There are news stories that disturb not because of what they reveal, but because of what they suggest. Recent evidence that Adolf Hitler may have suffered from Kallmann syndrome – a genetic disorder that alters hormonal and sexual development – once again brings to the table a hard-to-digest idea: major political events are usually the extended echo of an intimate drama.
It is not a fact that rewrites the history of National Socialism or mitigates its responsibility. But it opens a conceptual door that we rarely want to cross: History does not always advance through grand theories, but through small personal ruptures.
Max Weber anticipated this when he warned that all politics was characterized by the tension between internal passions and public responsibility. And long before that, Pascal summed up human fragility with a sentence that today takes on disturbing features: “Man is nothing more than a reed… but a reed that thinks.” A rod that, if it doesn’t deal with its obsessions, can drag millions along.
Hitler’s biography is full of emotional deficits: an authoritarian father, an unstable emotional world, a sense of mission as an identity prosthesis. Could a genetic disorder have served as a trigger for this impaired sensitivity? Yes, in the most human sense of the word. Politics – especially when it takes a totalitarian form – is usually the place where someone tries to fix what they have not been able to solve within themselves.
Hannah Arendt saw it clearly when she analyzed Eichmann: Evil does not always arise from the inexplicable monster, but from the simple man who never questions his impulses. This banality of evil applies to both the bureaucrats of genocide and the leaders who transform their own internal unrest into state architecture.
In a macabre display of the butterfly effect, small biographical ruptures—insignificant at first glance—combined with weak institutions, massive amplification technologies, and economic crises can cease to be private episodes and become systemic risks. Behind every political calculation there is always a spirit that is trying to determine its own place in the world. But the problem is not just the injured person, but the ecosystem that gives them leverage without real counterweights.
The 20th century is full of examples. Stalin’s paranoia shaped an entire system. Napoleon’s insecurity due to its provincial origins transformed into unbridled expansion. Mussolini’s need for recognition ended in an effective but hollow epic. Hitler was no exception: politics became his compensation machine. Where private life set limits, the state offered omnipotence. This leap – from personal lack to institutional power – is perhaps the greatest hinge in modern history.
The risk associated with this negligence is exponential and takes on more complex forms. If in the last century individual pathologies were channeled through the tank and the radio and took years to manifest themselves in catastrophe, today they can spread through algorithms and global networks in minutes, with potentially far more transcendent dimensions and effects.
Weber summed it up in “Politics as a Profession”: “Anyone who is looking for salvation will not find it in politics.” But many leaders are looking for exactly that: to save something that is broken inside them. And if this search does not find moderation, it usually drags an entire society into the abyss.
Here comes a part that is usually ignored in historical analysis: the leadership function of good advisors. The brightest moments in politics come not from perfect leaders – they don’t exist – but from leaders accompanied by people who are able to see what they don’t see, contain what they can’t see, and stop what would drag them down alone. Machiavelli explained it bluntly: “It is no small sign of prudence to know good advisers and to know how to direct them.” When this character is missing – when the leader surrounds himself only with timid or incompetent sycophants – the story becomes fertile ground for uncontrolled impulses. Evil does not always advance because someone plans it well, but because no one around dares to stop it in time.
Every time we attribute major political events to impersonal forces – the market, ideologies, geopolitics – we are neglecting a more crucial factor: the psychology of the leader. This is not about biological determinism or the excuse of responsibility.
It’s about recognizing that politics is not a cold mechanism: it is a human drama in which unacquired virtues, lack of emotional skills and unheeded wounds ultimately have collective consequences. And it is also a drama in which advisors – if they are honest, clear and firm – can prevent a personal ghost from becoming a historic catastrophe. Perhaps history is not, as the Enlightenment imagined it, the rational march toward progress. Perhaps it is more the long shadow of what a leader was unable to resolve in time. And if that is the case, to understand politics you have to look not only at the programs, but also at the biographies – and also at the circles of people who surround power. Sometimes an entire nation is trapped in the emotional geometry of a single man; Other times he is saved because someone close to him had the courage to say no.
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