“He is absolutely untrustworthy, as was his father before him.”

—Lord Derby on Winston Churchill1

It is people like Linda Mealey who remind us that not everyone is a self-serving Machiavellian. Far from it. Ordinary people by the thousands have raced into burning buildings to save children from certain death, thrown themselves onto hand grenades to protect their squad mates, or leapt into icy waters to help strangers who were drowning. And, just as even the most sinister of the successful have their good traits, it seems even the most angelic among us have bad traits. Christopher Hitchens, for example, describes Mother Teresa's buttering up of despotism in his The Missionary Position.² Altruistic Christian pacifists have given their lives for their beliefs—yet so have Muslim terrorists. In loop-the-loop fashion, one man's Machiavellian could be another man's Messiah. You can't help but wonder—are Machiavellian traits necessarily evil? If there are Machiavellians, couldn't there also be quasi-Machiavellians? Would quasi-Machiavellians do quasi-good?

What are we to make of people such as Salvador Allende, a socialist with the best of intentions who set himself above the law and sent the Chilean economy into a tailspin? Allende's successor, brutal martinet Augusto Pinochet, was responsible for torturing and killing thousands who opposed his regime. Yet most observers agree that Pinochet's economic policies have left Chile the envy of South America—arguably saving tens of thousands of lives, and improving the lives of millions more, by providing better possibilities for economic sustenance. At the same time, many far less able, but sometimes even more brutal, right-wing dictators have waved the anticommunist flag to maintain their power and simultaneously drive their country toward ruin, as with Haiti's “President for Life” François Duvalier, or Nicaragua's Somoza regime. Along similar lines, fascist Benito Mussolini had a reputation for making the trains run on time and built magnificent monuments, but at what price—particularly for the hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians killed in Mussolini's grand imperialist schemes? Yet Turkey's Ataturk and Poland's Pilsudski could also be ruthless, with no compunction against using dictatorial methods, but each inarguably left his country far better off than it had been before he took power.

Still further back in history was Catherine the Great, empress of all the Russias, who seized the throne in a coup d’état, while her eccentric husband and other claimants to the throne conveniently died around the same time. However Catherine achieved power, she was the epitome of the enlightened despot, doing much to improve the lot of her subjects. Even further back was Genghis Khan, who conquered vast territories in an often horrifically brutal fashion. Yet once these lands were under his control, the Great Khan proved himself to be a surprisingly benevolent and visionary ruler whose new political system, based on talent rather than nepotism, helped tie East to West.3

Machiavellian-cum-altruist and altruist-cum-Machiavellian—it's enough to make your head spin as you try to tease a clearer picture from the crazy jigsaw we call personality. But, perhaps surprisingly, there is a clearer picture. The fuzzy shades of gray that at first seem so confusing can, in the end, fill in a far more nuanced portrait, not only of the successfully sinister but of people in general. More than that, these shades can lead us to a much more complete understanding of why seemingly “evil” genes persist.

NARCISSISM, DECEIT, HUMBLENESS, AND CONSCIENCE

We can first see how shades of gray fit into the picture by harking back to narcissism—that vain self-fascination and inordinately high self-esteem that has received so little attention in hard science research. This trait forms a hallmark of those with borderline, antisocial, and narcissistic personality disorders. As mentioned previously, suspicions abound that it has a strong genetic component.4 Virtually every nasty dictator has shown the worst of narcissism's ugly features. Hitler, for example, deigned to share his feelings with an interviewer at Berchtesgaden: “Do you realize that you are in the presence of the greatest German of all time?”⁵ Romania's Ceausescu told his health minister in the early 1970s, “A man like me comes along only once every five hundred years.”⁶ Turkmenistan's Saparmurat Niyazov, frequently criticized in the West as one of the world's most authoritarian and repressive dictators, had images of himself in virtually every public place and a gold-plated statue in the capital that rotated so it always faces the sun and shines light into the capital city. Niyazov modestly noted: “I'm personally against seeing my pictures and statues in the streets—but it's what the people want.”⁷

But what happens to talented people when narcissism is not present? Such individuals help form the backbone of society—the superb secretary whose adept business skills make her boss look good, or the guy who never even sees fit to mention to his family that he had won the Bronze Star for his cool heroism under fire.

One such brilliantly talented, non-limelight-hogging person was Gregor Mendel, the man now known as the “Father of Genetics.” Mendel was an inordinately neurotic individual who spent his teenage years in bed with a mysterious illness that now appears to have been akin to acute anxiety.8 In keeping with his neuroticism, Mendel suffered so badly from test anxiety that he twice failed the examination to become a high school teacher. But Mendel, who loved both plants and mathematics, was a curious character. In his happy hideaway at the monastery, he spent eight years and raised thirty thousand pea plants figuring out why variations in heritable traits occur.

Mendel did attempt to communicate the results of his remarkable studies, but his pedantic lectures, paltry published study, and bashful attempts at correspondence with other scientists went ignored. Ultimately, although Mendel suspected his results were of supreme importance, his lack of confidence led him to give up and turn away from science altogether.

If Mendel had had the ego, self-esteem, or sheer, untrammeled narcissism^a. to repeatedly trumpet his findings to the world, researchers would have been clued in to the central ideas underpinning genetics some thirty-five years earlier than they did.

Mendel makes an interesting contrast with Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverers of evolution and variation with natural selection, who superficially appeared to share Mendel's lack of self-esteem. Darwin was an inhibited man with a reputation for integrity and a pride so well veiled that Wallace admired him from afar for being “so free…[of] egotism.”⁹ After a five-year, round-the-world voyage on the Beagle, Darwin returned to publish his findings related to zoology and geology. Secretly, however, he also embarked on a never-finished five-hundred-thousand-word masterwork (the equivalent of two thousand double-spaced manuscript pages) that was to summarize the theory of and evidence for evolution.

Much of the twenty years Darwin spent tucked away at his country estate preoccupied with puzzling out the secrets of evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace spent puzzling at the same problem in his adventures studying and collecting the flora and fauna of both the Amazon River basin and the Malay Archipelago. Like Darwin, he published his findings. Unlike Darwin, however, Wallace also began publishing articles related to the origin of species—poaching on evolutionary turf Darwin had thought was his alone. In a moment of feverish malarial brilliance, Wallace conceived a comprehensive theory of evolution and, in his enthusiasm, wrote it up and sent it to a man he knew would appreciate its importance—Charles Darwin.

Biographer-physician Ross Slotten notes: “Whatever the reason for [Darwin's delay in publication]—failure of nerve, a passion for perfection, periodic debilitating illness—it was not until the unexpected appearance of Wallace's essay that the issue of priority suddenly reared its ugly head.”10 Darwin, wringing his hands at the thought of his research being relegated to a footnote, wrote to his friend Charles Lyell, “I rather hate the idea of writing for priority, yet I certainly should be vexed if anyone were to publish my doctrine before me.”¹¹ With Darwin's tacit encouragement, his friends arranged a neat sleight-of-hand joint publication of the theory, with ever-so-slight seniority accorded to Darwin's efforts, and Wallace's more complete work used to bolster Darwin's claim.

If Wallace had sent his results directly to a journal, rather than to Darwin, he would have unquestionably have laid claim to the theory of evolution. But Wallace never worried over issues of priority. In truth, Wallace hadn't a drop of self-aggrandizement in his body—he was happy his work was recognized at all. (As science historian Michael Shermer notes, Wallace was “agreeable to a fault.”)¹²

Darwin, with his curiosity, brilliance, and well-concealed egotism, became canonized. Wallace, on the other hand, with the same curiosity and brilliance, coupled with an utter lack of egotism, became an impoverished footnote. Granted, neither of these men were flaming narcissists, but Darwin did have just enough ego to trump Wallace's hand.

Far more flagrantly egotistical than either Darwin or Wallace, however, was the sublimely arrogant James Watson, the misogynistic codiscoverer of the structure of DNA. Watson had no qualms about using data pilfered from scientist Rosalind Franklin to make his seminal discovery—and then writing a book describing “his” discoveries that mocked virtually everything about Franklin.13 Later, Watson would try to block the development of the computerized approach to gene sequencing. Instead of hailing Craig Venter's automated sequencing machines at a senate meeting about the Human Genome Project, Watson derisively cracked that the machines “‘could be run by monkeys.’ Venter, sitting next to him, turned pale. ‘You could see the dagger go in,’ a witness later recalled. ‘It killed him.’”¹⁴ Later, of course, Venter's sequencing machines would help decode the human genome years ahead of the government's desultory schedule.

Want ego? Science alone provides plenty of examples. Narcissistic Nobelist William Shockley, the inventor of the lucrative junction transistor, was goaded into his discovery by jealousy of his colleagues’ invention of the point contact transistor (which, indeed, used the underlying theory that Shockley had developed). Despite his genius, Shockley's arrogance and heavy-handed style alienated those who worked with him—he butted into everyone's business, sadistically blocking the careers of those he disliked. (Nobel co-laureate John Bardeen would leave Shockley's group in high dudgeon and go on to win a second Nobel Prize for the superconductivity research that Shockley had tried to prevent him from completing.)¹⁵ When founding his own company, Shockley deliberately hired the brightest men around, but he could become unhinged, pounding the table in rage, during the rare occasions they accidentally outshone him.¹⁶ Willing to do anything to keep in the spotlight, he took up controversial theories of eugenics, which undoubtedly assuaged not only his need for publicity but also his obsession with his own superiority. Ultimately he was left with racist allies whom “no moral, thinking soul would ever be associated with.”¹⁷ Even Shockley's own children became estranged—not surprising, considering that he publicly announced they had “regressed” from his own intelligence because of their mother's inferior standing.¹⁸

All of this doesn't even begin to do justice to the myriad of other cutthroat battles for glory surrounding the sciences. There was the mean-spirited Jonas Salk, with his continual public humiliation of Alfred Sabin. (Sabin had developed a far better polio vaccine that Salk did everything in his power to block and discredit.)19 And the bitter feud between Newton and Leibniz over the invention of calculus.²⁰ And neuroscientist Solomon Snyder's blithe usurpation of credit from his doctoral student, Candace Pert, for the discovery of the opiate receptor.²¹ (Snyder had, in fact, tried to stop Pert's research in this area because he thought it was a waste of time.) And brilliant Edwin Armstrong's invention of FM radio, which was hijacked by the unsavory Lee de Forest.²² Armstrong would eventually leap to his death in despair over the legal imbroglio that left him destitute.

Why does it so often seem necessary for there to be at least a smidgeon, if not a heaping helping, of narcissism to get one's just (or unjust) due in this world?

A big part of the problem seems to lie in the fact that so many people are so darned creative, not only in science but also in thousands of different areas. Simply walking into a corner bookstore and thinking about the billions of hours of imaginative work encapsulated there can make you gasp with astonishment. And that's not to even mention the ongoing creativity swirling worldwide in software, music, cinema, science, art, sports, and contraptions of all sorts. No matter what creative enterprise one might undertake, there are frequently so many other people doing something similar that it's difficult to stand out. The Beatles, who'd floundered for three years with no recognition (there were over three hundred rock groups in Liverpool alone), used their manic-depressive “drama queen,” Brian Epstein, to get them off the ground.²³ There would never have been a Motown without Berry Gordy, who has been dubbed a Jekyll-and-Hyde “thief of dreams” as well as a monstrous manipulator.²⁴ Madonna, with her ego and me-first sense of ethics, purportedly found whoever she needed to boost her up and then cut them out.25 She, like many another superstars, understands that being nice when competing against those who use their elbows is likely to leave you in the shadows. (Darwin was lucky to have had a sweet-natured competitor, and he knew it, writing Wallace that “[m]ost persons would in your position have felt bitter envy and jealousy. How nobly free you seem to be of this common failing of mankind.”²⁶ The fundamentally decent Darwin worked hard to arrange a civil list pension for Wallace. Even so, Wallace was still forced to continue publishing in his frail, final years in the hopes that his royalties would sustain his children.)

In the arts, it is difficult enough for an individual or group to stand out, even with the assistance of world-class, in-your-face promoters. But many modern-day creative concepts in other spheres—such as sequencing the human genome, building an assembly line and creating the automobile, coding a “killer application” for a computer system, or designing a high-definition TV—require an even more complex interweaving of innovation, tenacity, flexibility, and resourcefulness in order to be successful. To make matters worse, virtually all new innovations contain hard-to-protect creative concepts, either in execution or marketing, that other researchers or businesspeople love to emulate—or steal. This is where a spearhead person—a visionary who “gets it” yet also has a protective cloak of narcissism—is invaluable. And when the rewards of the enterprise are large, competition by those visionaries can become ruthless—a veritable clash of egomaniacal titans. As Roy Kroc, “the founder of McDonald's, once said of competition in the fast food industry: ‘This is rat eat rat, dog eat dog, I'll kill ’em, and I'm going to kill ’em before they kill me.’”²⁷

Narcissism can be a crucial asset not only in art, science, and business but also, understandably enough, in politics. Winston Churchill's sense of self-importance can be gleaned from an early letter to his mother from the battle lines: “I am so conceited I do not believe the Gods would create so potent a being as myself for so prosaic an ending.”²⁸ In the dark days of 1940 and ’41, when the Nazis seized the bulk of Europe and the lonely little islands of Britain were the next target, it was Churchill's convincing, egotistically certain manner that rallied the troops and the populace around the idea of standing fast rather than continuing with fruitless appeasement—as Lord Halifax, Churchill's competitor for the prime ministership, was wont to do. (Churchill once said: “Halifax's virtues have done more harm in the world than the vices of hundreds of other people.”)29 Where would England have been without Churchill's hyperinflated ego—coupled with his cunning intelligence and rapier wit?^b.30 We might do well to listen to Churchill's own admonition: “Megalomania is the only form of sanity.”³¹

Shades of narcissism might be needed to get your music heard, your ideas out, your innovations noticed—or your country saved, for that matter—but as people slide into the darker shades of that gray area, we find successful characters among us truly willing to hurt others to benefit themselves. As one former close associate of billionaire CEO Martha Stewart observed: “Martha often got involved with highly creative women whom she could dominate, manipulate, use, and abuse, women who wouldn't fight back.”³² Stewart's one-time business partner Norma Collier, whose ideas were cribbed during Stewart's me-first climb to the top, says of her former best friend: “I hope I never hear that woman's name again in my life. She's a sociopath and a horrible woman, and I never want to encounter her again or think about her as long as I live.”³³

Interestingly enough, one of the few lawsuits Stewart has filed was one against the National Enquirer for an article characterizing her as having many of the traits of borderline personality disorder. In 1997, reporter and celebrity biographer Jerry Oppenheimer published Martha Stewart—Just Desserts, a meticulously researched book that characterized Stewart as a narcissist of “almost diabolical dishonesty,” who suffered from fits of depression, had threatened suicide, possessed a mercurial and explosive temper, and was capable of profoundly abusing those around her.34 In the Enquirer article, borderline expert Leland Heller maintained that traits such as those described in Oppenheimer's book were consistent with borderline personality disorder. The National Enquirer didn't take Stewart's lawsuit lying down. After two years of wrangling, Stewart dropped the suit.³⁵ Subsequently, of course, she was convicted of insider trading and sentenced to five months in jail.

Individuals like Martha Stewart can be tempted to run with “cutting-edge” remunerative ideas that are ill-advised or frankly illegal (although in Stewart's case, there's evidence of prosecutorial bias in her jailing for a relatively minor offense).³⁶ As biographer Christopher Byron relates in Testosterone, Inc., Sunbeam's “Chainsaw” Al Dunlap, the Turnaround King, used channel stuffing—which entailed reporting shipments as revenue when the revenue hadn't actually been received—to fool people into thinking that Sunbeam had achieved a stunning surge in profitability when it was actually going broke.³⁷ Sunbeam eventually went bankrupt. (Executive Jerry Ballas, who had worked with Dunlap at Scott Paper Company, said, “It's terrorizing working for the man. What you do is you avoid, at all costs, getting near him…avoid contact with him.”)³⁸ In yet another selfish sleight of hand, Dennis Kozlowski, CEO of Tyco, was convicted of misappropriating company funds to support a lifestyle that included a one million-dollar birthday party for his wife on the island of Sardinia that included an ice Statue of David urinating Stolichnaya vodka.³⁹

And then, of course, there's Enron.

Enron—The Power of Unchecked, Mutually Supportive Machiavellians

Cursed with a tag team of Machiavellian leaders who shunted away or fired underlings with ethics, Enron Corporation followed the money deep into the dark side. (“We don't need cops,” said Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling, when asked to explain why he was moving a manager who was beginning to question some of the transactions.)40 Chief financial officer Andy Fastow was perhaps the key instigator of Enron's mythmaking flameout. Fastow was a smooth, deeply corrupt chameleon, able to charm his superiors into allowing him to supervise personally remunerative deals that were steeped in blatant conflicts of interest.

An overweening narcissist, Fastow told Enron's head of corporate communications Mark Palmer, “I ought to be CFO of the Year. I've seen it in CFO magazine…I want it to be me. Could you do that, get them to write a nice article about me?” Palmer was repulsed and became further appalled when he'd watch Fastow turn from tiger to pussycat in front of chairman Ken Lay. “It was like something out of a movie, with Fastow in the role of the obsequious yes-man.”⁴¹ In a set of stunningly adroit Machiavellian coups, Fastow would ultimately get his wish and be declared CFO of the Year, while Fortune would dub Enron America's best-managed company.

Fastow was not a genius—his ignorance of fundamental issues involving finance could at times be jaw-dropping. “Is this guy for real?” wondered one financially astute colleague. “How could someone making a play for the CFO job have such a fuzzy understanding of the basics?”⁴² But in Enron's top-down mandated culture of greed, traits such as competence and integrity were given short shrift. In any event, Fastow's temper served as an excellent guard to keep people from knowing his incompetence—or his dark secrets. Ray Bowen, a finance officer who had questioned Fastow's suspicious-looking partnerships, once received a late-night phone call from Fastow that quickly degenerated into a screamfest:

“I'm doing this because it's good for Enron, not for me!” Fastow shouted.

“Goddamn it! I am sick and tired of people attacking this! It's good for you, it's good for your business! So fuck you guys!”

Bowen hadn't said a word.

“I'll tell you what!” Fastow yelled, careening out of control. “We'll shut it down! And you fucking guys won't be able to get your fucking deals done because you won't have the fucking capital. So just figure it out on your own!”

Bowen held the phone away from his ear as the screaming escalated.43

If it had been just Fastow and his duplicitous schemes, the damage could have been caught and contained early on—Fastow's lack of ability alone would have seen him ushered to the door in most companies. Yet, with equally Machiavellian, cognitively dysfunctional CEO Jeffrey Skilling averting his eyes as necessary, Fastow's every incompetence and illegality was overlooked or somehow explained away. After all, whatever the means, Fastow was able to magically produce the profits that Skilling and others on the management team were so eager to see.^c. CEO Skilling presented an even richer level of Machiavellianism:

Skilling thrived on confrontation and had a perfect command of the minutiae of deals. In interviews he could stun financial writers with his grasp of details, but that same superiority made corporate meetings enervating for his colleagues. His vision was messianic…. From the beginning, colleagues say, Skilling's pattern was to scapegoat others without leaving a trail that could lead back to him. In meetings that Ken Lay chaired, Skilling was often silent, letting Lay believe that he was completely in control. But at other times Skilling could be very volatile…. He would often blurt out astonishing remarks in public—he once, famously, called a stock analyst an asshole during a conference call—and the public-relations staff worried each time he gave an interview.⁴⁴

It was Skilling's egotistical, charismatic, almost borderpathic ability to convince listeners that he was creating a new vision for business rather than recycling a de facto pyramid scheme that led whistle-blower Sherron Watkins to openly declare during meetings that “[t]his is a circle jerk.”45 But others were swept into rapt agreement with Skilling. (After Enron's demise, Skilling would become more obviously delusional, suffering a nervous breakdown on the streets of New York City, “running up to people in bars and on the street, pulling open their clothes, and claiming that they were undercover FBI agents.”)⁴⁶ Overseeing Skilling and Fastow was glad-handing chairman Ken Lay, a man so dysfunctionally clueless that whatever the evidence presented to the contrary, he believed the entire issue was simply a PR problem that could be solved with a press release.⁴⁷ Those who looked the seemingly gullible, self-serving Lay in the eye and told egregious lies were forgiven—their “minor” sins excused.

In short then, encouragement from Enron's semi-delusional Machiavellian top fostered development of a dim-witted Ponzi scheme. This was coupled with hiring, retention, and reward practices that selected for the unethical or their willing codependents, Intimidation of those who might have spoken up ensured that dissent was kept to a minimum. All this was bolstered by an oblivious chairman who refused to take firm action no matter what was brought to his attention. This sinister system was so obscenely and delusionally corrupt that it bent the lax rules for sinister stability past breaking. In the end, as the company went bankrupt, thousands of Enron employees lost their jobs and retirement savings, and some investors their life savings.

In short, then, narcissism—like many of the Machiavellian attributes—can be a double-edged sword. Too little of it can allow even the most talented and intelligent of individuals to pass by unnoticed. Too much of it—well, it seems there can never be too much of it. Extreme narcissism combined with even a modicum of talent can be a recipe for success on a grand scale. But when narcissism finds itself combined with intelligence, charisma, a too-easy glibness with truth, chameleon-like identity diffusion, and a Mao-like ability to manipulate mood with frightening effect, it can lead to individual success at high cost to others. When abetted by other Machiavellians and the oblivious dysfunctionality of blind optimists, Machiavellian narcissism can lead to the worst sorts of social disasters. On an organizational level, it can lead to Fastow, Skilling, and Lay's Enron. On a broader historical level, it can lead to Hitler's Nazi Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union, or Mao's China.

TEMPER, TEMPER, TEMPER

But there is another seemingly dysfunctional trait with a positive flip side, perhaps best shown by George Washington—the “Foundingest Father of them all.”48 Gouverneur Morris got right to the heart of the matter, eulogizing Washington as a man of “tumultuous passions” who was capable of terrible wrath.⁴⁹ At the Battle of Monmouth, Washington tracked down a commander who had allowed his troops to retreat and, as one observer noted, “swore that day till the leaves shook on the trees. Charming! Delightful! Never have I enjoyed such swearing before or since.”⁵⁰ Years later, Thomas Jefferson dryly noted Washington's reaction to a provocation at a cabinet meeting: Washington became “much inflamed; got into one of those passions when he cannot command himself.”⁵¹

Yet, despite—and possibly related to—his passion and sometimes overwhelming efforts to master it, Washington managed to control and resist a temptation to remain in power that Julius Caesar, Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon, Lenin, Mao, and thousands of other leaders, great and small, have been unable to resist. An anguished Napoleon commented on his deathbed, “They wanted me to be another Washington.” But he wasn't.

Washington wasn't alone in harboring a volatile side that he attempted to control even as he performed noble deeds. Spiritual master of nonviolence Mahatma Gandhi shared the same characteristic. (Beyond their shared temper, Gandhi, like Washington, wasn't above rewriting his own history to burnish his legend.)⁵² Biographer Louis Fischer, who knew Gandhi personally, reported, “He had a violent nature and his subsequent mahatma-calm was the product of long training in temperament-control.”53 Early on, it was Gandhi's wife who felt the brunt of his temper. “Once,” Fischer reports, “they quarreled so fiercely he packed her off from Rajkot to her parents in Porbandar.” But where Washington made a virtual religion of self-control, Gandhi made it an actual religion. He took the Hindu ascetic practice of brahmacharya to its broadest interpretation to include “restraint and control of all of the senses, including diet, emotions, speech, and actions.”⁵⁴

It's enlightening to contrast Gandhi's combination of hot-blooded emotion and generally tight control with Hitler's emotional makeup, as described in a secret analysis written by Dr. Walter Langer in 1943 for US intelligence:

[Hitler] shows an utter lack of emotional control. In the worst rages he undoubtedly acts like a spoiled child who cannot have his own way and bangs his fists on the tables and walls. He scolds and shouts and stammers, and on some occasions foaming saliva gathers in the corners of his mouth. [An eyewitness observer], in describing one of these uncontrolled exhibitions, says: “He was an alarming sight, his hair disheveled, his eyes fixed, and his face distorted and purple. I feared that he would collapse or have a stroke.”

It must not be supposed, however, that these rages occur only when he is crossed on major issues. On the contrary, very insignificant matters might call out this reaction. In general they are brought on whenever anyone contradicts him, when there is unpleasant news for which he might feel responsible, when there is any skepticism concerning his judgment, or when a situation arises in which his infallibility might be challenged or belittled.⁵⁵

Hitler, in other words, had an extraordinary temper—with only a rare desire to put a damper on it. No doubt Washington's and Gandhi's abilities to control their sometimes overwhelming emotions was in part abetted by their conscious decision to exert control—just as Hitler's perceived lack of desire to control his emotions was abetted by his realization that he could get his way more easily through temper tantrums. (In fact, architect Albert Speer, one of the few who was close to Hitler, argued that “self-control was one of Hitler's most striking characteristics.”56 Biographer Ian Kershaw agreed that Hitler's rages and outbursts of apparently uncontrollable anger were in reality often contrived.⁵⁷) Hitler clearly had a passionate temper—which he was perfectly capable of switching on and off as he needed to manipulate others.

Passionate emotions, as evinced by impulsive, angry outbursts—sometimes, but not always, kept under control—are found surprisingly often in a great number of high-achieving individuals, good or bad (or good and bad). A random list of those who have been said to possess such a temper might include Microsoft's Bill Gates; designer Ralph Lauren; opera singer Maria Callas; France's prickly Charles de Gaulle; “Iron” Mike Ditka; and a broad slew of US presidents, ranging from Bill Clinton to Richard Nixon to fiery nineteenth-century battle hero Andrew Jackson—a brawler who killed a man in a duel for casting aspersions on his wife.⁵⁸ And of course, impulsive tempers are found widely in the less talented, or less fortunate, run-of-the mill population: the friendly florist pulled over for road rage, the mother with an acid tongue, the landlord with an attitude.

In the end, impulsivity and temper may form part of Machiavellianism, but they also form a part of the broader spectrum of human behavior. If there is a difference between normal and sinister behavior, it is that the successfully sinister often appear to use their temper in a more consciously manipulative fashion for malevolent ends. As the perceptive Abigail Adams would write of George Washington, “[I]f he was really not one of the best-intentioned men in the world, he might be a very dangerous one.”⁵⁹

COGNITIVE FUNCTION AND DYSFUNCTION

But temper and ego aren't the only double-edged traits. Perhaps surprisingly, cognitive dysfunction can also carry good as well as bad aspects. After all, it was the near-delusional idealism of another founding father, Thomas Jefferson, that lay behind the inspiring opening words to the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal.” Jefferson's flight of rhetorical hyperbole, and the well-intentioned mindset it sprang from, inspired a nation to recognize the principles of individual rights and freedom that have since spread from “men” to women and people of all backgrounds. Indeed, Jefferson's extraordinary affinity for “idealized or idyllic visions, and the parallel capacity to deny evidence that exposed them as illusory [was] a central feature of [his] mature thought and character.”60 Jefferson declared, for example, that “all men are created equal,” even as he owned slaves and bedded at least one of them. But despite Jefferson's Mao-like tendencies for duplicitous behavior (George Washington endorsed a characterization of Jefferson as “one of the most artful, intriguing, industrious and double-faced politicians in America”),⁶¹ Jefferson retained a very un-Mao-like mental flexibility. He had a sincere aversion for conflict and carried a lifelong willingness to absorb advice from his many friends. As a consequence, most of Jefferson's more lunatic ideas—such as canceling all debts every nineteen years—were pruned before ever reaching public discourse.

It is that ability to listen and, at least on occasion, to change one's views in response (perhaps echoes of the ability or inability to resolve conflicting information that Posner's group was studying), that appears to be the key difference between inflexible tyrants such as Hitler and Mao, and vastly more effective, although still tough, leaders such as Turkey's founder Kemal Ataturk; Britain's Winston Churchill, and, in other fields, business executive Jack Welch, basketball coach extraordinaire “Red” Auerbach, and Manhattan project director J. Robert Oppenheimer (a probable polio survivor).⁶² After all, as James Surowiecki has shown in The Wisdom of Crowds, although groups don't always converge on the right answers, they can frequently get pretty close. One smart but inflexible person will always be wrong part of the time—and sometimes about crucially important decisions. But a critical thinker who accepts the best of surrounding input, instead of tuning out what he or she doesn't want to hear, can obviously do far better than any one inflexible thinker acting alone.

Delusions

It's worth lingering a bit on the dark side of our shades of gray to discuss outright delusional thinking, which can sometimes be found even in high-functioning, seemingly rational individuals.63 Recently, the editors of Popular Mechanics saw more than their share of such thinking as a result of their book Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up to the Facts. The editors’ conclusions? Conspiracy theorists, it seems, are often completely incapable of assimilating facts that counter their claims.⁶⁴

Research in delusional thinking is still in its infancy, but it seems clear that delusions must involve a fairly complex process. After all, it isn't just that the delusional person makes a mistake when perceiving something. Instead, a delusion can be adopted and maintained as a belief despite convincing contradictory evidence, and in the face of the fact that it is completely implausible. Delusions can be held with great conviction and defy rational counterargument. Such delusions often also involve jumping to conclusions: a negative bias in the way facts are absorbed; a way of processing information so that it becomes focused on the delusional individual herself; and biased recall that can actually seem emotionally richer to the delusional person than real memories. Indeed, one of the strongest characteristics of delusional thinking is the unwillingness to admit to any evidence that would refute the belief. Such thinking is reminiscent of the inflexible thinking of many a nefarious dictator—or difficult college roommate.

Researchers who have studied deluded patients have taken care to point out that these patients aren't delusional about everything. But such patients often do show a personalizing bias—a tendency to blame other people when things go wrong (in a word, projection). Interestingly, it seems that there is a separate neural circuit for threatening information that pertains directly to the “self” as opposed to anything else. Delusional patients, it seems, are not able to tone this circuit down, which means excessive attention is paid to “self-referential” information. This inclines the delusional person to think in a self-serving fashion. Research in delusions may help to provide a neurological-based understanding for the sometimes incomprehensibly self-centered behavior found in extreme narcissism.d.⁶⁵

One hypothesis relates delusional thinking to defects in the regulation of dopamine and perhaps other neurotransmitters. This could lead to a person improperly assessing the importance of the information she is receiving, because dopamine helps a person figure out whether whatever she is perceiving is either good or bad. It's thought that there may be two very different types of delusional thinking—one that is driven by emotion, and one that seems to have no relation to emotion at all. Interestingly, treatment of mood disorders seems to reduce delusional thinking that is based on emotion. No one knows the cause of many of the nonemotion-related delusions.

The Delusions of Dictators

Dipping again into the darkest shades of gray, we find that Hitler's borderline-like thought processes followed the emotion-driven pattern of delusion—his thinking was observed to “proceed from the emotional to the factual instead of starting with the facts as an intellectual normally does. It [was] this characteristic of his thinking process that [made] it difficult for ordinary people to understand Hitler or to predict his future actions.”67 (This is an eerie echo of Milosevic, who, if you'll remember, decided first what was expedient to believe, and then believed it.)⁶⁸ As early psychoanalyst Walter Langer pointed out, Hitler was so clever at finding facts to prove his emotions correct that he appeared to be making rational judgments when that was actually far from the case. This was particularly true in discussions, where Hitler was “unable to match wits with another person in a straightforward argument. He [would] express his opinion at length, but he [would] not defend it on logical grounds.” One observer noted: “He is afraid of logic. Like a woman he evades the issue and ends by throwing in your face an argument entirely remote from what you were talking about.”69 Hitler's near-schizophrenic magical thinking led him to believe “that his ‘will’ could accomplish what others thought impossible, [he would thus] brook no contradiction from lesser souls. The absolute power he in fact obtained served then to reinforce his idea that his will was magical.”⁷⁰

“No matter how impulsive, bizarre, destructive, or lawless his actions were, Hitler rationalized them as legitimate.”⁷¹ And, like each of the other dictators we've discussed, Hitler was particularly gifted at the borderline trait of gaslighting—that supernal technique of denying reality that can so throw an opponent. Particularly disconcerting in light of Hitler's phenomenal memory (about which more will be said later) was his capacity for “forgetting.” He would say something one day and then, several days later, say something that would completely contradict the first statement. If the inconsistency was pointed out, Hitler would fly into a rage, demanding to know whether the other person thought he was a liar. Leading Nazis took to mirroring Hitler's trick (shades of the emotional contagion seen in Ceausescu's Romania—and in Skilling's Enron). As former Nazi leader Hermann Rauschning observed: “Most of the Nazis with Hitler at their head, literally forget, like hysterical women, anything they have no desire to remember.”⁷² He noted further that Hitler was “capable of entertaining the most incompatible ideas in association with one another.”⁷³

The Delusions of Madmen

But, on the other hand, could humankind do without utterly inflexible, sometimes almost delusionally visionary people? Could we have done without determined teachers such as Socrates who, rather than accept exile, cheerfully drank hemlock as punishment for refusing to recognize the gods and for “corrupting” youth with his teachings? Or brilliant, tragic Joan of Arc, whose visions inspired her countrymen to fight off the yoke of the English? Or archly inflexible Galileo (Eppur si muove—“and yet it moves”)? Or the mysterious man of China's Tiananmen Square, courageous enough to stand for a just cause in front of massed tanks?

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 streets 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 people 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.

President Clinton was just as gullible regarding Saddam Hussein: “I think that if he were sitting here on the couch I would further the change in his behavior. You know if he spent half the time…worrying about the welfare of his people that he spends worrying about where to place his SAM missiles…I think he'd be a stronger leader and be in a lot better shape over the long run.”100 Dan Rather was similarly mushy with Hussein, allowing him the commercial airtime to speak, without rebuttal, about how much he loves peace and humanity.¹⁰¹

60 Minutes stalwart Mike Wallace was charmed by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the deeply fanatical president of Iran, effusively describing him as “very smart, savvy, self-assured, good looking in a strange way…infinitely more rational than I had expected him to be.”¹⁰² Wallace had been similarly obsequious with Syrian tyrant Hafez Assad as well as Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, prompting journalist David Bar-Ilan to note: “Had [Wallace] treated American…politicians this way, he would have been drummed out of the profession.”¹⁰³

Naivete about people's motives, especially from well-known figures, often allows Machiavellians a public stage to work their confusing, deceptive wiles. But sometimes, Machiavellians achieve this publicity by covertly appealing to their interlocutor's narcissism rather than naivete. When mediators and interviewers interact with a well-known sinister character and bring out the seeming best in him, it provides an opportunity to flaunt their own character: “See. He may seem evil, but he's really not so bad. At least not to intelligent, nice, right-thinking people like me. The guy's just a pussycat when I talk to him.”

WARREN BUFFETT—MULTIFACETED GENIUS

But there is yet another way that emergenic traits can combine to shape extraordinary, radically different behavior that has a potent influence worldwide. Investor Warren Buffett's life provides proof you don't need to be Machiavellian to succeed. But Buffett's success also shows the importance of recognizing the possibility of darker motives in others.

Warren Buffett is widely acknowledged to be the greatest investor the world has ever known. As biographer Roger Lowenstein summarizes: “Starting from scratch, simply by picking stocks and companies for investment, Buffett amassed one of the epochal fortunes of the twentieth century. Over a period of four decades—more than enough to iron out the effects of fortuitous rolls of the dice—Buffett outperformed the stock market, by a stunning margin and without taking undue risks or suffering a single losing year. This is a feat that market savants, Main Street brokers, and academic scholars had long proclaimed to be impossible.”104 How does he do it?

Buffett merges so many extraordinary abilities in one ebullient fireball that it's impossible to single any one trait out and say that's the key. He possesses an Einstein-like ability to focus (that is, a Lamborghini of an anterior cingulate cortex) and a photographic memory (making it easy to posit val/val BDNF with a deluxe option package of accompanying alleles). Buffett doesn't need a computer because, as he told one interviewer, “I am a computer.”¹⁰⁵

Perhaps surprising in light of Buffett's extraordinary ability to discern patterns from numbers is his talent for intuiting people's ability and motives—an underappreciated tool in the investment toolkit. If a would-be manager is more interested in the money than the business, Buffett either settles on a different manager or pulls up financial stakes and instead invests elsewhere. One whiff of Enron-style leadership, one suspects, and Buffett would make a speedy getaway.

Buffett himself writes:

I would agree that I have been pretty good at sizing up people. Not perfect, of course—I've certainly made a few mistakes in selecting managers at Berkshire. I would say that part of the reason for the success I've had is that I only take the easy cases. In other words, if you gave me 100 people to evaluate on a scale of 1–10 in terms of how they would work out at Berkshire, I would be pretty good at selecting a few 10s. I would also miss a few other 10s in my screening and I would be terrible at differentiating between the 3s and the 7s. This is similar to my method of selecting stocks where I only have to be right on a few decisions and can put most of the rest into the “too hard” pile.106

Buffett's practical ability to tell the difference between genuinely outstanding managers and their dark, chameleon-like doppelgängers has shaped his approach to business and propelled his efforts to steer Wall Street toward an ethical path. As Bill George at U.S. News & World Report points out: “[Buffett's] commitment to sound ethics and principles, his self-discipline and consistency, his transparency in disclosing mistakes, his criticism of Wall Street fees and compensation of underperforming CEOs, and his pleas for improving corporate governance—all have had a salutary influence on the corporate community.”¹⁰⁷ In reality, no other businessman has applied such pressure to ensure that ethical practices are woven into the regulatory fabric that governs Wall Street. And in the end, Buffett's donation of his fortune to philanthropy will be, at nearly $40 billion, the largest in history. Fittingly, rather than set up his own ostentatious foundation, he is donating his money to the philanthropic organization of his good friends Bill and Melinda Gates, where he knows it will be put to wise use.

No, one need not be Machiavellian to be successful. But being able to recognize that shades of gray in others helps.

HEALTHY CYNICISM

Over the years, I've found that nice people (that is, the majority of people) generally fall into two categories—those who have dealt with and have been wounded by the successfully sinister, and those who haven't. Those who haven't—which naturally includes many younger people—often simply don't believe that the successfully sinister exist. After all, since elementary school they've been told that virtually anyone can somehow be reasoned with. Even if a problem does arise, the naif thinks, surely the seemingly sinister person can be taught how to act more reasonably, perhaps through the proper modeling of patience, understanding, and compassion. Explaining the true nature surrounding the cognitive dysfunction and emotional imbalance of the successfully sinister to a naif is a little like trying to explain color to a blind person—it is no wonder that such naivete continues even when someone is warned point blank to be wary.h. People simply aren't generally raised and educated to understand that small percentages of the population—some of whom are outwardly very successful—are quite capable of masking deeply disturbed personalities. Sometimes, sadly, the devastating reality of these “unfixable” personalities becomes clear only after marriage and children. (As relationship expert Russell Friedman once quipped: “You can't love someone into mental health.”)¹⁰⁸

On the other hand, those who have dealt with the successfully sinister usually know instantly what I'm talking about. When I describe the concept behind this book, within seconds and without a further word from me, people I barely know will unwrap and describe psychic wounds that they've carried privately for years—the ex-wife who left the kids and a trail of credit card debt; the supervisor who made life a living hell; the friend who wormed close, mimicking hair, dress, even a way of talking—and stole a boyfriend; the uncle who took his grandmother's life savings and left her to die unattended in a filthy nursing home. “I can't believe there might be some kind of scientific explanation for this,” the have-dealt-withs tell me time after time, “I never even talk about it because no one would believe me.” Without knowledge of recent studies, people have little way of figuring out that their seemingly isolated experience was far more common than they'd realized—and that extraordinarily enlightening explanations are becoming available.

In an ironic twist of justice, it appears that the worst of all human crimes—genocide—often occurs simply because people can't believe that heretofore noncriminal humans can perpetrate horrendous acts such as mass murder or gratuitous torture. “I don't believe you,” said Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, when told by an eyewitness of the “naked corpses in the Warsaw ghetto, yellow stars, starving children, Jew hunts, and the smell of burning flesh.” Frankfurter interrupted to add: “I do not mean you are lying. I simply said I cannot believe you.”109 The justice literally could not conceive of the atrocities being described. Samantha Power describes one of the key causes of genocide in her Pulitzer Prize–winning “A Problem from Hell”: “Despite graphic media coverage, American policymakers, journalists, and citizens are extremely slow to muster the imagination needed to reckon with evil. Ahead of the killings, they assume rational actors will not inflict seemingly gratuitous violence. They trust in good-faith negotiations and traditional diplomacy.”¹¹⁰ Sadly, ordinary people often have little exposure to the research regarding Machiavellians that could do much to help prevent genocide. Only by recognizing Machiavellians for what they are and how they operate can we begin to stop them.

But if the dark shades of the successfully sinister are sometimes evil—and I believe they are—it is important to understand that that evil is complex. The dictionary definition of evil, after all, is “Morally bad or wrong; wicked: an evil tyrant.”¹¹¹ That definition implies a gestalt sense of evil—not evil in every particular. Shades of gray lurk, sometimes darker, sometimes lighter. And the occasional genuinely decent act from a successfully sinister person can't help but confuse our gut feeling that someone like Hitler, or on a more mundane level, the man who throws his screaming children from a fifteenth-floor hotel balcony, must be totally evil. With popular emphasis on “the sociopath next door,”112 people often don't understand that deeply dysfunctional, even unquestionably evil individuals can have genuinely decent aspects to their personality. “You could not imagine what a good heart Adi has,”¹¹³ one man exclaimed, after witnessing Adolf Hitler, as a penniless young man, protesting against the unjust treatment of an employee of a coffeehouse. And Hitler gratefully recognized the Jewish doctor who treated his mother's terminal cancer, protecting him until he emigrated in late 1941.¹¹⁴

In the ultimate world with its shades of gray, where “bad” traits can be used for good purposes, and “good” traits can be seen in bad people, some things, it seems, are relative. But not everything.^i.115 It seems that normal people worldwide use the same neural mechanisms to process moral questions. Thus the basic features of morality appear to be hardwired, and not a product of culture.¹¹⁶ Harvard biologist Marc Hauser, who has done extraordinary work in this area, has found that although there are some differences in morality between cultures, there are limits to those variations. There are some things, in other words, that religion or education can't easily instill in us, because it goes against our natural intuition—our built in moral compass.

Ultimately then, religion, education, and even family may have less of an impact on our innate sense of morality than we may think.¹¹⁷ Ethics classes, in other words, really may just preach to the choir. Those few who are wired differently—and we are beginning to learn how the wiring's awry—march to their own moral tune, no matter what they are taught.

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a.I hope the reader can forgive my loosely interchangeable use of narcissism, ego, self-esteem, self-importance, conceit, arrogance, and the like. Clearly these concepts are related to one another, but not identical. In the end, I'm fuzzy because hard science research in this area is fuzzy.

b.Unfortunately, egotism alone does not do the trick—as Churchill's talentless son Randolph revealed. Churchill biographer Gretchen Rubin summarizes: “[Randolph] was universally considered an over-bearing, egotistical snob—in fact, one club's constitution stipulated, ‘Randolph Churchill shall not be eligible for membership.’ Drunken arguments, broken marriages, and unfulfilled ambitions marred his life.”

c.Enron's culture of rewarded incompetence was the antithesis of Microsoft's. Whatever Microsoft's sometimes cutthroat business tactics, Gates's own dazzling technical and business acumen underpins virtually every major decision. A willingness to argue intelligently with Gates's ideas is prized.

d.I can't help but wonder whether this same set of circuitry might be involved in Hannah Arendt's “banality of evil.” As the Rape of Nanking, the murderous actions of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen, and savage onslaughts of the Huns show, virtually anyone can be taught to kill. However, careful examination shows that these killers have often been taught, sometimes through lifelong indoctrination, that other people aren't people. (This practice has a long tradition: It appears nomadic human bands generally refer to themselves as The People—other bipedal types, of course, being just humanoid imitations straight out of The Thing.) It may be that such killers have often been reared or trained to use a “non-self” or “not one of us” referential circuit that is less able to activate feelings of empathy. This would explain why, for example, savagely brutal WWII Japanese soldiers, taught since childhood to believe that the Chinese were worse than dogs, could return home from their rape and slaughter with little or no feelings of guilt and show themselves to be decent, upstanding family men. And this would explain Goldhagen's thesis that pervasive and violent German anti-Semitism lay at the heart of the Holocaust. Other types of killings may be based on development of a social frame that sparks neural circuitry related to morally justifiable actions. Cambodian refugee Youk Chhang, for example, is haunted by his teenage memories of heckling a couple as they were beaten and buried alive for the crime of falling in love without official permission.

Those with borderpathic traits, however, would need little training to commit their sometimes heinous crimes. Such sinister individuals could serve as ideal shock troops to inflame and train ordinary people. For example, researcher Paul Brass points out that Indian riots are generally fomented by “riot specialists”—somewhat sinister types ranging from scruffy young hooligans to university professors who specialize in converting what is often a minor local incident into a major regional or even national problem. (In borderline-speak, you might call these “splitting” specialists.) These riots are often ordered up by either the Moslem or Hindu elites to keep people on edge and make sure focus is maintained on Hindu-Moslem relationships. When the time is right for the full-scale riot, lumpen elements, including criminals, hooligans, and willing students, are brought in to get the ball rolling.

In some sense then, most of us are indeed capable of horrendous acts, but it may be that people with different neurological underpinnings would be induced to commit those acts much more easily and for very different reasons.

In relation to these ideas, Philip Zimbardo, a former president of the American Psychological Association, recently published The Lucifer Effect—a “penetrating investigation” of his famous 1971 Stanford Prison experiment involving college students who proved themselves capable of becoming sadistic prison guards or abjectly submissive prisoners. Zimbardo drew sweeping conclusions to the effect that it was the situation alone that drew these “good people” into doing “evil.”

Zimbardo's understanding was that he had gone out of his way to select “young men who seemed to be normal, healthy, and average on all the psychological dimensions we measured.” However, as pointed out by astute researchers Thomas Carnahan and Sam McFarland,⁶⁶ that does not at all appear to have been the case. On one test related to authoritarian attitudes, Zimbardo's volunteers scored higher than every standardized comparison group except San Quenton prisoners. Moreover, Zimbardo and his group did not indicate which version of Christie's Machiavellian test was used as another of the tests to determine normalcy. This makes it impossible to be certain what the scores reported by Zimbardo's group actually mean. In fact, it appears that, by most interpretations of the data, the Machiavellian scores of those involved in the experiment were far higher than normal. This logically implies that Machiavellian individuals tend to be attracted to prison-related situations.

Carnahan and McFarland tested this idea by writing two different newspaper advertisements for study volunteers. One ad was virtually identical to Zimbardo's original, which referred to “prison life.” The other was also virtually identical—except it was missing the words “prison life.” Testing of those who responded to the ad revealed there was indeed a dramatic difference in Machiavellian scores between the two groups of respondents—prison-related work apparently is a magnet for Machiavellians. Moreover, those who volunteered for Carnahan and McFarland's study were higher not only in Machiavellianism, but also in narcissism, dispositional aggressiveness, authoritarianism, and social dominance—and lower in dispositional empathy and altruism.

Ultimately, then, it is probable that Zimbardo's sweeping conclusions about Abu Ghraib, genocide, human nature, and evil itself are based on a fundamentally flawed study.

e.As I tell our kids—you can always find a distinguished scientist who backs up your views, whether you believe that US government agents destroyed the Twin Towers or that smoking cigarettes is good for you. People are often surprised to learn that a person can be simultaneously both an intelligent scientist or public personality and a crackpot. An immunologist friend once spoke with preeminent scientist Peter Duesberg—principal proponent of the idea that HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) is harmless, and that AIDS is actually caused by noninfectious factors, such as the very drugs being used to treat AIDS. Duesberg's work has inspired people like Christine Maggiore, an engaging, articulate, well-to-do HIV-positive woman who heads up a group that denies standard treatment is necessary or effective for AIDS. After Maggiore's three-year-old daughter died of AIDS-related pneumonia, Maggiore still leads the movement.

While conversing with Duesberg, my friend asked him why people with AIDS showed a certain well-studied pattern where certain cells in the immune system were killed, while others were left alone—an unlikely pattern if chemicals are the cause of the disease. Duesberg, although friendly, dismissively waved her question off with “I haven't seen that data.” In point of fact, it is mind-boggling that Duesberg would not be aware of, and obviously uninterested in looking at, that very well-known and relevant data. Incidentally, the foreword to Duesberg's book, Inventing the AIDS Virus, was written by Nobel Prize–winner Kary Mullis, who has also written of his abduction by aliens from his California forest hideaway.

As Richard Feynman noted in a commencement address to CalTech: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that.”

The reason it's so hard to be sure that “crackpots” aren't actually all they're cracked up to be is that occasionally, a seeming eccentric is proven correct. Dr. Barry Marshall, for example, came up with the idea that bacteria were the cause of most stomach ulcers. He was ridiculed by an establishment that had long held ulcers were caused by stress, spicy foods, and an overly acidic stomach. Scientists felt that bacteria simply could not live in such an acidic environment. “Everyone was against me,” said Marshall, “but I knew I was right.” Marshall eventually proved his theory by drinking a petri dish of bacteria and giving himself gastritis (and to his wife's dismay, bad breath). A dose of antibiotics cured him. Marshall—and his stomach—eventually won the Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking work.

f.Anyone, that is, except Deng Xiaoping, who easily bested the “Iron Lady” in negotiations for Hong Kong. But then, the brilliant, wily Deng had trained by surviving for decades under Mao.

g.As with Reagan's Alzheimer's, Thatcher's case is particularly poignant. Her daughter noted: “She had such a brilliant memory—like a website. She could quote inflation statistics going back years without reference to a single note.” But a series of mini-strokes left Thatcher with the frustrating inability to remember, by the end of a sentence, what the beginning of a sentence had been.

h.One example, which I've witnessed and heard about in various universities around the country, is when a more Machiavellian professor seduces a student into doing an independent study project under his or her direction. When the student is particularly hardworking and good-hearted, sometimes one can't resist attempting to give warning. Such warnings are almost invariably shrugged off—“It's only a two credit project,” the student might say, “What could Professor X really do to me?” The student always remarks on how nice Professor X seems, and one can practically hear them thinking: Why am I being warned about somebody who really likes me and is obviously such a great professor? Maybe you're the one with the problem.

A semester or two later, the tale of woe generally runs along the lines of “I'm just an undergrad, but Professor X wants me to read twenty-five journal articles and use all this information to create an advanced new theory. It's crazy! And he never shows up for meetings, never can help me with anything, and really—I don't think he understands what he's doing!” The other faculty all know what's going on, but in the topsy-turvy world of tenure, there is virtually no ability to discipline. Besides, X is so Machiavellian that even the administration is afraid to discipline him (or her). And of course, the administration has its own sinister cast of characters with their own Machiavellian mackerel to—well, you get the idea.

The students one really feels for are those from overseas, who arrive looking like lost lambs and sign on with the first friendly-looking professor they talk to. That professor is often X, in happy, charming, chameleon mode. Students don't realize that once they've signed, it can be virtually impossible to escape. However many experiments they run, papers they publish, or patents they obtain, at many universities, X is not required to allow them to graduate. Some students work full time on their doctorates for seven or more years, indentured servants who plump their masters’ credentials through their thankless, endless, low-paying work. In these cases in particular, nice guys really do finish last.

i.Even Einstein's Theory of Relativity was nearly instead named Invariance Theory, after the fact that, although space and time each vary individually, space-time itself, along with the speed of light, is invariant.