My book, A Good Look at Evil, doesn’t describe the best-known bad actors in human history. The cases I deal with are mostly of near-contemporaries. And, when dictators are discussed, it’s usually through their effects on people who executed their orders.

If now I consider some of the best-known modern dictators, it seems that they tended to provide rationales for what they did, namely gather up into their own hands most of the powers of the body politic. 

Twentieth-century dictators like Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy or Franco in Spain, each claimed to be acting in support of their people as potential players on the world stage. Their rationales might reference biological race like Hitler, or cultural glories like Mussolini, or faith inmixed with ultra-conservative traditions like Franco.

If we were to visit a still-earlier era, there is Napoleon. He aimed to emulate Roman heroes – a visit to his home in Malmaison shows an obsession with classical motifs – but he did end feudalism where his conquests permitted – and he did that in the name of the French Revolution’s liberté and égalité. 

In these cases at least, dictators provided themselves with rationales that went beyond merely personal lust for power. Ostensibly at least, they took power in the name of causes that went beyond themselves. 

* * *

But now let’s imagine a would-be tyrant of a different type. Let’s suppose an ambitious person whose motivations are hard to figure out because he comes equipped with experiences gained from a succession of earlier lifetimes spent as one tyrant after another, in life after life.

What might our imaginary person have learned from his earlier experiences? Could it be that, in previous despotic lives, his hold on power was undermined by his clinging to the rationales – whatever they might have been – that he’d found useful in coming to power? 

Here’s an example of such self-undermining by a tyrant’s impractical clinging to a previous ideological rationale. In the last year of the Nazi regime, resources badly needed at the battlefront continued to be diverted to carrying out the Holocaust – Hitler’s fanatical project of murdering Jewish men, women and children because they did not fit into his preferred racial categories. This was a striking case of ideology replacing strategic clear-sightedness.

Now picture our imaginary would-be tyrant who’s learned the lessons of his previous tyrannical lives. What lessons would those be? Hey, if power is what you want, keep it unmixed. Don’t dilute it by taking on extra baggage! Keep eyes on the prize! Dump the rationales!

I suppose that most people who go after power are – at least to begin with – responding to some hidden agenda, of which they themselves might be unconscious. Perhaps years ago they wanted to get back at some bully at school. Or a sibling who took the parental love they felt should have been theirs alone. I imagine that most people whose aim in life is power must at least have begun with some underlying aim for which power was merely the means.

Now back to the would-be reincarnated tyrant of our hypothesis. Up to now, we’ve supposed that most people who devoted themselves to amassing power at least began with a hidden agenda – perhaps hidden to themselves as well. 

By contrast, our imaginary tyrant who has learned the lessons of his previous incarnations will want nothing but power itself. Since a type like that would be quite unusual, he will not be well understood. 

If he were not well understood –

he’d be a lot harder to stop.

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