I want to talk about the mind. Not healthy in the clinical sense, although that will soon matter. I mean the broad kind: can a powerful person see the past borders self-evidently defended to make decisions that serve people other than themselves who are making the decisions.
Because this is what research consistently suggests, and what I return to as the world transforms itself into new configurations of violence: War, in many cases, is the first failure of this kind of reason. Rockets come in second.
Ego under pressure
Ego is not inherently a problem. It is the organizing principle of the self, the structure by which we navigate an otherwise overwhelming world. But the ego, in its compulsively defensive state, the ego that has calcified around the wound and decided that its survival depends on the subjugation of some perceived other, functions as a kind of simple madness. No psychosisand not necessarily diagnostic personality disorderbut the characteristic failure that occurs when he becomes so self-defensive that he can no longer clearly perceive, adjust proportionally, or act on anything other than the imperative of self-preservation.
Psychologist Bob Altemeyer’s decades of empirical research on authoritarianism personality constructs identified a consistent cluster: strict intolerance of uncertainty, hostility toward outgroups, and a need for dominance that resists legitimacy challenges (Altemeyer, 1996). What his work also revealed is how often these traits go hand in hand with height. narcissist Characteristics: strong egotism, belief that normal rules do not apply, and a remarkable lack of empathy for out-group members. Both constructs have the same psychological root: a fragile ego that requires constant external reinforcement and cannot be seen as weak, flawed, or limited.
Brunell and colleagues (2008) found that narcissistic individuals disproportionately emerge as leaders because they self-confidence and dominant behavior are initially misread as authority. Qualities that bring power become liabilities once the complexities of actual management arise. At that point, the ego structure that provided the position begins to distort the way it is realized.
The ethics of violence
None of this is an argument for pacifism, and I want to be clear here, because the analysis can slip into something naive if I’m not careful. There is a real moral hierarchy within armed conflict, and where a given war falls within that hierarchy is of great importance.
A leader who uses military force for the actual defense of a civilian population under existential threat is a completely different decision than one who mobilizes force to satisfy territorial ambitions, personal grievances, or hunger for historical heritage. A soldier who acts in the former service acts from another moral register sent for the last admission. As spirituality Philosopher Mehr Baba observed that wars fought for the defense of a common people can have a sudden effect of enlightenment on the people inside them: “During the war there are people who reveal their higher self through endurance of pain and courage and selflessness. It is better not to release such selfless motives at any risk.” Crisis can destroy the open capacities for sacrifice and solidarity that the protected ego would normally repress.
The moral weight, in other words, is not equally distributed. It mostly boils down to who ordered the conflict and for what purpose.
When the Ego commands
When narcissistic or psychopathic the structure of personality sits at the helm of the military apparatus, something qualitatively different from politics. Greatness, paranoiacompensatory aggressionand intolerance of the challenges that make up the leader’s inner world are projected outward, mobilized, and uniformed. The country and its military become an extension of the ruler’s ego architecture rather than a means of collective defense.
This is especially dangerous because narcissistic and psychopathic constructs are constitutionally ill-equipped for complexity, and war is nothing but complexity. Civilian life is associated with military purposes; history resists erasure; political realities do not obey the pure logic of rule. A leader whose personality structure cannot tolerate uncertainty will not sit with this complexity. They smooth it out. And what is lost in the flattening is the moral foundation that prevents barbarism.
Jerrold Post, a political psychologist who has spent decades reporting on world leaders for the CIA, has argued that this threat imbalance is one of the most dangerous characteristics of a narcissist. leadership (Post, 2004). Leaders who cannot distinguish between political challenges and personal destruction respond to the former as the latter. Diplomacy requires maintaining uncertainty, tolerating discomfort in the absence of dominance, and treating the adversary’s position as a legitimate human position. These are the very abilities that the protective narcissistic ego regularly disrupts.
The result is a predictable pattern throughout history: disproportionate retaliation, protracted engagement, and a basic unwillingness to negotiate except from a position of absolute superiority. Until the soul is satisfied, the war will not end, and the soul will rarely be satisfied.
Scale changes; No mechanism
Critical Readings on Narcissism
The psychology that creates conflict on a geopolitical scale is not entirely different from that which creates it on an interpersonal level. Limited ego, perceived threat, escalation, inability to recognize one’s role in the provocation, zero-sum logic of winners and losers: These are the same mechanisms at work in both defeats. marriage and a military attack, which differs only in terms of scale and consequences.
This is not an abstraction. This invitation seems to be inside. The level of awareness that a leader (or any person) brings to their defensive patterns is the variable that determines whether a conflict will escalate or resolve. The structure of the personality is not accidental for the conduct of war. In many cases, it is the main variable.
