"I think that the intoxication of power is probably the single biggest challenge for the world at the moment, right up there with climate change," says Professor of psychology Ian Robinson of Trinity College, Dublin. When the holder of a powerful office projects his “unbridled intuition” onto the world at large, it is time for drastic action. Will South African Members of Parliament rise to the occasion and impeach disgraced President Jacob Zuma?
“We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.”
— Rabbi Shemuel ben Nachmani, as quoted in the Talmudic tractate Berakhot (55b.)
The Gall-Peters cartographic projection of the earth (on the right) tries to correct the Mercator projection (on the left) in which Africa, South America, the Pacific tropical island nations and Australasia are depicted as being far smaller than they actually are. Based on the actual measured surface area of countries it is in fact possible to fit several large countries into the boundaries of Africa, as this map shows. [map below]
Presumably President Jacob Zuma has become aware of this and wants to make the point that Africans have got a raw deal in the way in which not only geographers, but also historians, theologians, economists, and other Western academic disciplines have represented Africa.
His after-dinner speech to a gathering of business leaders from Africa in December 2015 tried to correct the multi-disciplinary injustices. “This continent is the biggest in the world,” he said. “It is not even separated by a river. Rivers that flow through the continent, they don’t cut it into a half, or a quarter. All continents put together will fit into Africa.”
Where are South America, Antarctica, Australia and Russia?
He departed from his prepared script to ad-lib, and the SABC news producer decided to stay with the live crossing to feature the full speech live, presumably expecting that he would explain his decision to fire Nhlanhla Nene and appoint Des van Rooyen to the pivotal post of finance Minister. A strap line told us the “Breaking news: President Zuma replaces Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene”. However Zuma said not a word about that, leaving chance viewers bemused and wondering what the strapline on the screen had to do with him saying “We must reverse what happened in the past. What is the real power that you can choose? Hey? You can have political power and starve to death with it. Political power is driven by those who have economic power.”
He had a few hours before wielded his political power to prove the inverse point. Political power misdirected can very quickly kybosh economic power. The Rand went into a tailspin.
He seems to have been aware that he had crossed a Rubicon threshold and needed to present himself as a statesman, an intellectual and a bold leader. He has an intuition that there was a problem, but massively projects it onto Western cultural imperialism, slavery and economic subjugation. Unfortunately the task was beyond his cognitive capacity. It was so cringingly embarrassing that it is hard to watch. It is not a speech that will be remembered for its intellectual, scientific content. (Watch it here https://youtu.be/M2XYp4lg5MQ,) However, given the literature on the acquired personality disorder known as the Hubris Syndrome, it was profoundly revealing as a window into his “unbridled intuition” - a mental state of mind described by researchers into hubris as “an unconscious transition from an intuition that something ‘feels right’ to an unjustified belief that the same something ‘is right’.”
British veteran politician and neurologist Lord David Owen posits that a leader who wields too much power for too long is susceptible to acquiring the Hubris Syndrome. Owen is a medical doctor who specialised in neurology before entering politics and has now in his latter career pioneered a new field of mental health diagnostics of political leaders with US psychiatrist Dr Jonathan Davidson. This article gives the gist. http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/132/5/1396,
Hubristic incompetence is a result of chemical imbalances in cognitive function after sustained exposure to the neuro-chemical effect of continuous secretions of neuro-transmitters that produce a change in personality leading to the concomitant risk of the leader making irrational, impulsive and reckless decisions that can have catastrophic consequences. Notably the neurotransmitter dopamine works in the feel-good “reward centre” of the brain and is stoked up by more money, more sex and more power. That explains Henry Kissinger’s famous line “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac”. Flagging libido can be remedied by a pay-rise. A weak erection can be treated by a strong election. Lord Acton’s famous 19th Century dictum “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” might in modern parlance be rendered “politicians and CEO’s who hold too much power for too long are prone to become too high on their own juice.”
“But” warns Trinity College professor of psychology Ian Robertson “while we badly need leaders who can withstand the stresses of their job, over the last 1,000 years’ human beings have gradually come to realise that power is a double-edged sword. Yes, it emboldens and de-stresses leaders, even making them smarter. But if unconstrained or too long in duration, power almost inevitably begins to distort brain function leading to impaired judgment, delusions of indispensability, risk-blindness and emotional callousness”.
Owen concurs. There is a dark side to the profile of successful leaders: “impetuosity, a refusal to listen to or take advice and a particular form of incompetence when impulsivity, recklessness and frequent inattention to detail predominate. This can result in disastrous leadership and cause damage on a large scale.” Sustaining the dopamine effect risks an addiction to power. Power is the pusher of the drug. The more intense the addiction the more likely it is that moral constraint and prudent risk management will be dispensed with.
Within the power caucus that the individual commands, a self-reinforcing ‘groupthink’ distorts reality to turn ‘beneficiaries’ into ‘victims’. In this situation, the blind spots of their leader don’t show up as dark patches. If they do, the surrounding minions deny their very existence.
One way of conveying the gravity of the problem is to borrow an analogy from popular science writer Jared Diamond’s book “Collapse: How societies choose to Fail or Succeed”. A large dam is structurally unsound and could collapse at any moment. If one were to ask people downstream how anxious they felt about a collapse of the dam wall, predictably those farthest away would feel least anxious. The anxiety level would increase as one moves closer to the dam wall, until one gets to those who are living immediately below the dam wall. Diamond says they are not concerned at all.
It is known as a ‘scotoma’ – a psychological blind spot that the mind creates as a defence mechanism when the truth is simply too unbearable to face. In South Africa all of us are just below the unsafe dam wall because we are all dependent upon the Cabinet to exercise effective leadership to do something about the worsening crisis.
So, has Jacob Zuma become ‘mad’?
“The history of madness is the history of power”, wrote Roy Porter in A social history of madness: Stories of the Insane. “Because it imagines power, madness is both impotence and omnipotence. It requires power to control it. Threatening the normal structures of authority, insanity is engaged in an endless dialogue—a monomaniacal monologue sometimes— about power”.
Others, including social and moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt (and all those who long for the day for Zuma to have his day in court to face corruption charges) would conclude, “no, not mad but bad’.
“We lie, cheat and cut ethical corners when we think we can get away with it, and then we use our moral thinking to manage our reputations and justify ourselves to others. We believe our own post hoc reasoning so thoroughly that we end up self-righteously convinced of our own virtue”.
They would say that even if Zuma had acquired the personality disorder, he still had some volitional control over it, and that if his personality showed marked changes those who cared about him and cared for him (his physician) would bring him to his senses.
But it gets worse. Blend in another insight from social psychology, the Dunning-Kruger effect: 'Professor' Google explains.
“The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias wherein relatively unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to accurately evaluate their own ability level.”
John Cleese has a less refined explanation. https://youtu.be/wvVPdyYeaQU, “The problem with stupid people is that they don’t have enough intelligence to realise how stupid they are.” A bit simplistic. It is not about stupidity, but intelligence hermetically sealed into a self reinforcing 'group think'.
In the latest publication in the Hubris Syndrome literature titled The Intoxication of Power: Interdisciplinary Insights, two of the contributors (Malmendier and Tate) make an observation, which has a very, VERY alarming resonance with the findings of Dunning and Kruger. They pursue a line of inquiry which addresses the long-established and robust observation that top decision makers “persistently overestimate their own skills relative to others and, as a result, are too optimistic about the outcomes of their decisions”.
“The tendency towards hubris is usually present in individuals who see themselves as being immune from failure, and where failure does occur, such individuals attribute its causes to external factors that “are out of their control”. Even more worryingly, hubristic pride, if unchecked, can cement a narcissistic personality more firmly into place in the upper echelons of organisations.”
From the findings of Dunning-Kruger, high functioning and well educated people, (by contrast to those on the other end of the spectrum) tend to under estimate their own abilities relative to the assessment that their peers would make. Ordinarily one would expect leaders who rise to the upper echelons of an organisation to be high functioning, and thus less inclined to hubris. Clearly there is a subset of educated, high functioning people whose characteristic behaviour tends toward the “metacognitive inability of the unskilled to accurately evaluate their own ability level”. To put it crudely, they show the same self-deceiving, illusory tendency that stupid people display, however they get away with it because they hold power and control.
The implication is alarming. Very alarming. The synergy between the general hubristic incompetence of the ANC power caucus and the specific Dunning-Kruger/unbridled intuition malady of Jacob Zuma is producing the worst of all possible scenarios. Most in the inner caucus of the ANC seem to be blinded by the Zuma Projection. The NEC have now helped Zuma back onto the saddle of his high horse – his exaggerated self-belief, moral rectitude and belief that his interests are identical to the interests of the Nation and continent. Secretary General Gwede Mantashe says it is sufficient that President Zuma has apologised for misunderstanding the constitution. But the hubristic tendencies of the Speaker of the House, Baleka Mbete sheild him. It is not for the ANC only to accept the apology. The nation needs to do so. There can be little doubt that if the electorate as whole could vote directly for President Zuma he would be turfed out of office, apologies notwithstanding. Can thoughtful and concerned ANC MP's see that? It is true that "it is hard to understand something if your paycheck depends on you NOT understanding it", as Upton Sinclair once trenchantly observed. It is 'hard' but not impossible.
Fortunately, we have a constitution that anticipated the scenario of a president that is unable to perform the duties of his office. He can be removed if two thirds of the House of Assembly vote to do so.
Before anyone laughs it off as impossible, consider the following excerpt from Malmendier and Tate’s chapter in The Intoxication of Power. They are not referring to Jacob Zuma, but if they are correct there can be little doubt that it is very necessary for ANC MP’s to consider their options very carefully.
“The pathologies of power are disorders of position and are perceptual. They involve an almost psychotic loss of contact with reality and cannot be characterised merely as ‘wilful blindness,’ or as one big self-serving lie. We observe this perceptual disorder when the corrupt and distended leader speaks to camera. He is not lying when he says he is uniquely qualified to lead and that he alone is all that holds us from disorder. He really believes it. It is this last symptom, the lack of awareness, which makes the pathologies of power so hard to treat. As Freud pointed out, there can be no therapy with narcissists, for they lack the very capacity for insight. It is an understatement to say that the tyrant also lacks the motivation to engage in Cognitive Behaviour Therapy and is, indeed, more likely to shoot the one who suggests it, but the point is that the symptoms –the shrinking world; the cognitive separation; the immunisation against learning –all become so pronounced that they are untreatable by psychiatry and in need of some more political solution.”
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Further reading and references.
Owen, David. The Hubris Syndrome: Bush, Blair & the Intoxication of Power. Methuen Publishing Ltd (2012).
Garrard, Peter and Robinson, Graham (eds). The Intoxication of Power: Interdisciplinary Insights. Palgrave Macmillan (October 27, 2015).
MacSuibhne, Seamus P. What makes “a new mental illness”?: The cases of solastalgia and hubris syndrome. in Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Vol 5, No 2 (2009) http://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/143/261,
