Are Dictators psychopaths ?

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I seem to think it is easy to say that people like Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein etc are psychopaths without actually knowing what they were really like and how their minds worked. I remember watching a history programme once which was called Ancients Behaving Badly and it looked into the lives of ancient historical figures like Julius Caesar, Caligula, Alexander the Great, Nero, and Genghis Khan and ranked them on a psycho-graph whether they were goal-driven or insane. Caesar and Khan were both goal-driven in their behaviour as was Alexander although is was both goal-driven and quite psychotic and Caligula was as usual ranked as psychopathic even though the real Caligula may not have been as mad as we think he was. Same with Nero, he was both goal-driven and psychotic and seem to have a showman-like personality and was possibly narcissistic but the doctor on the documentary said there was no evidence that he was suffering from hallucinations or delusions.

it is a safe bet to assume a majority of those big bad men were psychopathic.

Yeah....Hitler was "goal-driven," all right.

His goal was to exterminate non-Aryans.....

One probably needs better emotional regulation than the average psychopath to rise to and maintain power, unless it's handed to them already secured like under a monarchy.

There's probably lots of dictators who possess some traits associated with those personalities but they'd have to not possess or successfully manage other traits.

A dictator would rather have a psychopath immediately under them that they can take 'off the leach' so to speak as a threat, but that person on their own would only have a short, unstable and and unsuccessful time in power were they to somehow end up in power.

Yep....dictators must, at least, maintain a veneer of public sanity.

Blame all the truly bad stuff on an underling.

Public, but also among those underlings.

If the boss seems like an irrational actor putting everyone at risk for no worthwhile benefit there's a good chance an underling with stronger survival instincts will move to ensure their own survival, even if that means the boss has a regrettable accident and is left a martyr to the cause.

A lot of dictators are megalomaniacs.

Idk. I used to think the world was broke down into distinct categories of people/personality disorders. It's not always so black and white as that.

I think you're right to be skeptical about that. There's a lot of reasons people might be motivated to do bad things, so to assume that everyone who does a certain bad thing must have a certain disorder is generally not very accurate.

I remember a page I looked at about history's dictators and it said on there that we often think of dictators as ''criminals'' even though they are not really as they are above the law and they themselves make the laws.

Interestingly the so-called light triad isn't highly anti-correlated with the dark triad, suggesting that it's not unlikely that a person might possess both sets of traits (humanism, Kantianism, and faith in humanity alongside narcissism, Machiavellianism and anti-social tendencies).

There's also discussion that sadism is the missing fourth element from the dark triad, making it a tetrad instead.