(machine translated from the original text in German)
On the train from Venice to Munich, I read Fritz B. Simon's new book. „Mittelmaß und Eifersucht. Profiling des Diktators." Barely two hundred pages, a slim attempt to sketch the psychological profile of the dictator as a type — without pathologizing, without political agenda. Simon needs no introduction. He is one of the most influential theorists of systemic therapy in the German-speaking world, and reading him is always worthwhile. When someone like him writes a book like this, it pays to look closely.
His starting problem is a conceptual one. The narcissism charge, which circulates so naturally in public debate about Trump, Putin and others, explains too little, Simon argues. It is too broad, too undifferentiated — a blunt instrument that says more about the political stance of the diagnostician than about the psychological structure of the diagnosed. Simon is looking for something more precise.
He finds it in Alfred Adler.
The inferiority feeling, Simon argues, is the more useful concept — precisely because it pathologizes less. Adler had insisted that this feeling is universal: "To be human means to feel inferior." It is not a defect but a drive. Nature has endowed the human being with a strong sense of inferiority that pushes toward compensation, toward moving from a minus situation to a plus situation. The dictator, then, does essentially what everyone does — he compensates. What distinguishes him is the scale: physical deficits, social origins, combined with a mother who promises and demands greatness. From such constellations, what Adler calls the lifestyle takes shape — an early-formed, largely unconscious pattern that reads every situation through the same schema. The result is a compensatory dynamic that does not end at the top of the power pyramid but intensifies there.
Adler's approach is not causal but final. It does not ask: what made the dictator who he is? It asks: what does his behavior aim at? What image of himself must be achieved, secured, defended? This fits the genre of profiling far better than any depth-psychological search for causes — and Simon uses this approach implicitly, without naming it as such.
The second term in the title — envy — Simon develops as a structural consequence. He distinguishes carefully between envy and jealousy: envy is a two-person relationship (I want what you have), jealousy a three-person relationship (I won't accept that you have what is rightfully mine). The dictator is jealous in the technical sense — he mistrusts everyone who displays the strength, intelligence, or creativity he claims for himself. Jealousy here is not an emotion but a political structure, which explains why dictators systematically destroy competence around them.
I find this sharply argued and convincing. Simon's decision to prefer Adler over the narcissism discourse is methodologically sound — and it has the pleasant side effect of bringing into play a thinker who has, in my view, been unfairly marginalized in the academic mainstream.
Somewhere before Innsbruck I finished the book. It had read almost like a thriller. And yet something was missing.
Adler had, alongside the inferiority feeling, a second major concept: community feeling — Gemeinschaftsgefühl. And the two belong together. The inferiority feeling is for Adler not only the driver of compensation through power — it is also the origin of empathy, of solidarity, of the capacity for connectedness. Both grow from the same root: the early experience of being small, dependent, reliant on others. The decisive fork lies not in the feeling itself but in the direction it takes — toward superiority or toward connection.
Simon does not need this second half for his subject. A book about dictators describes a world from which community feeling is structurally absent — suppressed, never developed, or permanently overlaid by the compensatory dynamic.
Anyone who reads Adler will inevitably ask further: what decides which direction the compensatory movement takes? Simon describes one direction with razor sharpness — power, jealousy, the inability to tolerate contradiction. What he does not describe are the conditions under which the same original experience pushes in a different direction. Adler calls that encouragement. And it is about time we took that concept out of its pedagogical corner.
Mediocrity and jealousy hold the world hostage. It doesn't have to stay that way.
Fritz B. Simon: Mittelmaß und Eifersucht. Profiling des Diktators – Ein Versuch. Carl-Auer Verlag, 2026.