“It is a curious thing, Harry, but perhaps those who are best suited to wield power are those who have never sought it. Those who are forced to assume leadership, accept it because they must, and discover, to their own surprise, that they wield it well.” Albus Dumbledore.
Contemporary societies tend to explain political violence, extreme inequality, and the erosion of social peace by resorting to two conceptual shortcuts that are equally insufficient. The first consists in attributing these phenomena to a supposed “human nature” that is inevitably selfish, competitive, and violent. The second, more reassuring one, consists in reducing the problem to exceptionally cruel individual figures, treating them as moral anomalies or isolated pathologies, without questioning the structural conditions that select, legitimize, and amplify them.
This essay proposes a different thesis. Massive political harm is not an expression of humanity as a whole nor the product of mental illness in the clinical sense, but rather the result of the capture of power by anomalous character structures, minoritarian, rigid, and devoid of empathic restraint. These structures manifest primarily in two configurations: Identitarian Greed and Closed Fanaticism. Both are compatible with high levels of functional intelligence, both can operate within legality, and both produce a persistent alteration of social peace.
This is not an attempt to moralize desire or to deny competition, ambition, or differentiation. It is an effort to understand why certain configurations of character, when they gain access to power, systematically produce cruelty, dehumanization, and social destruction, while others, in equally demanding contexts, do not.
Wanting more is not greed
A first distinction is indispensable. Wanting more is not in itself problematic. Human desire can legitimately be oriented toward expansion, creation, enjoyment, security, or the realization of vital projects. One can want more because something is liked, because it is useful, because it is enjoyed, because it is needed, or because it allows an idea to be sustained. In these cases, desire has an object, it has meaning, and it can stop.
There can be abundant, even excessive, accumulation without greed. A person who loves clothes, makeup, books, musical instruments, sports objects, or stamps may accumulate a great deal without their identity depending on exclusive possession. The object matters for what it is or for what it allows. It can be shared, given away, or even lost without the self fracturing.
Greed is something else.
Greed is not defined by quantity, but by the structure of the relationship with the object. The coveted object does matter, but not for its use or its meaning, but for two exclusive reasons: it matters because it is mine, or it matters because I want it to be mine. Value does not reside in the object, but in the act of appropriation. To have is equivalent to being. Wanting to have is equivalent to promising oneself that being.
This is why greed is never satisfied. Not because the world is insufficient, but because no thing can sustain an identity constructed exclusively through possession. Each acquisition produces a momentary relief that quickly fades. The greedy person does not seek satisfaction; they seek confirmation. And confirmation, when it depends on having, is structurally unstable.
Greed, psychopathy, and character
From an anthropological and clinical perspective, this structure does not represent the human norm. Most people seek stability, mutual recognition, meaningful bonds, and basic predictability. Greed, by contrast, is articulated as an identitarian fixation.
Kurt Schneider, in “Psychopathic Personalities”, offers a still-valid starting point: he does not define psychopathy as madness or mental illness, but as configurations of character that, by their way of being, cause others to suffer or cause themselves to suffer persistently. His psychopaths are lucid, functional, and often socially successful.
Contemporary anthropology and social psychology have deepened this intuition without medicalizing it. Research on traits of the so-called dark triad — narcissism, Machiavellianism, and subclinical psychopathy — shows that these profiles are not majoritarian, but are “disproportionately represented in positions of economic and political power.” Not because they are more intelligent, but because they better tolerate the absence of empathy, the instrumentalization of others, and the rupture of shared moral limits.
Greed, understood structurally, fits within this framework. It is not an occasional impulse, but an organization of the self. The coveted object sustains identity. The loss of the object amounts to an ontological threat. Sharing empties it of meaning. Defending it becomes an absolute imperative. The other is transformed into a resource, competitor, or obstacle.
Here a decisive trait appears: intelligence does not correct this structure; it executes it.
Intelligence in the service of character
Intelligence, on its own, is not ethical. It is a tool and/or an element of personality. When it governs character, it introduces reflection, limits, and the capacity for revision. But when it is placed at the service of a character fixed by greed or fanaticism, it becomes an accelerator of pathology.
In these cases, intelligence optimizes appropriation, calculates risks, anticipates resistance, neutralizes obstacles, and legitimizes harm through technical, legal, or ideological discourses. It introduces no moral doubt because there is no internal conflict. Success does not correct greed; it confirms it. Privilege eliminates external limits. Legality becomes an alibi.
That is why successful greed tends to encounter power.
Greed, fanaticism, and the alteration of social peace
Social peace is not a soft moral ideal nor a naive utopia. It is a material condition of possibility for any minimally stable human society. It implies basic trust, predictability, recognition of the other as a fellow being, and the reasonable expectation that conflict will not be systematically resolved through force or humiliation.
Psychopathic greed and psychopathic fanaticism are two structural disruptors of this condition. The former turns society into a field of extraction. The latter turns the world into a stage of permanent symbolic war.
In institutionalized greed, inequality ceases to be a problem to be corrected and becomes an organizing principle. Disposable populations, sacrificial territories, and expendable lives are normalized. Violence is not always visible, but it becomes structural.
In institutionalized fanaticism, absolutized identity demands permanent conflict. Peace becomes suspect, dissent becomes betrayal, the other becomes the enemy. Harm is not collateral; it is necessary.
Both structures share the absence of operative empathy. This is not emotional incapacity, but the structural irrelevance of others’ suffering in decision-making. When these configurations capture power, institutions cease to mediate and begin to dominate. Law is emptied of ethics. Coercion replaces legitimacy. Surveillance replaces trust.
Paradoxically, this erosion of social peace ends up affecting even those who seem to benefit from it. Power becomes harder and more fragile. Each decision requires more control, more preventive violence, more isolation. Political life turns into the permanent administration of chaos.
Trump and Netanyahu: two different configurations of political psychopathy
Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu should not be thought of as madmen or as simple villains. They are exceptional figures, anomalous in a statistical sense, not representative of average humanity. Both exercise real power and produce massive harm. But they do so from different configurations.
Trump embodies pure identitarian greed. His relationship with the world is possessive. Objects — money, power, women, institutions, countries, narratives — matter insofar as they confirm his self. He does not govern from an idea, but from a permanent need to win. Winning not in order to achieve something, but in order to exist.
Harm is not ideological; it is irrelevant. There is no internal conflict, no guilt, no symbolic limit. Intelligence is tactical, instrumental, at the service of character. Chaos does not bother him; he instrumentalizes it. Legality does not restrain him; he uses it.
Netanyahu, by contrast, is not driven by greed of the self, but by fanaticism of the idea. His axis is not immediate personal appropriation, but a closed, sacralized worldview: security, historical exceptionalism, permanent enemy. The world is divided into us, enemies, and the expendable.
Here intelligence is strategic, historical, and discursive, but subordinated to the absolutized idea. Harm is not an accident or excess; it is a condition of possibility of the project. Law becomes a tool. Violence is normalized. Peace is a threat.
Trump degrades. Netanyahu systematizes. Trump needs to win. Netanyahu needs to defeat. Both lack operative empathy, and both confirm that when greed or fanaticism encounters power, abnormality becomes collective destiny.
Non-psychopathic figures of power: examples of limit and resilience
Faced with these configurations, there are historical examples — not perfect models — that show another possible relationship between character, intelligence, and power.
Nelson Mandela governed South Africa after decades of apartheid and 27 years of imprisonment. In a country on the brink of civil war, he prioritized social peace as a condition of collective survival. His resilience consisted in not turning suffered harm into exercised domination.
Angela Merkel governed Germany, a central European power, facing successive crises without turning power into spectacle or identitarian loot. Her leadership was deliberative, self-limited, and oriented toward stability. Intelligence governed character.
José Mujica governed Uruguay after a biography marked by political violence. Instead of transforming power into narcissistic compensation, he symbolically deactivated it. Having did not found being. The adversary was not dehumanized.
Jacinda Ardern governed New Zealand, a small country without hegemonic ambitions, facing terrorism and a pandemic. She integrated empathy as political infrastructure. Her resilience was relational: she sustained the social bond under pressure.
These examples do not deny conflict nor idealize politics. They demonstrate that power does not require psychopathy, greed, or fanaticism.
Conclusions
Before any theoretical abstraction, greed and its logic have been narrated with brutal clarity for centuries. Few scenes show this with as much precision as the climax of “The Merchant of Venice” by William Shakespeare.
Antonio, the merchant, reaches that point not through malice or criminal imprudence, but through a chain of recognizable human decisions: trust, friendship, commercial risk. To help his friend Bassanio, he accepts a loan from Shylock, a moneylender marginalized and humiliated for years by Venetian society and publicly despised by Antonio himself. The contract is seemingly ironic, almost a joke: if the debt is not paid, Shylock may claim a pound of flesh from the merchant’s body.
The tragic turn occurs when Antonio’s ships are lost. The money does not arrive. The contract, however, remains valid. And Shylock demands its literal fulfillment.
The trial scene is unbearable in its psychological precision. There are no shouts. No emotional outburst. There is a surgical coldness that anticipates violence. Shylock does not demand money. He does not accept compensation. He does not negotiate. He wants the flesh.
The judge — who we later learn is Portia in disguise — tries to understand. He does not first appeal to the law, but to human reason. He asks why. Why insist on inflicting such disproportionate harm when he can receive the money multiplied. Why he wants that flesh.
Shylock’s answer is devastating in its moral nakedness. He offers no utilitarian reason. He invokes no justice. He appeals to no necessity. He simply affirms ownership.
“The pound of flesh which I demand of him
Is dearly bought; ’tis mine, and I will have it.”
(Act IV, Scene I)He does not say “I need it.”
He does not say “it is just.”
He says: it is mine.
Shakespeare condenses here the complete logic of psychopathic greed. The object matters not for its use value nor for its reparative function, but because it has been appropriated. Legitimacy is reduced to possession. To have becomes equivalent to being able to do. The right to destroy derives from the right to own.
The scene becomes even more unbearable when the judge accepts the contract on its own terms. Shylock is granted permission to cut the flesh. He is given exactly what he asked for. And it is then that anxiety appears.
For the first time, Shylock hesitates. Not out of compassion, but out of precision. He must cut exactly one pound. Not a drop of blood more. Not a gram less. The human body, reduced to contractual matter, reveals itself as what it always was: a limit that greed does not know how to manage.
The merchant, bound, offers his chest. The knife is raised. The silence is total. The tension lies not in explicit violence, but in the greedy man’s inability to control the consequences of his own desire. Law, carried to its absolute literalism, turns against the one who invoked it without moral restraint.
Shakespeare’s genius does not lie in demonizing Shylock as an isolated individual, but in showing how he arrives there. Shylock is not born a monster. He is humiliated, excluded, reduced to a stereotype. But instead of transforming harm into limit, he transforms it into absolute right. Suffering does not produce empathy; it produces fixation.
Shakespeare’s intention is neither simple justification nor condemnation. It is to show that when the world is organized exclusively around property, contract, and legal literalism, humanity is excluded from the calculation. The moment Shylock says “it is mine” is not an outburst; it is an ontological confession. He knows no other language. He cannot speak otherwise.
This scene anticipates with terrifying lucidity what centuries later will appear in far more sophisticated institutional forms: when possession becomes the ultimate foundation of right, when intelligence is placed at the service of character rather than limit, social peace breaks from within. Not through explicit hatred, but through structural indifference.
Shakespeare does not write an allegory of absolute evil. He writes a warning. The knife suspended over Antonio’s chest threatens not only an individual, but a form of society that has confused legality with justice and property with moral legitimacy.
It is from this point — not from theory, but from exposed flesh — that it becomes impossible to continue speaking of greed as mere ambition or as an anecdotal trait. Here greed reveals its core: wanting because it is mine, and wanting even when the price is the destruction of the other… and, ultimately, oneself.
Greed is not wanting more. It is wanting in order to be. When it is articulated as a structural trait of character and encounters power, it produces persistent harm, not through excess of humanity, but through its reduction.
Political psychopathy is not a mental illness, but an anomaly of character that contemporary societies continue to select as an adaptive advantage. Not because it is majoritarian, but because it better tolerates the absence of limits, the instrumentalization of others, and the erosion of social peace.
Trump and Netanyahu do not represent the inevitable destiny of leadership. They represent extreme configurations that, by capturing power, reveal the ethical fragility of the systems that legitimize them. Mandela, Merkel, Mujica, and Ardern show that another relationship between character, intelligence, and power has been historically possible.
The final question is not psychological, but political and anthropological: what kind of humanity is reproduced when power rewards greed and fanaticism, and what collective mechanisms allow intelligence to once again govern character instead of executing it.
The defense of social peace is not moral naivety. It is a strategy of collective survival. Even — and especially — for those who believe they do not need it.
