It is not all but certainly many if not most men that seek to make little gods of themselves. In so doing, they seek to be praised and treasured but when this fails to occur they generally set about conquering their world, their families and (the extended family of) their nations as some immodest compensation for the emotional vacuum and existential uncertainty they feel when their core narcissistic fantasies of self-significance and potency are not confirmed. Their critical error lies in that they seek to be loved through force. This may in part be because they are not clever enough but many are indeed very intelligent and quite content to play and aspirationally master the game of life as they find it: Machiavellian, pragmatic, cruel. To some extent it is because what they have seen and learned through culture and the persistence of memory that narrative histories represent indicates the simplistic caricature of blundering tyranny is a good bet when you don’t actually have any better ideas. The little gods can probably not even see or ever know and comprehensively acknowledge that the love and recognition or legacy they seek can never be forced and on a spectrum from interpersonal relationships through institutional power and on in to Global empires – it is only ever bad ideas and their profoundly fragile insecurities that must impose themselves as symbolic or literal violence and suffering upon other human beings.
Daedelus Kite 