In psychology, there is a thing called a personality disorder. A personality disorder is not some kind of chemical imbalance, nor does it (necessarily) result from abuse or trauma. Rather, a personality disorder is exactly what it sounds like: someone whose very personality is twisted and dysfunctional, due to some deep flaw. Personality disorders are divided into subsets called "clusters", and these clusters are named with letters. One of those clusters is the so-called "cluster B", which includes the antisocial, borderline, histrionic, and, finally, narcissistic personalities. The narcissistic personality, in particular, is relevant here. The Mayo Clinic website lists the symptoms of narcissistic personality as:
Belief that you're special and more important than others
Fantasies about power, success and attractiveness
Failure to recognize others' needs and feelings
Exaggeration of achievements or talents
Expectation of constant praise and admiration
Arrogance
Unreasonable expectations of favors and advantages, often taking advantage of others
Envy of others or belief that others envy you
It seems to me that Mao was not just a narcissist, but maybe the single most pure narcissist in the historical record. He's not just a narc. He's the arch-narc. Prior to reading this excellent biography, I thought that Josef Stalin was the worst person in history. Nope. Mao has him beat by miles. If this book were not so well-sourced and researched, and if it did not generously quote Mao's own words, I would dismiss it as propaganda. If you wrote a novel with a villain based on Mao, and then tried to publish it, the publisher would probably reject it for having an unrealistic villain. Mao isn't just evil. He's almost cartoonishly evil.
Let me quote Mao as he's quoted in the book, with some bold text added for emphasis. The following, if read out loud with extra emphasis on the bolded words, gives a clear impression of what sort of person Mao was.
I do not agree with the view that to be moral, the motive of one’s action has to be benefitting others. Morality does not have to be defined in relation to others…People like me want to…satisfy our hearts to the full, and in so doing so we automatically have the most valuable moral codes. Of course there are people and objects in the world, but they are all there only for me.
People like me have a duty to ourselves; we have no duty to other people.. I am responsible only for the reality that I know, and absolutely not responsible for anything else. I don’t know about the past, I don’t know about the future. They have nothing to do with the reality of my own self…Some say one has a responsibility for history. I don’t believe it. I am only concerned about developing myself…I have my desire and act on it. I am responsible to no one.
Without knowing who Mao was, this quotation gives the impression of being merely infantile. If I found this in a sixteen-year-old boy's journal, I would dismiss it as adolescent self-centeredness. I would say to myself, "Oh, he'll grow out of it." Mao, however, did not grow out of this. Instead, he slaughtered over 100 million people by means of starvation, warfare, genocide, torture, and ideological purges. Entire cities were nearly wiped out. People turned to cannibalism and ate one another. Dissenters, or just people whose faces Mao didn't like, were dragged out and forced to participate in struggle sessions and then brutally killed.
Mao, meanwhile, lived a life of luxury that puts American oligarchs to shame. He had lavish palaces built across China and then never even visited many of them. He was obsessed with controlling nuclear weapons, but needed to pay the Soviets for the materials and expertise to build them. He paid the USSR in grain, stolen from his own peasants, many of whom were worked to death. Millions of peasants starved to death because their food was stolen to pay for nuclear missiles that China didn't even need. All because Mao needed to control nuclear weapons to satiate his lust for power.
On top of being malicious, he was also grossly incompetent. People tend not to labor as effectively when they're emaciated and half-dead from malnutrition. The harder he squeezed the Chinese peasantry, the more they starved; the more they starved, the less they produced; the less they produced, the harder he squeezed; the harder he squeezed, the more they starved. Mao wasted thousands of hours of labor on frivolous projects, such as artificial mountains to stop a Soviet invasion. The artificial mountains never came even close to completion and the Soviets never invaded. In the end, his maniacal pursuit of superpower status for China (really, superpower status for himself) wound up destroying China and producing very little of value. What advances were made were made in spite of Mao's efforts, not because of them. The one virtue Mao did have was the virtue that makes a good bureaucrat: manipulation.
To wrap this up, I want to tell you a little story. There's an episode of The Twilight Zone where a small child is granted supernatural powers and uses them to control all the adults around him. As you'd predict with a little kid, he acts like a psychopath and terrorizes everyone. The concept behind that episode is this: what would happen if you took someone with all the egocentric self-interestedness of a small child, and gave them absolute power? The answer is that they would become a tyrant. That's who Mao was. A case study in what happens when you give power to a grown-up baby.
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