac is a finished man; he is unlikely to change except, perhaps, by divine intervention. In this age of the rise everywhere of megalomaniacs, what do we do while we await that divine intervention? Do we become afraid, collaborators, enablers, fence-sitters, indifferent, appeasers, justifiers, or foot-soldiers of the Megalomaniac? Or will we become those who recognize the ravening cloud and fight to stop it from spreading across the sky, possessing it and devouring the stars?

When true democracy reigns, everyone gains. When megalomania is continuously provided with oxygen, everybody loses.