Abuse of Power as Pathology

“The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater is his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments prevail.” —Judith Herman

Power is the capacity to achieve values in collaboration with and in opposition to others. It can be an end in itself, but it is primarily instrumental in attaining other objectives. In the original French, pouvoir, it means “to be able” and is a creative, generative, and cohesive force.

However, within a group or between groups, this capacity often has an uneven distribution, so that more powerful people and groups have more autonomy than others as well as more influence over others. When the uneven distribution is extreme and persists over time, it becomes domination. Domination, or abuse of power, then becomes a condition of pathology.

The classical political theorists concerned themselves primarily with concepts such as justice, virtue, and the good life. At the same time, they also understood that power was instrumental to the achievement of these values. Aristotle (1598) used the distribution of power as the criterion by which to distinguish governments of the one, the few, and the many. Thucydides (1550) affirmed that the strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must because of the inequality of power and its consequences. Roman writers occupied themselves with gaining control of and regulating power.

Power became a concept for analysis with the work of Machiavelli (1532), who elucidated how princes and states could exploit its mechanisms. English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1651) held the view that power should be concentrated and institutionalized in a sovereign. Enlightenment philosophers John Locke, Charles-Louis Montesquieu, and the authors of The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison (1788), devised their institutional arrangements of dividing, sharing, and separating power with the aim of avoiding any concentration of power.

For the most part, monarchies and aristocratic societies provide for inherited offices, titles, privileges, and wealth that confer power on those holding positions. In contrast, democratic electoral systems offer more widespread opportunities to contenders who may seek, win, or lose office. Meanwhile, capitalist economic arrangements are based on competition, with rewards for success and the ever-present risk of failure. Patriarchal social arrangements place men in positions of power over women, whereas egalitarian societies aim for more equal allocation of authority. Slave societies confer on masters nearly complete power over slaves, but as slave revolts and political revolutions attest, those who are dominated sometimes resist and overthrow an unjust social and political order.

There can be antidotes to abuses of power. American political theorist Robert Dahl (1989) has named democracy—or a system of government where the whole population shares power—as a central guideline. Political values that human beings seek may include policy objectives, but also more enduring principles, such as order and justice, equality and freedom, security and stability, and the checks and balances that prevent despotism and arbitrary rule.

However, neoliberal ideology in favor of privatizing what had previously been public functions has produced a trend toward allocating authority to private groups and firms, weakening the public accountability of democratic systems. Military capability also creates an imbalance of power, both domestically and internationally, through threats as well as actual use.

When abuse of power comes easily, it also becomes an all-too-attractive end for pathological individuals who might try to seize it through any means. When they attain a position of control of an entire society, great tragedy can result. We shudder to consider the examples of Adolf Hitler’s Germany, Joseph Stalin’s Russia, Mao Zedong’s China, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia.

The rise to power of pathological leaders results from what political scientists call a “toxic triangle” (Padilla, Hogan, and Kaiser, 2007), which consists of dangerous leaders, vulnerable followers, and a society that provides the ripe ground for their collusion. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot all rose to power not as isolated individuals, but as members of pathological parties that facilitated their rise. In each case, not only did many of those close to the pathological leader also suffer from dangerous defects, but they also played key roles in securing the pathological group’s hold on power. Economic insecurity, social disintegration, and mass disaffection with existing structures of power often form the third crucial aspect of the toxic triangle—the ripe ground that allows these pathological leaders to come to power.

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A disorder at the societal level still has the same outcome as any unopposed disease: destruction and death. A common feature of these regimes is the terrifying wastelands that pathological leaders produce when their dangerousness unfolds into the world. The death factories of Nazi Germany, the mass prison system of Stalin’s Gulag, the millions of victims of Mao’s famine, and the mass murders of Cambodia’s killing fields are all terrifying, natural consequences of the leaders’ mental pathology. To their creators, however, they were places of cleansing, places which, they believed, history would look back on with gratitude for their service to humanity (Hughes, 2018).

While these are extreme examples, we see abuses of power encroach in subtle ways. Currently, our neoliberal ideology of privatization has created ripe ground for pathology. Military capability affords a means for ensuring and exercising power, both domestically and internationally, and thus is a favorite area of expansion for pathological leaders and their vulnerable followers.

In the U.S., a pathological leader is now seeking to shape the judicial system through the nomination of a Supreme Court justice who not only has a record of siding almost exclusively with power but also has expressly signaled that a sitting president cannot be indicted during his term in office (Gerstein, 2018). When accusations of sexual assault came to imperil the nominee’s confirmation, he exhibited belligerence, grievance, rudeness, and petulant behavior that was astonishing for a man seeking the highest legal office in the land.

The Latin root of “privilege,” privus lex, means “private law.” The French aristocracy, for instance, was endowed primarily with exemption from taxation. Today, we have an elite class that has both the sense and the experience that the rules do not apply to them and that they can act without much concern for the consequence (Khan, 2018)—be it substance use, sexual misconduct, corruption of the presidency, or lying under oath.