There are a number of personality traits in the psychological make-up of individuals that are either good or bad. Addictive behaviour is one such manifestation of a trait. Addiction is a recurring compulsion by an individual to engage in a specific activity, despite its harmful consequences to the general health, mental state or social life. Of late, a well-recognised yet uncategorized problem is being highlighted by the media, and that is "power addiction".
Our politicians are known to be suffering from this problem. In order to satisfy this behaviour and urge, they can go to any extent while crossing the moral, ethical and religious boundaries. The urge at times become so much overwhelming that such individuals would not care for the security of their lives. If we categorise the types of politicians, 10% of them have strong moral characters, are honest and wish to contribute for the people.
They may readily shun away from politics or position of power if there was a conflict between their moral principles and the social circumstances. The remaining 90% display erratic character and may follow the devious route of corruption and waywardness. There are a number of examples from western world where addiction to power remain treatable and manageable. In Pakistan, we find clans and families who wish to remain in power and politics. In order to remain in such position, they do all corrupt practices, sabotage the rights of people, torture and kill people, grab lands, collude with external forces against national interests and security.
Sometimes, it is not only for wealth or other incentives but to acquire ego-satisfaction or address the 'pleasure principle' that one would even gets exposed to life threatening situations and may even loose life. The recent example is of Benazir Bhutto who came back to Pakistan despite warnings and death threats. She was an accomplished woman, had the privilege of being prime minister twice and enjoyed immense wealth and fame. Her family went under huge turmoil because of politics and power.
Her father was eliminated by design, one of her brother was poisoned, the other was assassinated and her mother succumbed to serious illness secondary to severe emotional turbulence. She was a mother of three children who needed her care and attention. One wonders why she chose to put her life at risk despite all these life events. The answer lies in the psychological term 'addiction' that went overboard and resulted in fatal outcome.
There is another category of Pakistani politicians, some of them are working as advisors or enjoying other lucrative positions with the blessing of current government. This category of evolving pseudo-politicians who keeps appearing on talk shows and display rowdy behaviour is that of originally deprived attention seeking individuals who had the intense desire of being recognised in some way. They by default came in contact with political groups and acquired some sense of power, hence had 'narcissistic enjoyment'.
These feelings keeps growing until it reaches out of proportion and result in commitment of errors that affect indirectly or directly the interests of our nation. A number of such faulty characters are fast evolving and it would not be unusual to see a huge bunch of malfunctioning politicians in the future that would possibly rule us.
Watching the current talk shows on local channels, Pakistanis living abroad feel embarrassed by the discussion, arguments and presentations of these politicians who blame each other for bad deeds. They speak very loudly in order to suppress the counter arguments, display furious gestures and use harsh language at times. Their arguments lack insight, depth and genuinity. They portray a dismal picture of our country. We owe gratitude to our media for exposing these malfunctioning 'power addicted' people to the public.
For a country like Pakistan, the current breed of politicians is dangerous for the country's well-being. In order to address this problem, we need to find a satisfactory solution in two ways. First, in humorous surgical term, we do a 'politectomy' ie practical removal of faulty political elements and secondly 'prevent' the growth of narcissistic neo-politicians. Removal requires banning the politicians for a lengthy time period through legal system. Prevention will first aim at primary identification of 'cause' and for this we have to revisit the human personality traits and the factors triggering the political symptoms.
Traits may be due to genetic predisposition to some extent at least, the other factors responsible for activation of this trait can be explained from a psychodynamic perspective. A viral theory seems interesting in terms of political symptom manifestations. Viral infections are generally self limiting and particular treatment regimes are not effective. A political virus appears to be resistant to moral therapy and has chronicity with the propensity to proliferate at an accelerated speed.
We are proud of our nuclear capability and hopefully our scientist would find a remedy for this 'virus'. Let's aim to address the menace of these home grown faulty politicians before they damage the integrity of this country.
(The writer is a Professor of Psychiatry at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada.)