Don’t hand power to dangerous people (even when they really want it) — a modest Buddhist proposal

We are living in a time of transition. History is taking a new turn. Vladimir Putin has, at a minimum, reignited the cold war, and thermonuclear Armageddon is back on the list of imminent possibilities.

What makes these calamities uncanny is that they seem to emerge from one man’s bizarre, idiosyncratic ambition. While Russians elected him and seem to admire his strength, they surely don’t want an unhinged autocrat who is callous about their welfare and cavalier about the risk his actions pose to their lives and wellbeing. It is clear they made a mistake. They were fooled.

Buddhism teaches that we are all subject to distorting biases of many kinds, which prevent us from acting in our own best interests. One of the most consequential delusions in politics is the craving for the security of a strong leader, even a ruthless one, in times of instability. Another Buddhist principle is impermanence — that things are always changing, always uncertain. It often seems like plain sense to seek refuge with the strongest man around. And, of course, sometimes it is. Yet ruthlessness and brutality, effective as they can be in competitive situations, are misleadingly attractive qualities. They are evidence of a serious disorder of the mind, which is tied to failure of the central Buddhist virtues of heedfulness and compassion.

If your protector’s compassion and heedfulness are offline, he’s not fundamentally committed to protecting you. Rather, he’s using you for his own personal ends. This means that, while he might be protecting you today, tomorrow he might turn around and throw you in the fire. Furthermore, if his heedfulness and compassion are blocked, he is untouched by social norms that would prevent him from lying to you and manipulating you. He will know that you support him because of your fear — so, instead of addressing your concerns, he is likely to exaggerate them and exacerbate them in order to maintain your support.

Although sociopaths should be kept out of power because of the danger they present to society, their peculiar combination of manipulation and ruthlessness ironically favours them to succeed in business and politics. What can be done to counter this? Normal social checks on destructive behaviours do not restrain people who lack the ability to experience shame and remorse. We need more widespread understanding of how to assess capacities for compassion, heedfulness, and shame, and we need formal requirements so that a propensity to anti-social behaviour disqualifies a leader in society.

I do not think that we should punish people for their psychological disorders and limitations, and people should certainly be given every opportunity to heal and grow. But a society has the right to keep its members from harming themselves and others. Every citizen should understand the dangers of anger and manipulation, but, unfortunately, knowing about it does not stop the cycle. A more certain intervention would be a constitutional requirement that persons who stand for elective office undergo a formal psychological examination. Governments define psychological competency for witnesses and can require mental health screenings for military service and many specific jobs (pilots, for instance). Why not for candidates, as a check on voters’ susceptibility to demagoguery? It could also be a key assessment for management, especially executive status, in major corporations and other large institutions. Human resources, are you listening?

It might seem odd to think that psychological tests could be used to reveal what we ordinarily think of as moral traits. Yet, for Buddhists, moral failings are the result of the mental “defilements” of greed, hatred, and selfish self-delusion, all of which distort our moral perceptions. And modern psychology agrees with Buddhism that compassion, heedfulness, and shame appear naturally in a healthy mind, whereas their opposites and the anti-social behaviours that result from them are evidence of mental disorder. At the extreme end of the scale are the symptoms associated with anti-social personality disorder (ASPD), which ought to be out of bounds for an elected official but read to the untrained like a character description of Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin. A full ASPD diagnosis should be sufficient to preclude candidacy, but it should not be necessary. Extensive evidence of shamelessness, heedlessness, and callous disregard for social norms ought to be disqualifying, given the danger to society such traits pose in executives, especially those who control massive armies and nuclear weapons.

In 2017 Bandy X. Lee led a large group of mental health experts who broke with traditional protocols by speaking publicly about Donald Trump, whom they considered a danger to society — not giving a formal psychological evaluation but enacting a trained professional’s “duty to warn” in cases of evident, imminent danger. These were, and remain, controversial pronouncements, because psychologists are prevented from speaking about public figures’ mental health (the so-called “Goldwater Rule” of the American Psychiatric Association). Yet they accurately predicted that Trump would neglect public health, escalate violent extremism, disrespect legal guardrails and resist returning power at the close of his term. And they petitioned for a formal examination, which would have made the controversy irrelevant. Clearly, if Trump would not share his taxes, he would not sit for a psychological examination. It must be a constitutional requirement.

This is not a radical proposal. Although religions and ethical systems diverge on matters great and small, there is widespread (though not universal) convergence around pro-social values such as justice, truth-telling, compassion, and not murdering innocents. While viewed from the outside, religions compete with one another, internally they display evidence of parallel struggles to contain and counter those among us who lack empathy, and to elevate those who excel in it. Buddhist meditation, for instance, directly counters the distorting biases that occlude empathy and lead to anti-social behaviours. Important as it is to identify individual people who suffer from empathy failure, Buddhists deny that people are essentially ill or not. People become mentally ill and are capable of healing. Our current competitive structures exacerbate anti-social mental illness; fixing compassion and heedfulness among the conditions for success would incentivise ambitious people to take up meditation and other therapies that are known to counter it.

It will be difficult to implement such a change in active constitutions. There must be checks to prevent corruption and bias in the assessment of electoral candidates’ mental health. But given the truth of impermanence, there are many opportunities to try it. New constitutions are implemented all the time — over fifty since the year 2000. After Putin’s reign comes to an end, Russia will need one. The cycle of fear, brutality, and manipulation that exacerbates instability and elevates those who lack empathy is among the key causes of government failure. If we cannot figure out how to control it, our current global civilisation will fall. But there will probably, eventually be another. It’s nice to imagine that it might be run exclusively by people with a healthy capacity to care for others.

Roger Waters, frontman for Pink Floyd, once proposed “The Fletcher Memorial Home for Incurable Tyrants and Kings”, where “wasters of life and limb” could be taken away. He envisioned them playing their games of life and death without harming the rest of us, having fancy parties and performing for one another on closed circuit television. If there is a future, perhaps our descendants will look back with incredulity on times when anti-social behaviour was systematically rewarded. In the meantime, we have work to do, to curb the causes of destruction.

Jonathan C. Gold is Professor in the Department of Religion and Director of the Center for Culture, Society, and Religion at Princeton University.