Based on Gabor Maté’s views on addiction
Dr. Gabor Maté, renowned addiction expert, believes that the source of addictions is not to be found in genes, but in childhood trauma and in stress and social dislocation endemic to systems of inequality and injustice. In his TEDx Talks, he states some facts about power-addict people. The criteria that he clarifies is dramatically compatible with Massoud Rajavi.
According to Gabor, some people are addicted to power, to wealth and to acquisition because they want to make themselves bigger. Their sense of insecurity and inferiority makes them need power to feel okay in themselves.
He refers to certain dictators in the history such as Alexander, Napoleon, Stalin and Hitler. To make themselves bigger, and in order to get that power, they were quite willing to fight wars and to kill a lot of people, just to maintain that power. “The addiction to power, is always about the emptiness that you try and fill from the outside,” Gabor says.
First of all, why did they need power so much? The interesting thing is that physically, they were all relatively short people, about my size, or even smaller. They came from the margins; they were not part of the mainstream population. Stalin was Georgian, not Russian; Napoleon was Corsican, not French; Alexander the Macedonian, not Greek; and Hitler was Austrian, not German. So, there was a deep sense of insecurity and inferiority complex in them.
Remember Massoud Rajavi, short man born in a small town far from capital with no upper-class family! He finds himself in a situation that all the first founders of the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) are gone. He takes over the organization. However, after the Iranian revolution he and his group cannot find any position in the newly-established Islamic government. So, he sets off for a bloody war with Iranian government.
“They needed power to feel good about themselves, to make themselves feel great,” Gabor suggests. “And to get that power, they were quite willing to wage war and kill a lot of people, just to keep that power.” That’s what Rajavi did in accomplice with Saddam Hussein and other war-addicts around the world. His addiction to power led him to build his cult of personality in which he violates the right of his member, abuses women and trains child soldiers.
Amir Yaghmai, a former child soldier of the MEK, recalls Rajavi’s compatibility with what Gabor says about power addicts:
A man of about 160 centimeters tall, full of sexual and psychological complexes, who had built the structure of a cult around his pathological need for control and power. Forced divorces, obtaining confidentiality signatures from hundreds of women, weekly sexual confessions, forced baths called “ideological purification baths” [self-criticism sessions as cult jargons in the MEK ]
None of these were signs of faith, spirituality, or liberation. Rather, they were all tools for dominating people, from the inside and outside. Rajavi was a concrete example of what Gabor Maté was talking about: a person who felt empty without power and found existential meaning only in dominating others.
Mazda Parsi