megalothymia

It's designed to constrain people with megalothymia and the Napoleon or the Stalin or the Saddam Hussein that would enter American politics and want to turn it into some kind of a dictatorship -- and that's why we have this system of checks and balances and the three branches of government and that sort of thing, to constrain political ambition.

The End of History and the Last Man 1992

Now megalothymia is another Greek word, but one that I made up myself.

The End of History and the Last Man 1992

Megalos in Greece means great and thymia refers to thymos and megalothymia means the desire to be recognized as greater than other people, and in my view, this is in a way the sense of both things that are good about politics and the things that are bad about it because a tyrant is in a way, a prototype of the person that wants to be recognized as greater.

The End of History and the Last Man 1992

FUKUYAMA: Well, I think that's right, because if you say that we are potentially threatened by would-be tyrants that have this megalothymia, that want to be recognized as greater, it is much safer if they become Ted Turners than if they become let's say politicians or military people, that will turn their desire to be recognized as greater into some political movement or cause -- or in a way, it would have been much better if if Hitler had stayed out of politics and gone into the sign painting business and then become the Ted Turner of house painting in Germany in the 1920s and he would have made a lot of money, he may have gotten quite recognized as a very innovative house painter, whatever, and we would have been spared a lot of the fascist politics of that period.

The End of History and the Last Man 1992