"a person afflicted with a personality disorder characterized by a tendency to commit antisocial and sometimes violent acts and a failure to feel guilt for such acts." - Collin's English Dictionary 2009 10th EditionThere is no doubt that Ghengis Khan was a violent man, but there was nothing abnormal or violent about his behavior. The Mongol culture was violent and unforgiving. Stealing women from neighboring tribes for marriage was a common practice, and in a nomadic society there would be no incentive for the lives of tribesmen from other tribes to be valued. Therefore, there is no reason to believe that his violent behavior towards other tribes was violent (in context to his culture) or unusual. He grew up in a hostel society, and having grown up in this society held different values, nothing he did was unusually hostile in the Mongol culture, and so there is no reason for him to feel guilt, and so there is no reason to classify him as a psychopath. Whats more, Ghengis Khan valued the lives of others, and was concerned about wasting them. A psychopath would hold no value in the lives of others. From a psychological standpoint, there is nothing about Ghengis Khan that suggests that he is a psychopath. He merely did what his culture taught him to do and expanded it to a larger scale by commanding a powerful military, and is therefore not a psychopath. In my opinion, he was a ruthless and hostile general who held a tight reign on his troops, and because of this was an effective and powerful ruler capable of large scale expansion, even if it came at a cost. Nothing about being a powerful and ruthless ruler implies that a person is a psychopath, and there is no reason that the case of Ghengis Khan should be seen differently.
Monday, January 23, 2012
Ghengis Khan: A Psychopath? Or not.
The video we watched in class today was not the first time and will absolutely not be the last time that Ghengis Khan is portrayed as a psychopath. But was he? The point is debatable, there is not doubt, but I do not believe that he was. I think a key point in developing this opinion is the definition of a psychopath:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Simplistic analysis at it's worst. It’s normal to rape women in my culture so I’m just an ordinary guy doing what every guy on my block wants to do. I know you’re talking about an individual and not his social group, but how about considering that his culture was a twisted one that produced twisted individuals? Just a thought you should consider.
ReplyDeleteMy real problem with your analysis is you ignore the extreme violence perpetrated by Genghis Khan and his followers. For example, organized mass murder took place, and was repeated over and over again, under the great Khan and his successors. Often when a town or city was conquered or sometimes even when it surrendered without a fight, the entire town’s inhabitants would be bound and then the Mongols would do some math and determine how many people each soldier would have to kill to wipe out the town or city and then they would kill everyone and everything including work animals and pets. Sometimes the Mongols would leave and return several days later to catch anyone who had managed to hide in the ruins and had come out of hiding. I’m not talking about the occasional villages of a few hundred people being murdered, though that would be bad enough. There are accounts of cities with as many as fifty thousand people being killed in a single day. We have contemporary descriptions of this level of butchery coming from different countries and cultures which suffered the onslaught of the Mongols. In other words, I’m not talking about a single isolated incident.
Now other steppe peoples and horse tribe people have become conquerors and their methods of achieving dominance in any given area have probably never been gentle. The rulers of Northern China who Genghis Khan overthrew had themselves conquered this area several generations before Genghis Khan was born. However, the Great Khan brought a new level of violence and destruction that hadn’t been seen before and has only rarely been matched since. His behavior goes well beyond anything that can be considered normal within the culture he came from. More importantly, you don’t repeatedly engage in this kind of behavior unless you enjoy it.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete