Just as 'The Prince' is a theory book on how to manipulate and hold power, 'The Feast of the Goat' is a handbook for the tyrant, great or small. There is no space here to delve into how different ideologies give rise to tyrannies nor how they are sustained so long, apparently sometimes with popular support although later we will look briefly at this and at complicity.
Each individual will have their own interpretation of what a tyrant looks like but a coincidence of literature and personal experience, brings me to identify the tyrant as having various characteristics, the first of which I explore here.
Tyranny has existed for so long and has been so widespread across the globe that there is only space here to touch on a very few to exemplify a few similarities and differences between them. What marks a tyranny? Often it is a vast number of deaths. It is causing death that tends to make the tyrant stand out. Yet most people living under a tyrant will not die. Many more, probably a majority, will live in fear of the tyrant, or more likely their secret police. They may fear their neighbours if the tyranny has set up a system of denunciation such as existed in Nazi Germany, East Germany with the Stasi, the USSR, China, Cambodia under Pol Pot, Communist Romania under Ceaușescu and North Korea. Or, they live lives that have been co-opted into the service of the tyrant such as in Equatorial Guinea in the late 1960 and 70s or in the Congo under Leopold II in the late nineteenth century. In more modern tyrannies like those currently in Belarus, Hungary and more controversially, Turkey, they live lives that are restricted and repressed, towards conservative ideas and where democratic institutions are being undermined. Viktor Orbán in Hungary actively promotes an "illiberal democracy".
I also want to keep drawing attention to the common behaviours and motivations that unite both the national tyrant and the common or everyday tyrant of the workplace, school or family. A tyrant is fundamentally someone who cannot brook any conception of anything being other than the way they see it and say it and they have the forcefulness to ensure that what they say, goes. Everything else is a detail regarding why they are like that, or how they get their way, or what the consequences are for those around them.
I. Cruelty
The first common trait in tyrants is cruelty. I don’t necessarily mean they are sadists, though they might be and probably on a personal level, may well be: the kind of person who as a child would kill animals or engineer situations to get someone else into trouble and delight in the resulting fear, anger and frustration. Those, indeed, are behaviours more psychopathic and sadistic than simply cruel.
Someone may be cruel through intent or cruel through indifference. A sadist tends to operate on a personal level. We don’t tend to hear about sadists operating at a mass scale. Sadism is personal. It is usually one or perhaps two people acting on one or two others. It therefore takes time and focus. Over a lifetime a sadist may indeed harm many people.
A tyrant, on the other hand, tends towards control and that can be exerted over one person or a small group (micro-tyrant), which of course could result in many, over a life time. But the macro tyrant can control and therefore harm many hundreds of thousands or millions at a time.
Hitler, racists, any group that says they want to or which does exterminate another, they all seem to feel glee or satisfaction at that prospect. There is a nuance of difference between pleasure through causing personal harm to one other person and satisfaction at the extermination of a group. I am quite sure that many, if not all of the latter are quite able also to be sadists, and this is what makes them one of the most dangerous of all types of humans.
But my point is rather that the more ordinary tyrant who is not bent on the extermination of a group has an ability to cause harm that leaves them indifferent to the harm caused rather than taking sadistic pleasure in it.
If the tyrant is the micro type that inflicts harm in the workplace, the school, the community, the family, then it is harder to say whether they are psychopathically conscious but indifferent to the harm they cause or whether they cause it sadistically. In these cases it could well be a combination of the two.
In national tyrants, especially those not deliberately intent on exterminating another group, it is far more likely to be conscious indifference because of the difficulty in feeling pleasure towards the harm caused to many when your motivation may well be something completely different like control or greed. Motivation we will come on to later but it is rarely said that tyrants are motivated by a desire to cause harm. They tend to want other things, but it is their indifference to the suffering they bring about that sets them apart from other people.
The tyrant then is responsible for acts that horrify and appall those not under their spell or those forced to work under it. The Parsley Massacre alone is a lesson that normal standards of morality are far removed from the thinking of tyrants. They have a capacity to go beyond, to do acts of such cruelty and barbarity where other people draw a line.
Kinds of harm
What sorts of extreme harm do tyrants cause? In macro tyrants, most obviously, it is death. How do tyrants execute killing on such a large scale and what are the main causes of death? Are there any patterns? It is usually a combination of factors: with Hitler it was a a systematic approach to eradicate certain groups completely, combined with mass complicity, or mass ignorance. It has also been the result of an enormous failure in central decision-making usually driven by ideology, as was the case in China under Mao, Cambodia under Pol Pot and Stalin. Most of the single biggest cause of deaths under these tyrannies occurred through famine caused by collectivization, with other causes typically due to various forms of forced labour and executions. Estimated deaths under Stalin range from 10 - 60 million with more than 10 million being more likely.
During Mao Zedong's tyranny (1849-76), between 40 and 78 million were killed, the majority of these, in The Great Leap Forward (1958-1962). It was an attempt to rapidly industrialise China and collectivise agriculture which, being disastrously planned and executed led to 15 - 45 million deaths due to starvation, disease, forced labour and repression as agricultural output plummeted.
Pol Pot's and the Khmer Rouge's tyranny (1975-79) in Cambodia killed nearly 25% of the country's population. His idea was similar to Mao's: a classless, agrarian society. Starvation killed 1.5 - 2 million, executions 1.4 - 1.7 million, disease and forced labour accounted for another 1-2 million.
Deaths under Leopold II were different: The 10 million he killed was about half the population at the time. These deaths were largely through forced labour and horrific punishment if quotas were not met, together with disruption to local lifestyles which caused disease and death. Another factor was that because the country was his own property, there was essentially no oversight during his long rule.
What about the harms caused by the micro tyrant? They, quite simply, can drive someone to suicide. They cause them to lose their peace of mind. They bully, harass, coerce, criticise repeatedly in many areas. All of this, is legal, incidentally, in Scotland, unless (since 2018) towards a domestic partner. It is illegal in England if the parties have a “personal connection”. With time I expect bullying, intimidating and coercive behaviour to become more generally illegal in the UK if the democracy becomes more liberal instead of less, which is its current path (see recent curbs on protest and free speech).
The effects of the above cause stress, anxiety, insomnia, which lead to physical damage. The micro-tyrant will engage in psychological manipulation: they will strait-jacket the attempts to manoeuvre of the person they want to control. They will lie, stall, steal, gaslight, slander, manipulate, create a false narrative, show one face to the authorities or the public, to friends and family, another altogether in private. They destabilise and act unilaterally and unexpectedly instead of cooperatively. They will do anything at all to control, to have their own way. In a word, they are diabolical.
I said above that the type of human that wants to exterminate another group is one of the most dangerous. At least, though this action is recognised as illegal. The type of micro-tyrant who wants to completely remove something - which is to say someone - in their way, without resorting to assassination or murder is cleverer. They will dispatch and dispense with them legally because psychological abuse is still legal in most parts of society. And in the end they will say, completely legitimately that you need help. That is the line they walk - legal, legitimate, diabolical. If they are the type that just wants to control, perhaps to feel powerful, or for their own ends, they will turn the subject into a zombie, a puppet, not dead but not really living either. Either way, they will have no regard for their emotions or humanity because to the sociopath these don't matter.
Corporations, institutions, are very much like this. They squeeze employees for as much as they can which why so many have so much poor ratings. The job of human resources is simply to ensure this is done legally. Perhaps the happiest people inside corporations are those with the power of management. They become a part of the vampiric entity by participating in its power. The best manager I ever had was the only one who didn't manage: who listened, praised, encouraged. In contrast, when on my second placement in a local school in Perth and Kinross, in frustration, I asked for a morsel of evidence that I was doing something right, instead of the weekly list of a hundred criticism - no exaggeration, I counted - I was told they weren't there to massage my ego. I left the following week. The place felt as though at any moment it could turn the corner into a Scottish version of the Cultural Revolution.
The narcissist wants your attention and will try to manipulate you and possibly others to get it. The tyrant is not only likely to be narcissistic, but to have elements of the dark triad personality type, psychopathy and machiavellianism, as well. They don’t just want your attention. They want to control you for other reasons - for whatever it is they want. That could be just for control’s sake or more likely, to exploit you in some way or remove you as an obstacle to something they want.
To sum up the last few paragraphs, it is this cold-blooded capacity for extreme harm that causes people to fear the tyrant big or small. It is fear that allows them to operate. Fear paralyses. Fear, like pain, is something that does work as you might expect. People can sometimes overcome pain with their mind, or even invent it. Fear can attack even when you know nothing can physically happen to you. People can shake with fear inside their houses because of the psychological harm caused by others, even when that same instigator might be in another country.
People feared the Goat because they knew his proven ruthlessness which would follow if anyone stepped out of line.
“- Usted, Presidente Balaguer, tiene la suerte de ocuparse sólo de aquello que la política tiene de mejor -dijo, glacial-. Leyes, reformas, negociaciones diplomáticas, tramsformaciones sociales. Así lo ha hecho treinta y un años. Le tocó el aspecto grato, amable, de gobernar. ¡Lo envidio! Me hubiera gustado ser sólo un estadista, un reformador. Pero, gobernar tiene una cara sucia, sin la cual lo que usted hace sería imposible. ¿Y el orden? ¿Y la estabilidad? ¿Y la seguridad? He procurado que usted no se ocupara de esas cosas ingratas. Pero, no me diga que no sabe cómo se consigue la paz. Con cuánto sacrificio y cuánta sangre. Agradezca que yo le permitiera mirar al otro lado, dedicarse a lo bueno, mientras yo, Abbes, el teniente Peña Rivera y otros teníamos tranquilo al país para que usted escribiera sus poemas y sus discursos.”
“You, President Balaguer, have the good fortune to be concerned only with the best part of politics’, he said icily. ‘Laws, reforms, diplomatic negotiations, social transformations. That's what you've done for 31 years. You've been involved in the pleasant, enjoyable aspect of governing. I envy you. I would like to have been only a statesman, a reformer. But governing has a dirty side, and without it, what you do would be impossible. What about order, stability, security? I've tried to keep you away from unpleasant things, but don't tell me you don't know how peace is achieved, with how much sacrifice and how much blood. Be grateful that I've allowed you to see the other side and devote yourself to the good, while I, Abess, Lieutenant Peña Rivera, and others kept the country in order, so you could write your poems and your speeches.”
A tyrant may be capable of executing their cruelties themselves. On a national scale, it obviously isn’t practical so the tyrant recruits henchmen. Trujillo hired Johnny Abbes who shaped the SIM, his secret police in his image.
In summary, tyrants have this ability to go further than others can or will , to step over the limits of ordinary morality. They see it as a kind of power that sets them apart - which it is. They have a unique ability to balance between being personally indifferent to the harm they cause - which they normalise or justify - while being perfectly conscious of that harm to cause fear in the people he wants to control. While others are repulsed by the acts, the tyrant sees this “weakness” as a sign both of their greatness and often of the necessarily hardship thrust upon them by weakness in others or in society. Whatever nuance you care to cast: the picture is the same:
I am right / great / strong / wise. You (singular or plural) are wrong / nothing / weak / foolish
X must be done.
And / or: Your weakness or failures have forced me to do X.
You will be instrumental in achieving X or you will be removed.
Tyrants: post 7
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