The Innocent Tyrant
“Every human, no matter how sinister, no matter how damaged, was once an innocent child.”
The topic of dealing with tyrannical men in our society is and will always be a challenge for all of us. It disempowers those caught in the crossfires. Enslaving others without the power, emotional strength or legal status to protect themselves. It creates dissent within families, workplaces, political parties and thwarts global peace. We get it – these types of men in the world are bullies, seemingly out to create suffering for their own pleasure. The question is, how can we respond better?
I’m not meaning the knee-jerk reaction of simply tightening laws, increasing punishments or threats of social isolation. Yes, for the sake of the victims involved, those cogs need to keeping moving to create better protections all round - but that’s not the angle of this article. Rather, how can we re-frame our thinking to counteract the mindset of the tyrant? How can we retain a level of self-empowerment without cowering in fear or reacting with equal rage in their presence? What might actually change our path towards a world without these kinds of men and is it possible?
Now before I divulge how I recalibrated my view on tyrants, I’d like to explore how we’ve shifted over the decades in our perception of the classic villain or antagonists within our social ‘pop’ culture…and how they model our reality.
Back in the iconic 80’s action movies, the antagonist (or bad guy) was very two dimensional. Just out to seize power and control and give our hero something to fight for and against. However, the changes since then in the hero versus villain dance are quite substantial and resonate much closer to home.
Take Christopher Nolan’s reimagining of Batman’s Joker in the Dark Knight, when Heath Ledger's character famously says to Batman, “You're like me, you're just not as crazy.” This is indicating that at the core they are the same human but just express it differently given their cumulative life experiences. This is why I believe we choose sides of good or evil. We don’t like the grey area in between. But this is what I’ve loved about how our fictional storytelling has shifted.
A great movie or TV series these days is where you start out despising a character, only to have the writers turn them around to show more empathy around why they do what they do. A great example is Professor Snape in the Harry Porter series. (Spoiler alert!) We spend at least five of the movies despising his obvious hatred of the little wizard, only to discover he’d been protecting Harry all along and even sacrifices his life to save him. This is when the arch villain, becomes more relatable to us. They become more human and less of a 2D tyrant. It’s also why we continue to paint today’s villains in this black or white imagery, so we don’t have to look at the possibility that we may share traits with them. So much easier to throw barbs when all the mirrors have broken.
We distance ourselves from this tyrant behaviour because (like Batman) we don’t want to admit those same feelings of tyranny exist within all of us – that no-one is exempt from carrying similar wounds of abandonment and rejection. The difference is how we choose to express those unprocessed feelings of pain when it seeps out. And if we don’t understand it or learn how to wrangle its power, then we simply pass it on to the next generation to bear the load.
The initial step I took to understand my reaction to these antagonistic forces in my life was out of exhaustion and curiosity. Exhaustion because enduring interactions with angry men often left me feeling deflated, diminished in my personal power. However, it was my innate curiosity that really drove the exploration. I can’t ever feel satisfied accepting what I see on the surface of any human, knowing there’s a labyrinth of untapped potential underneath. And that especially goes for those humans I simply don’t relate to. Hence I went down the path towards the origin story of this beastly man who I believe was once an innocent boy.
First I want it to be clear, I’m not justifying or in any way defending these tyrant’s behaviours as adults. I’m merely curious about what’s behind their motives? What’s really going on underneath and how the hell did they get where they were? More importantly, what can the rest of us do about it, because living in a world run by these personality types makes us all feel disempowered, exhausted and unsafe.
It may sound ironic, perhaps triggering for some, to acknowledge in any way that the root of these men’s behaviours also comes from a place of feeling unsafe. So, putting aside your own sense of justice seeking, I ask you to take a moment to consider the damaged boy inside the tyrannical man.
I believe most boys enter the world full of hope, wonder, and boisterous energy to explore. To seek adventure, conquer challenges and soak up everything they can. But allowing this testosterone driven creature to run amuck without the tools to see him prosper, is a toxic brew. Tools that encompass the inherent need for affection, praise, support, love, understanding, and guidance - whether from varying mother figures to the male role models around him. However, in the absence of these, within the blink of an eye, he grows up with beliefs the outer world is cruel and that he must use aggression to ensure his own safety and survival - regardless of the consequences and collateral damage he causes. In a nutshell, it’s the old mantra to ‘kill or be killed’.
From my fifty plus years of life’s hardships and countless learnings around self-development, it seems apparent that every human buries pain to protect their emotional instabilities. It’s a great survival technique which can also backfire if not managed well. And that certainly applies to these tyrannical men who stuff their pain deep down for years, creating a protective crusted layer over the top of an active volcano. We all know how that pans out.
It’s my belief that counteracting this multi-generational toxicity begins with those who are willing to step up. To create a future where our men don’t feel this primal need to dominate those around them, it must start with the willing men of today. Our dedication to provide healthy guidance of the boys, the young men around us is the way we can stop this abusive cycle that carries from one wounded man to another.
So now I’ve laid out the groundwork of how these tyrants may arise…
How can we respond to them differently?
The usual trigger response when facing the wrath of the tyrant can be one of the following;
We cower in their force and brace ourselves for the lashing. We obey just to make the pain go away as quick as possible. We live in fear of their power because we deem them powerful. It’s the persona they need to maintain their force so its very easy to succumb to.
We fire back at them with just as much force. We might try legal avenues to force them to back down. We might use our own tactics of intimidation to see if we can push our chest up bigger than theirs. We might stage a revolt with allies to bring them down in flames. We may even get to the breaking point of ending their tyranny, by ending their life.
There’s the in between. We may appease them on the surface to diffuse the tension, meanwhile quietly hating them underneath. We’ll bitch and moan to our trusted allies about how awful this human is. We exert all our energy into complaining about the injustices until we’re blue in the face, but it all stops here. Nothing changes and becomes a stale roundabout that diminishes our own health without the tyrant even knowing.
Some have the spiritual training to simply allow the tyrant’s rage to roll off the back. That may seem admirable but in my experience it’s not the way most of us think and feel on a day to day basis. But hey, good on them for getting to that ability. However, I want something more real for me to apply without needing ongoing retreats to find my chi…only to lose it when I return to the real world.
While I’ve engaged in all of the above options, none of them have provided a sustainable framework for me to hold onto. And it wasn’t until a couple years ago while I was dealing with (simultaneously!) an angry relative and a troubling neighbour within the same few weeks. You know the type who seems to prefer escalating conflict, often at the expense of pure logic or human decency. And even if you catch them in a lie, false accusations or provide them with facts, they choose to double down and will never admit any wrong doings. This type of tyrant in my eyes can be the most frustrating.
I’ll leave the relative out of this conversation, so I’ll use the neighbour as an example. At the time I think he was a man in his mid to late 60’s, but for some reason I had this image of him stomping his feet on the ground like a bratty boy. Something wasn’t going his way with our mutual dealings with local council over a shared land dispute, and the little attempts he made to annoy us for no benefit just came across as childish. So that’s when it hit me.
I wasn’t dealing with a mature man. I was staring into the wrath of a four-year-old.
All his fury, whether in letters or via threats of legal pursuits, just sounded like a whining little kid who doesn’t like being told no, he can’t have that. It reminded me of a lot of our world leaders. The ego driven men who can’t back down from a fight or find some common ground for the sake of peace and humility because their ego is at stake, are acting the exact same way. For the record, I could also see my relative displaying the same child-like behaviour.
I then recalled my previous encounters with tyrants and bullies over the course of my life. Normally, even just thinking about events that happened years ago, would still get my pulse quickening at the mere reminder of how I felt at the time. But replaying these situations through this new lens, I began to feel sorry for them; that they had to behave in such a way to feel okay about themselves. I dug deeper, wondering how they were treated as boys for them to be that disconnected from what I see as natural compassion for your fellow human. Maybe it’s been a torturous internal existence for most of their life to become the tyrant persona they now embody, believing it’s the only scaffolding they know which holds them intact. It’s what keeps them safe from harm. They are so damn scared that everything will come crumbling down around them and be forced to experience ultimate shame, that they will do anything to prevent this. And that ‘anything’ has no limits.
So I came away from this realisation that tyrant men need validation. They behave this way because of something they didn’t receive growing up. They act out because it gets the biggest reaction…and justifies their existence. They don’t care if they are liked or not, they just want to be seen and listened to. They need the spotlight on them to feel anything. This led to wonder what would happen if I remove it? Took away my emotions, knowing that’s what fed them. Viewing them as this damaged little boy screaming to be loved, helped me stop fuelling the fire in its tracks.
I truly believe this emotional dysfunction in men underpins all wars, neighbourhood disputes, domestic violence, incarcerations, human detriment and savagery. But if we reduce ourselves to the same level of emotional immaturity then we don’t evolve away from it. We just prove that it’s worth doing for those emerging, future tyrants watching from the sidelines, waiting for their chance to step into the toxic limelight.
If the rest of us take ownership of the auto response we have towards tyrants, then perhaps we reduce the effect they have. We diffuse this perceived power they hold over us into something that doesn’t get attention at all. The more we fan those flames of hatred and fear and carry it into our personal lives, the more we justify the behaviour back to the tyrant that’s it’s a working formula. They get the hit they’re looking for in seeking attention or being feared, (and often admired!), therefore it boosts their ego and ultimately their empty self-esteem.
Let me reiterate. While I might have titled this article ‘The Innocent Tyrant’, their behaviours are not. Anyone needs to be held accountable for those. Instead, I propose we separate the tyrant from the behaviours to help the rest of us. Knowing they simply stem from an innocent place before they were corrupted over time, gives us more insight into preventing the next wave of emerging unstable men. If we kind-hearted blokes can check our emotions at the door, then we have hope in better preparing our boys to avoid this path. Basically, let’s not give the tyrant behaviour the power it doesn’t deserve.
I know this is a hard one to adjust in our lives. Our news cycles are so full of atrocities in the world by these damaged creatures. We may have several tyrant men in our circle who dominate our daily lives, that it’s hard not to get wound up. It’s a challenge to change the habit and approach it with measured strength. But I really feel it’s our only way forward. At least give it a try and see how different you feel. View that tyrant as the emotionally unstable four-year-old they are underneath.
Even lighten it up by imagining a worn-down dummy in their mouth and shitty nappy on them for some comic effect.
What have you got to lose?
