Ever wondered how dictators like Kim or Saddam Hussein, or Hitler or Stalin for that matter maintain power over their people?
Homeland Africa has recorded history this month by dethroning two long-serving leaders within two weeks. The following are the reasons study has revealed dictators use to stay for power in such a long time.
Psychologists and sociologists who study terrorism say dictators are able to spread fear among their people and place themselves as their only salvation. Manufacturing an external threat, like Jews to Hitler’s Germany, or the entire West for Kim, help keep the society off balance and collectively paranoid as well.
Dictators also exploit a well-known instinct for most people to seek protection from a strong leader, according to Alice LoCicero, a Cambridge, Mass.-based clinical psychologist and researcher on leadership and terrorism.
“Our behavior is still affected by what went on thousands of years ago,” LoCicero said. “It’s easier to understand why it’s adaptive and common for people to bond to powerful leaders. In Darwinian evolution, the people who bonded with the leader survived. That instinct got passed along.”
Dictators are also able to rule with more practical tools, such as fear and control of information, according to Jerrold Post, director of the political psychology program at George Washington University.
Post said that in both Iraq and North Korea, dictators tightly controlled the flow of information. That control was upended in the past two years during the “Arab spring” revolts that swept away despots in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and some of the Gulf states, revolts that were encouraged in large part by information spread by cell phones and social media.
“Controlling information and controlling dissent are part of what goes into maintaining a totalitarian state,” Post said.
By most news accounts, Kim was a ruthless tyrant — starving his own people while delivering a lavish lifestyle to himself and his generals; pursuing nuclear brinksmanship with South Korea and the West while his economy remained sputtering in the ditch.
“For the personality disorders, it appeared that a ‘big six’ emerged: sadistic, paranoid, antisocial, narcissistic, schizoid and schizotypal,” Coolidge and Singer wrote. “All three dictators also showed evidence of psychotic thought processes.”