The people you list are all in contexts where they are forced to juggle many forces having different goals, capacity for violence, sizes, etc. Leaders like these gain and keep power by {cajoling, rewarding, punishing, threatening} the military, capitalists, businessmen, revolutionaries, farmers, peasants, bureaucrats, and foreign nations; and by making themselves Basilisks of violence (I think that’s why Hitler and Mussolini loved each other). It’s not obvious to me that these forces *made* e.g. Hitler what he was, but they seem pretty different in nature, and plausibly also in effect, from the incentives of a genius in a vat in a basement with a few genius buddies with a mission to save the world.
The people you list are all in contexts where they are forced to juggle many forces having different goals, capacity for violence, sizes, etc. Leaders like these gain and keep power by {cajoling, rewarding, punishing, threatening} the military, capitalists, businessmen, revolutionaries, farmers, peasants, bureaucrats, and foreign nations; and by making themselves Basilisks of violence (I think that’s why Hitler and Mussolini loved each other). It’s not obvious to me that these forces *made* e.g. Hitler what he was, but they seem pretty different in nature, and plausibly also in effect, from the incentives of a genius in a vat in a basement with a few genius buddies with a mission to save the world.