The Devil You Made: How We Create Evil Leaders

Throughout history, we’ve learned about persons who were utterly evil and in my mind I’ve always wondered how they came to be this way and how they justified their actions, at least in their minds. Of course their actions weren’t justifiable, but they had to make sense of it somehow in their own lives.

I think in the modern era, we do have a clear glimpse of this through the political spectrum. You can clearly see how dictators come to power and how they are made, so in this article we are going to go through how such persons come to be.

First on a small scale, like that of an individual, we can clearly see that their motivation for evil might be either be because of selfish ambitions, pride, evil intentions or maybe because they find it fun to do. This is what could lead to a person being evil most of the time.

When it comes to leaders of whole communities, corporations, or even countries, people who have an impact on a huge amount of persons, how do they justify being that evil? It can’t simply be because of selfish ambitions, how many billions could you possibly want. It also couldn’t be because of pride or evil intentions, unless you are a psychopath. Your intentions tend to be directed towards people you know. Here we are talking about wanting to impact the lives of millions of persons you don’t know and probably would never even get to know, lets try to understand why people become evil in the process

The nature of power and how it corrupts

One thing power does so well is to put you in a particular space where it becomes difficult for you to empathize with others and at the same time it shields you from consequences.

Think about your life right now, the decisions you make all have a direct impact on you and your family. You can clearly see and feel all of that every time you look around you. However, a person in power can make decisions which have literally no effect on him, so he tends to have less empathy because he doesn’t feel much pain. If you decided to stop working, your family will go hungry, and you’ll feel that, but a CEO who decides to fire half of his work force doesn’t feel anything. The best he can do is avoid their mean look, but his life goes on as if nothing changed.

This lack of feedback makes persons in power to have less empathy, and they become much more focused on results than avoiding hurting people. Power also surrounds you with people who will only give you positive feedback while insulating you completely from the effects of your decisions. This eventually corrupts your mind in a way which pushes you to want to preserve this power and continue making decisions which to you seem right, even when it hurts other people you don’t know.

Leading requires manipulation

It should come as no surprise to you that the world is run by money and everyone is looking for it, however as a leader, making more of it requires making tough decisions which not everyone is going to agree. Money isn’t an unlimited resource which grows on trees, generally speaking It's something which is transferred from one person to another, whether it's in terms of cash or resources.

In order for you as a leader to make more of it, you have to be able to convince people to follow along. This means you have to be skillful at manipulation, finding the right words, confusing minds, and playing people. That’s why politics is full of liars

Have you ever tried to convince your family to do something all together? Maybe go to the gym? Sure you might convince one or two persons but good luck convincing the whole family. Now think about a politician who has to convince thousands of persons to do something they might not approve of (but which is good for them in the long run). Honesty in such circumstances would only take you so far.

That's why politics ends up rewarding those who are good at lying and manipulating others. The honest ones get left behind. If you have a better way of convincing thousands or millions of persons to do something which might not be in their best interest in the short term, kindly let me know.

Narcissism

At a small scale, the evil person isn’t that much of a narcissist, they might have evil intentions at best, but their main goal isn’t necessarily for everyone to worship them. Evil persons who seek positions of leadership are ultimately narcissists. They seek power not with the intentions of doing good, but rather using it as a way to satisfy their narcissism. That's why when they get the power, it eventually becomes hard for them to let it go. To identify a narcissist is pretty easy. Just look for a person who thinks he or she would never be replaced. A good leader is rather someone who is well aware of their time limits and works to prepare the next generation. He has a clear deadline in his mind of when the time would come to pass the baton.

Unfortunately for us, society actually rewards narcissism and that's why it proliferates so much, take whatever industry you like, and you are going to find a narcissist in there. How many times have you seen a group of individuals valorized? Most times than none its always an individual who stands out like they singlehandedly did all the work.

The invention of the light bulb, telescope, gravity, telephone etc pick whatever invention you like, its always a name associated to it, like that person worked alone to create such an ingenious system, but the reality is that it was a team of persons collaborating directly or indirectly, yet society prefers to attribute it all to one person rather than a group of persons.

This is precisely why narcissist often tend to seek positions of power, to satisfy their ego and feed into their desires for control and recognition, when you add to that a society which rewards such persons then you have a toxic mix.

Excessive ambition

To climb any ladder in society, whether its the corporate ladder or political ladder, would require for you to compete with countless others. Life in itself is a struggle for resources; the more you want, the more you have to fight for it. Which means that the average person who is just concerned about his next meal can’t make it very far up those ladders, do you think you can casually become a billionaire? I don’t think so.

In order to climb those ladders it requires a crazy amount of ambition, beyond what is ordinarily had by most people, it requires for you to be ruthless, ready to do anything and crush all competition. The only people who are able to do these are those who are willing to abandon a lot of their empathy and what could be considered weak traits, in order to make it to the top. Before you realize it, the competition becomes between very evil persons, and you have to rise to become the worst if you are going to beat them.

Lets use a simple example, imagine you are a company who follows all the rules and does what is right meanwhile your competition uses every loopholes to get ahead of you. You might say its unfair and unjust but at the end you are going to lose to them because the system in its state actually rewards evil. That’s why it’s very difficult to see whether it’s a corporate or political system in the world free from corruption.

How we got here

With all of these factors, you eventually end up with a leader who is just pure evil and who has been honed through the years to believe he is right and everything he does is the right thing to do. Not only did he overcome every dissent, but he takes his victory as a validation for all of his ideology and gets drunk on being right in his mind. Needless to say convincing such a person otherwise is an uphill battle you can’t possibly win.

As you have seen through all of this write-up, there is a lot of blame to go around. We could blame the person for being evil but we could also blame the system for permitting such evil to proliferate. However, we could go as far as blaming even our own human nature for tolerating such evil.

The world is full of good and evil persons, however we tend to act surprised when evil people get in to power without realizing that we are the very ones who promoted such persons into those positions unconsciously or not.

For evil to proliferate, it most meet fertile ground, else it would get destroyed. There are many countries doing very well. You just don’t hear about them because they are not stifled with drama every now and then. One thing which is common for all those countries is a general sense of justice and doing what is right. Even though there might be evil there, it gets put out very fast.

Where do we go from here

I want you to understand from this write-up that evil proliferates because as a society we allow it to, and it just becomes a vicious cycle where more evil produces even more evil. The universe is constantly trying to balance itself, when there is too much evil people start yearning for good, when there is too much good people become complacent and evil starts growing. It's either a leader rises among us to combat such evil, or we let the universe take its course and eventually, enough people would be ready to fight for good.

Thanks for reading ☺️