Putin ‘a great illustration of how power-hungry monsters’ overstay their welcome

Many people couldn’t imagine meeting for drinks with the daughter of a dictator who was notorious for feeding dissidents to crocodiles. But for Brian Klaas, it’s all in a day’s work.

Klaas has long been interested in the topic of power and its abuse. He researched it for his PhD dissertation, and currently discusses it in podcasts and writes about it as a Washington Post columnist. Now he has a new book out about the subject, “Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us,” published by Scribner.

“All the available evidence points in one direction,” Klaas writes in the book. “Becoming powerful makes you more selfish, reduces empathy, increases hypocrisy, and makes you more likely to commit abuse.” Citing a well-known observation, he continues, “Lord Acton was right: power does tend to corrupt.”

“Sometimes people become bad because they’re in power,” Klaas told The Times of Israel over Zoom. “Sometimes bad people get into power. Sometimes people in power face impossible choices and do bad things because the alternatives are also bad. It’s important to accurately diagnose which is which. It’s important to understand why something is happening if you’re going to make it preventable in the future.”

The book has become more timely since the eruption of the Russia-Ukraine conflict — and the subsequent crackdown on Russian oligarchs by the United States and Europe.

“Putin stays in power thanks to the oligarchs,” Klaas said in a follow-up email. “If they turn on him, he’s in trouble.”

“For much of the last several decades, Western governments have been complicit in allowing those oligarchs to gallivant around the world — sending their kids to elite Western schools, funneling their corrupt cash through offshore banks, buying property and visas in Western capitals, and vacationing in their super-yachts on the Mediterranean. The best way to pressure Putin is to make the lives of those oligarchs more ‘Russian,’” he said.

Putin is ‘a great illustration of how power-hungry monsters are so adept at getting into power and overstaying their welcome’

“Of course,” Klaas added, “much of ‘Corruptible’ applies to Putin more directly — he’s a great illustration of how power-hungry monsters are so adept at getting into power and overstaying their welcome.”

A Minnesotan now based at University College London, where he is a professor of global politics, Klaas says his book “Corruptible” uniquely approaches the subject through nearly 10 separate disciplines, from anthropology to psychology. And it incorporates real stories of people who abused their power — from heads of state to one particularly power-hungry head of a homeowners association.

“I was just going to take information wherever I could get it, if it had some relevance,” Klaas said.

He wrote about an eyebrow-raising study that “suggests that there are about 20 times more psychopaths in corporate leadership than in the general population,” and said that in business and politics, there is an overrepresentation of a psychological term called the dark triad — narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy.

When it came to former United States president Donald Trump, who was the subject of many an armchair diagnosis, Klaas was somewhat measured.

“Psychopathy is a clinical diagnosis,” he said. “I’m not a clinical psychologist, I cannot say. I can certainly say he’s a narcissistic, Machiavellian figure. He’s clearly driven by ego, clearly a strategic-figure, end-justifies-the-means sort of guy.”

And, he added, “The broader lesson is that there’s an overrepresentation of a certain personality type — good at getting power, bad at wielding it.”

Klaas started thinking about power while growing up in Minnesota. He describes the Land of 10,000 Lakes as an idyllic venue characterized by the “Minnesota nice” stereotype and a relatively peaceful political scene. His family has had its share of achievement in state politics — his mother successfully ran for school committee, and Klaas himself helped manage Democrat Mark Dayton’s winning campaign for governor. However, Klaas wondered about places that didn’t have such squeaky-clean systems, whether in the US or internationally.

“I wrote my PhD on broken authority systems — the rise of authoritarianism, political violence, civil wars, coups,” he said. “I interviewed some pretty awful people in the process, about how those people ended up in power.”

To write “Corruptible,” Klaas called on his interviewing skills once more. The inside cover notes that the book is based upon “hundreds of interviews with some of the world’s top leaders — from the noblest to the dirtiest — including presidents and philanthropists as well as cult leaders, terrorists, and dictators.”

In Bangkok, he met for coffee with Abhisit Vejjajiva, a former Thai prime minister who presided over a violent 2010 crackdown on protests; Klaas estimates the death toll at 99. Traveling to Paris, he went to a bistro for drinks with Marie-France Bokassa, the daughter of the late Central African Republic dictator — and briefly emperor — Jean-Bedel Bokassa.

“Her dad fed dissidents to crocodiles,” Klaas said. “There were allegations he served human flesh to a visiting dignitary from France, that he was a cannibal. When she was growing up, he was quite a monstrous dictator.” He called their present-day rendezvous “an illuminating experience. She spoke fondly in some ways about her father, one of the worst regarded tyrants in African political life.”

In Switzerland, he visited Ma Anand Sheela, who now runs an adult care home but in the 1980s was the power behind the throne in an alleged Oregon sex cult called the Rajneeshees. In that capacity, Sheela became the worst bioterrorist in American history, poisoning just under 1,000 people and allegedly plotting to rig a county election, conduct assassinations and weaponize HIV. Unlike his meeting with Bokassa, when Klaas visited Sheela, he declined a drink — in this case, a glass of water offered by a nurse.

Surprisingly, he said, “When I flew out to visit [Sheela]she was kind and warm, a 70-year-old, five-foot-tall lady with gray hair. It was hard to juxtapose with court transcripts of poisonings and assassination attempts. That experience was something I experienced a lot of times in personal encounters with someone like [that] on an individual level. I found them charming, sometimes funny. They had done remarkably monstrous things.”

He opens the book with the rise and fall of another interviewee — Marc Ravalomanana, a yogurt entrepreneur who became president of Madagascar. Initially governing as a reformer, his downfall was hastened after purchasing a presidential aircraft with state funds.

Klaas calls Ravalomanana “a perfect case study,” whose example might have been instructive for another former head of state — Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

“The longer you’re in power — this also applies to Netanyahu — you start to think you can game the system more,” Klaas said. “There’s a lot of evidence that the longer someone’s in power, the more they think they can get away with things. All the corruption allegations, all the scandals, are very often correlated to time in power.”

Even as he interviewed individuals who had served at the highest levels of power, the author kept his eye out for accounts of people who were similarly power-hungry on a smaller scale.

“I wanted to show the effects around power applied from the smallest stages of power to the biggest,” Klaas said. “There may be more direct consequences if you’re a dictator, but the underlying personality types may be similar.”

As he noted, “I would be telling people about it in my social life — friends and family. They’d say, ‘It’s just like my old boss, my homeowners’ association head, totally drunk [on power].’”

Intrigued, he posted on a Reddit homeowners’ association forum that he was researching a book on power and abuse, and looking for interesting stories. He got hundreds of responses on the thread.

“One stood out,” Klaas said. “He spent two hours ranting about his experience with this guy. I said, this story is perfect… It’s a real story. I changed the names — I did not want a defamation suit.”

However, he said, “this tyrant from the homeowners association in Arizona, if he was actually a dictator, he would probably be a monster.”