A Psychological Look at the Autocrats of Our Time

Every year at Purim we are commanded to read the Megillah. Every year we drown out Haman’s name with noise. Every year we dress up, drink too much, and tell ourselves this is an ancient story.

I want to suggest—as a psychologist who studies human behavior and a rabbi who studies human nature—that Haman is not a historical relic. He is the embodiment of Amalek. He is a personality type. A blueprint. And right now, several of his descendants are running countries.

Let’s Start with the Psychological Profile

Haman is, from a behavioral science perspective, a textbook case of fragile narcissism. Not the confident, self-assured kind of narcissism that occasionally produces great leaders. The brittle kind. The kind built not on genuine self-worth but on the desperate need for external validation—universal, uninterrupted, unconditional admiration.

Here is what gives Haman away: one man refuses to bow. Not an army. Not a rebellion. One stubborn Jew going about his daily business, and Haman cannot function. He cannot sleep. He cannot enjoy his wealth, his power, his family, or his considerable influence at the most powerful court in the ancient world.

That is not the psychology of a powerful man.

That is the psychology of someone whose entire sense of self is one slight away from total collapse.

Contemporary psychology has a name for this: narcissistic injury. When the grandiose self-image of a fragile narcissist is threatened—even symbolically, even by something trivial—the response is wildly disproportionate. Because the injury isn’t really about the triggering event. It never is. It’s about the profound emptiness underneath the performance of power.

Haman doesn’t just want Mordechai punished. He wants every Jew in the empire destroyed. Because when you are that fragile, proportionality is impossible.

Now. Does any of this sound familiar?

Vladimir Putin: When One Country Refuses to Bow

For twenty years, Putin’s story has been a masterclass in Haman-style psychology dressed in geopolitical clothing.

A small neighboring country — Ukraine — refuses to align itself with Moscow’s orbit. Refuses to abandon its aspirations toward Europe and democracy. Refuses, in the most fundamental sense, to bow.

And Putin, like Haman, cannot let it go.

The military response that followed — first in 2014, then catastrophically in 2022 — has been analyzed through every geopolitical lens imaginable: NATO expansion, energy politics, historical claims, imperial nostalgia. All of these factors are real. But beneath all the sophisticated analysis lies something much more primitive.

A man whose identity is fused with the idea of Russian greatness could not tolerate the existence of a Ukrainian democracy because it implicitly said: you are not necessary. Your model is not inevitable. People choose differently.

That is Mordechai sitting at the gate.

That is Haman unable to enjoy the banquet.

The terrifying part is what Haman — and Putin — do next. When you cannot tolerate one person’s refusal to bow, you don’t seek therapy. You build a gallows. You launch a war. You escalate until the whole world bends or burns.

Viktor Orbán: Haman as Democratic Arsonist

Orbán is more sophisticated than Haman but no less recognizable.

His genius, if we can call it that, has been to dismantle Hungarian democracy not with tanks but with laws. Courts packed. Media controlled. Universities pressured into exile. Civil society strangled through legislation. Elections structured so that winning becomes increasingly unlikely for anyone else.

The tell, again, is the fragility beneath the performance of strength.

Orbán has spent enormous political energy — years of it — attacking George Soros, a private citizen. He has built a political movement substantially around fear of migrants who exist mostly in campaign posters rather than Hungarian streets. He has framed every election as an existential civilizational battle because a normal political contest — in which a reasonable person might simply lose — is intolerable to the narcissistic authoritarian.

You cannot simply disagree with Orbán. You must be an enemy. An agent of foreign interference. A threat to Christian civilization.

Because for the Haman type, disagreement is never just disagreement. It is rejection. And rejection is annihilation.

Mordechai didn’t bow. Orbán built a political system where not bowing is no longer an available option.

The Ayatollahs: When Haman Becomes State Religion

If we are searching for the most direct Haman analog in the modern world, we need to look not to Europe but to Tehran — because what Ruhollah Khomeini accomplished was something none of the others on this list quite managed: he built an entire nation-state around the Haman psychology.

The others deploy antisemitism and eliminationist rhetoric instrumentally — through dog whistles, coded language, strategic plausible deniability. Khomeini made the genocidal intention toward Israel and the Jewish people a founding principle of a nation-state. He didn’t merely want Mordechai to bow. He institutionalized the gallows and wrote them into the constitution.

The fragile narcissism is fully present, but here it wears divine mandate rather than nationalist grievance. When God has personally commissioned your revolution, there is no loyal opposition — only heresy. The Islamic Republic of Iran was founded with Israel’s destruction not as a political preference but as a theological imperative. The enemy wasn’t incidental to the revolution. It was structural. It was necessary.

This maps onto the Haman psychology with disturbing precision. Haman wasn’t threatened by anything Mordechai actually did. He was threatened by what Mordechai was. Khomeini’s regime didn’t oppose Israeli policies. It opposed Israeli existence. The distinction matters enormously and the Megillah understood it perfectly. Policy disagreements are political. Existence disagreements are Haman.

The loyalty purity spiral was present here too. Khomeini’s revolution consumed enormous numbers of its own — the liberals who helped overthrow the Shah, the leftists who fought alongside the Islamists, the moderate clerics who questioned the pace or direction of change. This is classically Haman: the circle of acceptable loyalty perpetually shrinks because the wound beneath the ideology never actually heals.

His successor, Ali Khamenei, has been maintaining and expanding the gallows for thirty-five years. The “Death to Israel” chants at official government functions are not campaign rhetoric. They are liturgy. The Holocaust denial as official state policy. The funding of proxy armies specifically dedicated to Israel’s destruction. The nuclear program whose symbolic message — whatever the technical arguments — carries an unmistakable statement about who is permitted to exist.

This is Haman not as individual pathology but as state religion.

One important distinction must be made, however, and the Megillah would insist on it: the Iranian people are not their government. Significant numbers of Iranians have risked their lives — and lost them — resisting this theocracy. The Green Movement. The Woman Life Freedom uprising. The persistent, breathtaking courage of ordinary people in the streets demanding the right to simply be themselves. These are the Mordechais living inside the empire, refusing to bow to the Haman who rules them.

That distinction actually strengthens the comparison rather than complicating it. Haman’s need to destroy extended to an entire people who mostly just wanted to live their lives. The regime’s brutality toward its own citizens follows exactly the same psychological logic as its genocidal posture toward Israel. It is the same wound. It is the same emptiness. It requires the same endless supply of enemies.

The More Complicated Case: Donald Trump

I want to be careful here. Not because the analysis is unclear, but because I am aware that half of my readers will think this section doesn’t go far enough and the other half will stop reading the moment I write his name. Please understand that I like Donald Trump, just not as an elected leader. I’ve heard many stories from people who’ve actually met him and spent time with him who concur that he has warmth and genuine human connectivity. His public persona is quite a bit different, though he says very funny things. His comedic timing needs a bit of work, and the left often take his musings out of context and treat them as serious statements.

Whatever your politics, and I am speaking now mainly as a psychologist, Trump’s behavioral profile contains elements that are impossible to ignore in this context.

The disproportionate response to perceived slight. The inability to accept electoral loss—not once, but as an ongoing, years-long psychological project. The extraordinary energy devoted to litigating crowd sizes, television ratings, and the affections of people who have left his orbit. The categorization of every human being into absolute loyalty or absolute betrayal with nothing in between.

This is Haman’s psychology. It is not a partisan observation. It is a clinical one.

What makes Trump different from the purely authoritarian Haman model is the context: a democratic system with institutions, courts, a free press, and an opposition that has—so far—functioned as a check. Mordechai, in Trump’s story, has not been hanged. The gallows were built but the story isn’t over.

That is either reassuring or terrifying depending on how you read Purim.

The Pattern That Connects Them All

What unites these men — and others like Erdoğan in Turkey, Maduro in Venezuela, Lukashenko in Belarus — is not ideology. They span the political and religious spectrum from secular nationalist to Islamic theocrat. It is not geography, ethnicity, or culture. It is psychology.

The Haman personality requires several conditions to thrive:

First, an audience. Haman needed the court to witness his admiration. Today’s autocrats need the rally, the state television broadcast, the rigged election showing 97% approval. The audience is not incidental. It is the oxygen that keeps the fragile self alive.

Second, an enemy. Every autocrat requires an identifiable enemy whose existence explains everything that has gone wrong and justifies everything that must be done. Jews have filled this role with terrifying regularity across centuries. Today the enemy might be migrants, or Soros, or the deep state, or NATO, or LGBTQ people, or the West, or the Zionists, or the liberals. The specific enemy is interchangeable. The psychological function is identical. You cannot have Haman without Mordechai — not because Mordechai does anything threatening, but because Haman cannot exist without someone to hate.

Third, total loyalty. Haman could not bear a single exception. Neither can these men. Loyalty is never enough — it must be demonstrated, repeated, escalated, proven anew each morning. Yesterday’s devoted ally becomes tomorrow’s treacherous enemy with startling regularity, because the narcissistic wound never actually heals. It only temporarily subsides, and always demands more.

Fourth, the escalation cycle. Haman moved from annoyance to genocidal decree in the space of a few verses. The autocratic mind, when threatened, does not de-escalate. It escalates. Always. The response is disproportionate because the threat is never experienced as merely political. It is always experienced as existential. You don’t negotiate with an existential threat. You build a gallows.

What the Megillah Understood That We Keep Forgetting

The genius of the Purim story is not the happy ending. It is the psychology.

The Megillah understood, three thousand years ago, what we are still struggling to accept: that the most dangerous leaders are not the strongest ones. They are the most frightened ones. Haman was not destroyed by his power. He was destroyed by his need.

And it understood something else. That this type doesn’t go quietly. That the gallows Haman built for Mordechai was always going to claim someone — and that someone turned out to be Haman himself.

History keeps demonstrating this pattern. The paranoid purges that consume the dictator’s own most loyal allies. The wars that exhaust and humiliate the nations they were supposed to glorify. The personality cults that collapse suddenly and completely, leaving populations blinking in the daylight wondering how they ever believed. The revolutions that devour their founders. The empires built on fear that discover, too late, that fear is an unstable foundation.

This is not optimism. It is pattern recognition.

So What Do We Do with This?

The Purim commandment is to remember. Zachor. Not as an exercise in ancient history but as active, present-tense awareness. The noise we make at Haman’s name is not merely celebration. It is refusal. Refusal to be silent. Refusal to normalize. Refusal to look away from what is actually happening and call it something more comfortable.

Mordechai’s act was not heroic in the conventional sense. He didn’t raise an army. He didn’t storm the palace. He didn’t write an op-ed for the Persian Times. He simply refused to bow. He maintained his dignity and his identity in plain sight of the man who needed him to disappear.

That, the Megillah suggests, was enough to change history.

It is worth thinking seriously about what our version of that refusal looks like today. Not bowing is not always safe — Esther knew that better than anyone. But the alternative — a world organized entirely around the psychological needs of frightened, powerful men who cannot bear a single Mordechai at the gate — is a world the Megillah has already described for us in precise and uncomfortable detail.

We know how that story ends.

The question is whether we remember it clearly enough, and are brave enough, to change the chapter we are living in.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)