Personality of Villains

Dear reader, are you one of those people who love to observe the rise and fall of villains in movies? Aren’t they very interesting people? Villains have stories and tragedies which are always different and intriguing, whereas the good guys always live and end up the same way old way – happy. Villains are personality’s extremes and outliers who clearly show us that personality, and especially the personality of leaders is of immense consequence.

In my opinion, no psychologist can be trusted to expertly know personality if they do not have a solid understanding of clinical psychology and psychopathology. The latter word tells it all – the sufferings of the soul (psyche and pathos in Greek mean soul and suffering respectively). In essence, all personality disorders are psychopathy-ies in this sense, not just the antisocial personality disorder which is frequently and erroneously equated with psychopathy.

In what follows, I analyze the personality of three historical villains – Emperor Nero, Adolf Hitler, and Joseph Stalin. I hope that this triad will expose quite many of the commonalities in madmen’s[1] heads. And there are many. No matter if the madmen were overtly paranoid, narcissistic, or antisocial. Deep down, in its origins Evil is essentially the same, but just as the great deceiver (i.e., the Devil) it appears in so many forms and deceives us. Psychopaths wear a mask of sanity (Cleckley, 1941/1976) and for us, the observers, psychopaths can be perfectly normal and well-intentioned and many people, even whole nations, have been fooled.

I will not comment on the biological and genetical underpinnings of psychopathology, although let it suffice to say that for the violent ones there ARE genetic causes such as a defective monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) gene (Caspi et al., 2002). Again, nurture is all-important – an individual with psychopathic tendencies who grew up in a loving family and good environment of friends and peers will be 99% fine, that I can guarantee you. Because as forensic psychologists like to say, “Genetics load the gun, personality aims the gun, but the experiences of the criminal pull the trigger.” The problems usually start when there was a history of violence, abuse, extreme hardship, separation, and lack of true love in the villains’ family. Usually there is an oppressive father and a totally silent mother, and the boy hates the father but secretly identifies with the father’s unlimited and tyrannical power.

In terms of the FFM, psychopaths are low on Conscientiousness, low on Agreeableness, and high in Neuroticism (Lynam et al., 2005). However, the high Neuroticism is a bit of a misnomer because psychopaths are low on the Anxiety facet and high on the Angry-Hostility facet. Thus, because the latter is a very strong factor it brings the whole factor to be positively related to psychopathy. Also, regarding the FFM facets, psychopaths are high on the Excitement-seeking facet of Extraversion, and very low on two Conscientiousness facets – Dutifulness and Deliberation (Decuyper et al., 2009). Most importantly, psychopaths understand quite well your emotions, but they cannot possibly feel and show any empathy to your suffering (Blair et al, 2005). That is why their personality profiles are always low Agreeableness. For example, imagine you and a psychopath both observe a stray cat being run over by a car. You will be screaming and maybe crying whereas the psychopath will say something of the sort “Oh no, that is so sad”, you will look them in the face to verify their emotions and you will immediately know they do not mean any sorrow for the kitten, they are sad as a matter of fact. Just as they kill others as a matter of fact and go to sleep without any qualms. Creepy, right?

Now, let me be your Dante and I will lead you to some of Inferno’s circles, follow me closely and we will emerge unscathed, I promise.

Nero

Nero, the last emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, started his reign with extreme lavishness and festivities and the Romans truly acclaimed him as a poet and artist. However, in short time he became paranoid, killed his mother Agrippina and many of his friends, publicly executed innocent people (some of them the first converts to Christianity in Rome), committed serial rape, supposedly burned down Rome to build more palaces, and suicided at the ripe old age of 30. He loved theater and everything Greek to a point where he was perceived as not a Roman enough. Some historians claim that this made him feel as an outcast and he reacted violently. Other historians claim he just wanted to be admired (like we admire celebrities nowadays) and felt underappreciated. All these historians forget that next to Nero’s apparent attention-seeking and Narcissism sits a long string of abominable acts and murders that cannot be justified.

The best source for Nero’s personality comes from the head of the imperial libraries Suetonius and his Vita Neronis (The life of Nero). According to Suetonius Nero’s father despised him from birth and said that “nothing that was not abominable and a public bane could be born of Agrippina and himself” (Suetonius, Nero 6.1-2). The father reportedly killed a boy for sport and happily gouged the eye of a knight. The mother was not an angel either. She was an insatiable sex addict and a popular joke during her time was that she could sleep with all the soldiers from the Pretorian guard within a night and then she needed a horse to get tired enough to go to sleep. I am sure the reader starts to form ideas of the family environment of Nero. Because Emperor Caligula dispossessed the 3-year-old Nero after his father died, Nero had to move in with his aunt and lived a very poor life for a while. Also, Nero witnessed at a very young age how Caligula executed criminals and fed them to the animals. Eventually Nero’s wealth was restored when Emperor Claudius took power, and when Agrippina poisoned Claudius Nero became emperor at the age of 17.

Now what we can tell about Nero’s character and personality will become clear by recounting some events. He knew of Claudius’ poisoning and chose to do nothing (lack of remorse). He was paranoid about Claudius’s firstborn Britannicus becoming emperor and poisoned him only after experimenting with the poison for effectiveness on another innocent boy (objectifying humans). He did not allow his audiences to leave when he performed and prohibited people from disliking his performances (both grandiose and vulnerable narcissism). He liked to stab and kill innocent people during his nighttime walks in Rome (aggression). He stole from shops and sold the goods for his own profit (theft). He raped the Vestal priestess Rubria and castrated a boy to turn him into a woman to marry (sexual promiscuity). His mother was very controlling, so Nero banned her from the palace and eventually killed her. He killed and dispossessed his aunt too. He killed his second wife Octavia after framing her for being adulterous and kicked to death his pregnant third wife Poppaea because she was complaining. Any fan of philosophy also knows that Nero asked his tutor and advisor, the great stoic philosopher Seneca to suicide which he did.

Nero, according to Suetonius felt guilt about Agrippina’s murder and associated himself with the ancient Greek hero Orestes who also killed his mother and who Nero played as an actor. The paranoia and delusions of Nero brought to him a series of events culminating with his death: the revolts in Gaul (France) and Spain, his denial of the growing military threat to Rome, his escape to his villa although he did not need to, getting the letter that he has been declared a public enemy and suiciding out of fear of being caught. ?He did not even have the courage to stab himself in the throat – he needed his scribe’s help. Thus, in my opinion, with Nero we are dealing with a schizophrenic with grandiose delusions and paranoia driving extreme aggression.

Hitler

Hitler was not the strong man we think he was. As Henry Murray writes in his psychological evaluation of Hitler (Murray, 1943) – Hitler was a combination of Lord Byron and Al Capone. Why?

First, the Byronian qualities. Hitler was very anxious and totally impulsive, erratic, and irregular. He immediately wanted to achieve the spasms (he used that word) of his imagination and that is when he came out of his languid and apathetic Self and turned into this Romantic hero of tremendous will-power and charisma. In the delusional and mystical he saw the power to save him and the humiliated German nation. He perceived himself as the hero to invoke the mighty Valkyrie from his favorite Wagner operas and amend all post-WWI injustice done to him and his beloved country. Note that he associated more with Germany than with his home country of Austria. In essence, Hitler had a messiah complex in which he escaped from his neuroticism. His paranoia created the ghosts of the lazy and drunk Slavs, the impure Jews, the weak and fat generals, the impotent social-democrats, and he set to action to fight these ghosts, to set things right and create himself a heroic personality to feel good with.

Second, the Caponean qualities – lack of conscientiousness, remorse, or inhibitions, as well as high risk-taking. A weak student, he might have had unhealthy interest in young girls when he was in early adolescence, and he supposedly beat up his mother to let him quit school. In his Vienna pre-WWI years, he was an unreliable worker, unable to get up early in the morning (yes, your author likes to get up at 5:30 am), and when he worked, he did not want to work too much because he perceived himself as an artist and Bohemian – work was for the proletariat. Hitler was a cynic and unlike Mussolini or Stalin, he did not care for the working classes and his ideology was elitist. When Carl Jung met and observed Mussolini and Hitler interact in the late 1930s, he remarked that the first was warm and original whereas the second was sulking, in bad mood, and inspiring fear. Hitler has the contrived conviction of being respectable middle class via his father who worked his way up to become a lowly customs clerk in Vienna. However, the father was not the respectable self-made man Hitler later bragged with – the father started as an illegitimate peasant child of Jewish descent who grew to be a promiscuous man with three marriages. Hitler associated with the powerful and wanted to be like them. He bowed to the president of the Weimar republic Hindenburg, he bowed to the Bulgarian Tsar Boris III, and he respected the aristocratic British whom he saw as Arians too and natural allies against Russia. However, whole nations (Polish, Greek, Russian) and ethnic groups (Semitic, Romani, Slav) were deemed unnecessary because they did not fit these simple stereotypes in his head.

We need to emphasize more the role of the father in Hitler’s story. The father wanted Hitler to become a civil servant, but Hitler wanted to be an artist. The father humiliated both Hitler and his mother, and Hitler had to be submissive to him but also learned through observation what is to have unlimited power and liked it. Hitler despised his father for being 23-years older than his mother and equated the father with the ailing Austrian Empire and its impotent leaders. Note that Hitler had no qualms of abandoning Austria for his new beloved Fatherland – Germany. As a child Hitler was emotionally dependent on his mother. But the mother was silent and oppressed and Hitler despised her for not putting up a fight against the father. The liberation came when Hitler was 13 and his father died.

When did Hitler’s psychopathology really unlock though? With Nero the downfall started with his mother’s and tutor’s killings. Many psychologists who evaluated Hitler character think that it happened during and after the mustard gas attack on his unit in October 1918 at the Russian front (Coolidge et al., 2007). Langer (1943/1972) argued that Hitler exaggerated his gas poisoning symptoms and used it to drive his schizophrenic delusions about being chosen by Providence to defend the Fatherland from the Jews. Combined with his Narcissism, this messianic attitude might have turned an anxious and erratic character into an energetic and charismatic public speaker. Thus, Hitler ideally fits Mayer’s (1993) concept of the dangerous leader disorder: 1) indifference to killing family, citizens, and committing genocide, 2) intolerance to and censoring dissenting opinions, and 3) grandiosity in terms of being chosen to unite people, wage successful wars, be the force of God on Earth, etc. All in all, with Hitler we might be presented with a case of schizophrenia of the paranoid type as well as several personality disorders – narcissistic, antisocial, and sadistic (Coolidge et al, 2007).

Stalin

Stalin was not the semi-illiterate and countryside-style dictator like his successor Nikita Khrushchev. A recent book on Stalin and his library (Roberts, 2022) reveals that he read avidly throughout his life and left numerous markings and commentaries in his books. He even took books from the library and delayed returning them – something every inquisitive bookworm has done. Thus, Stalin was definitely high on Openness to Experience. However, the angry comments he left in his markings (especially inside Lenin’s books) shows he was quite fanatic and brutal – because who argues with a book? Also, Stalin’s sternness and dogmatism can be traced to his mother’s deep religiosity and relentless work. He mother changed many jobs to support the priestly education of Stalin after his father left the family when the boy was six years old. Eventually Stalin made it to the Seminary in Tbilisi (the capital of Georgia) but in 1899, at the age of 24 he was expelled for revolutionary activities. Since then to her death in 1937 Stalin visited his mother only a few times and wrote her some letters. He did not go to his mother’s funeral because he was too busy with the great purges among the Politburo and the army. This aloof attitude he repeated with his own children’s upbringing – I encourage the reader to read about his daughter Svetlana. In essence, Stalin never truly experienced family love and seemed to not need it. He had to be strong and fight. But what fed that will-power?

It was the paranoia and all biographical studies of Stalin testify to it (Birt, 1993). If you have not heard the saying that only the paranoid survive, then you need to consider Stalin as the perfect example for it. Notably, and in contrast to Nero and Hitler, Stalin did not suicide – he ruled until the end. But to achieve that he basically executed not just the old, Lenin-bred Bolsheviks, but also anyone who had even the slightest charisma and chance to oppose him in the party. The purges were so cruel and comprehensive that Russia entered the WWII with too few qualified generals and bureaucrats.

The origins of Stalin’s paranoia might be traced to the beatings he and his mother got from his drunk father, who by the way was mostly absent. Stalin was a victim of childhood violence, but he also missed his aggressor and undoubtedly made a role model out of him too. When a threat appeared in his life, he turned on his aggressive and ruthless mode. His paranoia must have also been caused by his hiding as a Communist in the seminary. Lastly, the paranoia must have intensified by feelings of being targeted and ridiculed for his physical appearance – Stalin was very short (5 foot 4), his face was disfigured by smallpox, and his left arm was disfigured and shorter because at the age of 9 he was struck by a carriage.

Tucker (1990) described Stalin as very sensitive and so devoted to the Soviet Union that any threat to himself he perceived as a threat to the state. And what do we do with threats to our states? We remove them as necessary. To an extend where for Stalin was perfectly normal to displace whole ethnic groups to Siberia (e.g., Caucasian and Crimean Tatars), starve tens of millions (the Holodomor in Ukraine), order the mass executions of captured countries’ elites (e.g., Katyn massacre), or split whole nations down the middle (e.g., Germany, Poland). Just as Hitler was reducing the non-Arians to literally ashes with mechanical precision and efficiency, so was Stalin purging the enemies of the state. In essence, Stalin was a case of three personality disorders – antisocial, paranoid, and narcissistic. He was not schizophrenic and did not suffer from delusions. Thus, he would eventually listen to his generals (which Hitler did not) and he would play well on the stage of world diplomacy. For example, he split up Poland with Hitler and later, under the nose of Roosevelt, he split up post-war Europe with Churchill - on a handkerchief. Stalin died in 1953 from a stroke at 74 in his dacha. His impact on the USSR and the Eastern satellite countries was so great that when he died people were shell-shocked and completely lost – how were they going to live without the great Father and Hero? A scene to be repeated with Brezhnev later too.

Now, my readers, let us emerge from the dark caverns of villains’ pathology. Allow me to make some conclusions on what is shared between our three examples. Here are the communalities I see: a strong, oppressive and violent father (all thee), a mother who was either strong and oppressive (Nero) or submissive (Hitler, Stalin) but was nonetheless despised (all three), a family atmosphere of poverty and observing violence (Hitler, Stalin and Nero’s life with his aunt), lack of professional commitment and success (a failed actor, a failed artist, and a failed priest), high paranoia (all three), vulnerable narcissism with different fixations (theatrical with Nero, mythical with Hitler, and statist with Stalin), and let us not forget one factor that we often forget by always committing the fundamental attributional error – chance and circumstances (Agrippina securing the throne for Nero, Germans’ disillusionment from social democracy exploited by Hitler, and Lenin concentrating the power and handing over a well-greased oppressive apparatus to Stalin). Villains apparently have high Neuroticism and low Agreeableness, and perhaps their Conscientiousness is the deciding factor if they might make it (like Stalin who assiduously read and worked until the very end) or not (Nero and Hitler). Also, note that villains with heavy psychopathology like schizophrenia have delusions which cloud their judgement and sometimes act as the reagent in their self-fulfilling prophesies. In conclusion, I can only add that villains are actually weak personalities, personalities that never fully developed and never discovered their balance, always looking to prop up their vulnerable egos. Do not be afraid of villains – they are more afraid of you than you think. Do not challenge them because they love to feel the victim and that gives them the aggressive motivation to fight you. Instead ally with other people and show the villain that you are to get him, the paranoia will do the rest.

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Birt, R. (1993). Personality and foreign policy: The case of Stalin.?Political Psychology, 14(4), 607-625.

Blair, J., Mitchell, D., & Blair, K. (2005). The psychopath: Emotion and the brain. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Caspi, A., McClay, J., Moffitt, T. E., Mill, J., Martin, J., Craig, I. W., ... & Poulton, R. (2002). Role of genotype in the cycle of violence in maltreated children.?Science,?297(5582), 851-854.

Cleckley H. M. (1941/1976). The mask of sanity: An attempt to clarify some issues about the so-called psychopathic personality. C. V. Mosby Co.

Coolidge, F. L., Davis, F. L., & Segal, D. L. (2007). Understanding madmen: A DSM-IV assessment of Adolf Hitler.?Individual Differences Research,?5(1), 30-43.

Decuyper, M., De Pauw, S., De Fruyt, F., De Bolle, M., & De Clercq, B. J. (2009). A meta‐analysis of psychopathy‐, antisocial PD‐and FFM associations.?European Journal of Personality,?23(7), 531-565.

Langer, W. C. (1943/1972). The mind of Adolf Hitler. New York, NY: Basic Books

Lynam, D. R., Caspi, A., Moffitt, T. E., Raine, A., Loeber, R., & Stouthamer-Loeber, M. (2005). Adolescent psychopathy and the Big Five: Results from two samples. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 33(4), 431-443.

Murray, H. A. (1943). Analysis of the personality of Adolf Hitler with predictions of his future behavior and suggestions for dealing with him now and after Germany’s surrender. A report prepared for the Office of Strategic Services. Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/AnalysisOfThePersonalityOfAdolphHitler

Roberts, J. (2022). Stalin’s library: A dictator and his books. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Tucker, R. C. (1990). Stalin in power. New York, NY: W. W. Norton.

[1] Excuse me for the frivolous language though. In science, we do not use the word mad anymore, as it is derived of any concrete meaning and is offensive. But I used it for these three people to underscore the severity of their psychopathies.