“We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Remember in history class how we were taught that all the kings, conquerors, and subsequent rulers in ancient times were great men? How we focused on their limited positive achievements, disregarding the human carnage it took to accomplish them?

In Kings, Conquerors, Psychopaths: From Alexander to Hitler to the Corporation, author Joseph N. Abraham makes the indisputable case that “Conquest is murder and theft; Conquerors are vicious criminals; Conquerors become kings; Kings designed civilization; And we are the products of civilization.”

Despite what we were indoctrinated to believe, these iconic figures were not benign rulers or philosopher-kings. Instead, and the facts bear it out, they ascended to power because of personality traits that include a confluence of psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and sadism, or as Abraham refers to this malevolent mix, “the dark tetrad.”

The reasons for the primacy of the “atrox,” the term the author uses for those individuals with these personality traits, are two-fold: genetic and conditioning. Abraham points out that humans are pack animals and that the characteristics of a successful alpha male very closely resemble that of the “dark tetrad.” Furthermore, the chances of flourishing or even surviving under such a leader necessitate blind obedience; ergo, civilization is designed by the atrox and we are products of his civilization.

Considering that I read this book during Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, it provided some disturbing revelations about this modern-day atrox’s motivation. According to Abraham, “when the conqueror invades, he robs civilians of their wealth, their freedom, and their lives. He may claim any number of reasons for his conquest, including protection, ideological conversion, liberation, trade preservation, or others. It does not matter. Those arguments are rationalizations, or at best secondary concerns, for a simple reason: without profit, conquest is impossible. Without obscene levels of profit, it is unattractive.”

He also convincingly applies these traits to modern-day corporations, suggesting that “King and conqueror have morphed into modern business and political leaders, who continue to exploit us and expend our lives for power, wealth, and narcissism.”

So compelling are Abraham’s arguments that it’s not an exaggeration to say Kings, Conquerors, Psychopaths: From Alexander to Hitler to the Corporation changed my world view. Despite being dense with facts and theories, the book is extremely readable, with countless historical revelations and profound insights throughout. The most discouraging of these is the idea that “Horror is our past. If we do not embrace that fact, it will also be our future, over and over, until we finally do learn to understand and to control it. Or until we disappear from the planet.” ( )

Joseph N. Abraham's " Kings, Conquerors, Psychopaths" provides an in-your-face look at the dystopian nature of human governance which the faint of heart will poorly handle (if you subsequently feel in desperate need of an elixir, perhaps Brian Orend's "The Morality of War" can offer some breathing space).

Abraham ruthlessly lays out the numbers of people murdered during conquest for regime after regime, nation after nation, and civilization after civilization. He primarily describes strongman systems which make up the core of human civilization, but does not limit his dissertation to them. The hardest hitting part of his text for me to cope with are the sheer magnitudes of regime – based blood baths. Most notably, we in the West are justifiably conditioned to view the Holocaust as being paramount in goal – oriented murder. The numbers given by the National WWII Museum are “approximately six million European Jews and at least five million prisoners of war, Romany, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and other victims.” Yet these numbers are familiar and 20th Century and brought about by modern mechanized war machines.

My formal history education never prepared me for Abraham's discussion of five and a half million civilian and military casualties in the Napoleonic wars, nine million lives lost during the Crusades, and a litany of other million+ death events. The Holocaust is not at all as quantitatively unique as it should be. In light of the differing population sizes, these earlier killing events are not even slightly occluded by it. Abraham makes this a major thesis of his book:

"I agree that Hitler was a fiend, but I argue that he was, unfortunately, a very usual fiend"

Abraham brings an interesting amount of current psychology into his writing, introducing the reader to the dark triad of psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism. He profiles each phenomenon briefly and comments on the consequences to government of each one. Machiavellianism is essential to governance, albeit requiring prudence, he points out, but the others are not so. He even proposes adding sadism, resulting in a dark tetrad (which he points out is semantically if not scientifically imperfectly compatible with the DSM-5 – the professional diagnostic standard for psychiatry).

Fanaticism and zealotry, he points out, are not recognized as psychiatric disorders. However, from the standpoint of leadership, Abraham asserts that they ought to be:

"Zealotry is a thought disorder of large societies that results in large scale murder; so it is not clear why it should be excluded from psychiatric consideration."

In America, we currently have at least two nations masquerading as one. One of these is permeated with / defined by fake Christianity and general anti-intellectualism. I was impressed that Abraham takes on the problem of anti-intellectualism directly.

As the book progresses, he applies a psychological perspective to the nature of more categories of people and historical and current economic classes. He resignedly states that the immorality of persons gaining power by force is what our civilization is founded upon. He dives into some of the societal consequences of catering to the authoritarian leader. Among them, placating the docility – seeking tyrant requires stifling childrens' intellectual curiosity and teaching them to be compliant.

He makes a very poignant observation about how a commonly occurring mindset can have chilling consequences:

"A particularly toxic football saw is 'Defense wins championships.' When carried into politics and business, this translates into an unfortunate: 'If I can stop you, I don't need to produce much progress.'"

This observation comes from Chapter 7, and this chapter is a mini-masterpiece of discourse on the psychology of despotism. He systematically presents a number of critical psychological features of the social mind which he then opines about such as sacrifice, fatalism, anti-intellectualism, fundamentalism and various other features that relate back to dark leadership and, increasingly, the corporate de facto state as well.

Overall, this book is depressing. However, it should be slogged through because his epilogue is a must – read in which he opines on a variety of steps needed for progressive, caring, and genuinely moral people to take back the USA. Abraham considers George C. Marshall's plan for post-war European recovery to be the high point of governance. Perhaps his next book should focus on that thesis. ( )