The Omnipotence Fantasies of Little Boys

I. The Sandbox

There is an age at which boys name things and believe they own them thereby. They build a sandcastle and declare: "That's my castle." They draw a line in the sand and say: "Everything on this side is mine." When another child comes along, they shout: "That's mine!" — not because they built it or earned it, but because they said it. The saying is the owning.

Most children grow out of this phase. Some become presidents.

On 20 January 2025, Donald Trump stood on the steps of the Capitol and announced: the Gulf of Mexico is henceforth the Gulf of America. The tallest mountain in North America, called Denali by the Athabascan people for ten thousand years, is once again Mount McKinley. In December 2025, he had his name affixed to the Kennedy Center — "The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts." In September, he had renamed the Department of Defense as the "War Department" — a name America had consciously discarded after the Second World War. The Institute of Peace now bears his name. On the White House account, his image appeared wearing a crown with the words: "LONG LIVE THE KING!"

Maria Shriver, niece of John F. Kennedy, wrote: "It is beyond comprehension that a sitting president considers it acceptable to place his name before that of an assassinated president." The Kennedy family called it an insult. The press called it narcissism. Alaska — Alaska! — voted unanimously against renaming Denali, both Republican senators included.

But all of this misses the point. It is not narcissism in the clinical sense — although it is that too. It is something more fundamental. It is the behaviour of a child who owns the world by naming it. Adam in Paradise. The six-year-old in the sandbox. The omnipotence dream of a little boy who never had to learn that the world belongs to others.

II. The Collection

Trump is not alone. He is merely the loudest.

Vladimir Putin had a palace built for himself on the Black Sea, exposed by Navalny's team in a 2021 video: 17,691 square metres, a "dirt room" with a stripper pole, a theatre, a casino, an ice hockey rink. When the exposure came, Putin declared the palace was not his. That is technically true: it belongs to the Russian state, which belongs to Putin. A little boy would say: "Everything here is mine." Putin says: "Nothing here is mine — but everything obeys me." It is the same fantasy, merely more maturely phrased.

On 20 June 2025, Putin told the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum: "The Russian and Ukrainian peoples are one people. In this sense, all of Ukraine is ours." And added: "Where the foot of a Russian soldier steps, that is ours." The audience applauded. It is the six-year-old with his foot on the neighbour's sandcastle: "I'm standing on it, so it's mine."

Xi Jinping had term limits abolished and declared himself ruler for life in 2018. His "Xi Jinping Thought" is compulsory curriculum at Chinese universities. His face hangs in every village. His name stands in the constitution. Mao is dead, but the structure lives: one man, one thought, one country. The little boy who shouts "Everyone must do what I say" — and a billion people have no other choice.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan built himself the largest presidential palace in the world — 1,150 rooms, thirty times the size of the White House, erected on a nature reserve in Ankara, against judicial orders. When a sixteen-year-old student allegedly insulted him in a 2015 speech, the boy was arrested. The president personally insisted on prosecution. The adult who punishes a child for questioning his authority — and does not notice that in doing so he exposes himself as a child.

Mohammed bin Salman, Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, had a yacht built for 600 million dollars, bought a Leonardo da Vinci painting for 450 million, and is planning a linear mirror city in the desert called NEOM — 170 kilometres long, 500 metres high, nine trillion dollars expensive. When journalist Jamal Khashoggi criticised him, Khashoggi was dismembered in a consulate. The little boy who builds an impossible fortress and punishes whoever says: "That won't work."

Elon Musk — not a head of state, but with more power than most — bought Twitter for 44 billion dollars, renamed it X, fired eighty per cent of the staff, had himself named "Chief Twit", then de facto head of a federal agency (DOGE), then published the phone directory of cabinet members who had voted against him. When he broke with Trump after a few months, he publicly insulted the president, was insulted in return, and continued funding him anyway. Two six-year-olds who fight and play together the next day — only they are dismantling the governance system of the United States in the process.

III. The Psychology

Developmental psychology recognises the omnipotence fantasy as a normal phase of early childhood development. The child believes the world obeys its wishes. It cries, and the mother comes. It points at something, and it is brought. The boundary between wish and reality has not yet been drawn.

Healthy development means: learning this boundary. Discovering that other people have their own wishes. That the world does not obey. That "mine" is a claim that must be justified. That one cannot have everything. That "no" is a word others are allowed to say.

What happens when someone never learns this boundary — and instead receives billions, armies, and nuclear weapons?

He renames things and thereby considers them his property. He builds palaces, because external grandeur is meant to fill internal emptiness. He surrounds himself with yes-men, because contradiction destroys the illusion of omnipotence. He punishes critics — not out of strategic calculation, but from the feeling of hurt that a child experiences when someone takes away its toy. He confuses the world with his property and people with his subjects.

Psychologist Geoff Beattie describes Trump and Musk as "two massive narcissistic egos in crystalline juxtaposition" — and quotes writer Norman Mailer on Picasso and his lover: "Narcissists do not join each other so much as approach each other like crystals. It is not love we may encounter so much as fine-tuning." The metaphor hits: not a human relationship, but the collision of two force fields that amplify each other until they explode.

But it is not only narcissism. The clinical term describes a personality disorder — and that may or may not apply to these men. What is described here is something more political: the omnipotence fantasy as a form of government. Not the psychology of an individual, but a system that brings such individuals to power and keeps them there.

IV. The Pattern

The similarities are striking — not because these men coordinated, but because the psychology of unchecked power produces the same symptoms everywhere.

Naming. They all rename the world. Trump renames bodies of water, mountains, buildings. Putin renames peoples: Ukrainians become Russians, neighbouring countries become historical Russian territory. Xi renames history: the Cultural Revolution becomes an operational accident, Tibet a Chinese province "since ancient times". Erdoğan renames the Turkish republic: from Atatürk's secularism to Erdoğan's neo-Ottomanism. MBS renames Saudi Arabia: from oil monarchy to "Vision 2030". Whoever names, owns. Adam in Paradise.

Building. They all build. Putin's palace. Erdoğan's 1,150-room residence. MBS's NEOM. Trump's wall, his White House ballroom, his golden lifts. Xi builds islands in the South China Sea — literally land from nothing, only to then claim it as his own. The child who builds a sandcastle and says: "That is my kingdom." The difference: the sandcastle costs billions and is built by forced labour.

Punishing. They all punish dissent. Putin poisons opponents. MBS has journalists dismembered. Erdoğan imprisons tens of thousands. Xi makes millionaires disappear who become too visible. Trump fires anyone who contradicts him, prosecutes opponents, and threatened Greenland with military force because 57,000 Inuit said: "No, thank you." The child who bangs on the table when it doesn't get its way. Except the table is a country and the banging hits real people.

Claiming infallibility. None of them has ever admitted a mistake. Trump: "I take no responsibility at all." Putin: "Everything is going according to plan." Xi: the zero-Covid policy was a triumph; the millions of deaths a Western lie. MBS: Khashoggi was an isolated incident, nothing to do with him. Erdoğan: the economic crisis is the work of foreign conspirators. The child who drops the plate and says: "The plate fell by itself." Except the plates are national economies and human lives.

V. The Enablers

No little boy becomes an omnipotence fantasist if someone says "no" in time. The problem is not that such people exist. The problem is that nobody says "no" — or that those who do are eliminated.

In Russia, there is no parliament that contradicts Putin. In China, there is no press that questions Xi. In Saudi Arabia, there is no opposition that challenges MBS. In Turkey, the judges who could have stopped Erdoğan have long since been dismissed or imprisoned.

But the mechanisms also fail in democracies. In the United States, Congress did not stop Trump — neither over the Kennedy Center renaming (which by law only Congress can authorise) nor over the threat against Greenland nor over the self-appointment as "acting president of Venezuela". The Republican Party has transformed into an enabling machine. As one psychologist put it: the system around the narcissist becomes a circle of yes-men who amplify his reality distortion because they depend on his favour.

Elon Musk briefly demonstrated what happens when one narcissist says "no" to another: it escalates immediately. Musk called Trump's legislative package a "monstrous abomination"; Trump called Musk ungrateful; both insulted each other publicly — and then reunited, because they needed each other: Trump needed Musk's money, Musk needed Trump's government contracts. The crystals in juxtaposition: not love, but fine-tuning.

The enablers are not only politicians and courtiers. They are also us — the voters, the spectators, the consumers of spectacle. For the omnipotence fantasy has a seductive side: it promises order. The strong man who says "I alone can fix it" — that is the promise of the father to the frightened child. And in times of uncertainty, economic anxiety, and cultural disorientation, astonishingly many people reach for this promise, even though they should know that the father is himself the child.

VI. The Cost

Omnipotence fantasies are not merely ridiculous. They are lethal.

Putin's fantasy that Ukraine "belongs to us" has led to a war that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Xi's fantasy of zero-Covid and infallibility cost millions. MBS's fantasy of military strength led to the Yemen war, one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes of the twenty-first century. Erdoğan's fantasy of economic control — he insists that low interest rates reduce inflation, the opposite of all economic knowledge — has impoverished the Turkish middle class.

Trump's fantasies — Greenland, Venezuela, "the Panama Canal belongs to us" — have so far caused primarily diplomatic damage. But the logic of escalation is the same. Whoever renames bodies of water in January 2025 threatens allies with tariffs and military force in January 2026. Whoever affixes his name to the Kennedy Center in December 2025 has, that same month, declared war on Venezuela and had its president abducted. The omnipotence fantasy knows no upper limit. The six-year-old will not stop on his own.

Research confirms it: personalised regimes in which a single individual concentrates all power produce the worst foreign policy blunders. Hitler attacked the Soviet Union because no one could stop him. Mao launched the Great Leap Forward because no one contradicted him. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait because his generals did not dare disagree. The omnipotence fantasy is not merely a psychological phenomenon — it is a security risk for the entire world.

VII. The Antidote

The antidote to the omnipotence fantasy is the same as in child-rearing: boundaries. Institutions. Rules that apply even to the person who considers himself the most powerful.

In psychology, the dictum is: the narcissist is not curable, but containable — through consistent boundary-setting, through withholding narcissistic supply, through naming reality. Translated into politics: separation of powers that functions. Constitutions that cannot be changed by a single individual. Media that refuse to be intimidated. Parliaments that say "no" — even at the cost of their own careers.

Greenland showed the way. 57,000 people told a man who considers himself the most powerful in the world: "No. We do not belong to you." Their protesters carried signs: "No means no." That is the language every child learns — and that some adults have forgotten.

The Associated Press showed the way: it refused to rename the Gulf of Mexico and was banned from the White House for it. It sued — and won. A small victory, but it demonstrates: the "no" is possible. Reality cannot be permanently renamed.

Alaska showed the way: the entire state senate voted unanimously to call the mountain Denali — against its own president, against its own party. Because a ten-thousand-year-old name weighs more than one man's whim.

But this resistance remains isolated as long as systems are not stronger than persons. That is the lesson of Akratia: the goal is not the right ruler, but a system that needs no ruler. Not the hope that the next strongman will be less childish — but structures that prevent any individual from renaming bodies of water, having journalists dismembered, annexing neighbouring countries, and calling it "self-determination".

VIII. Growing Up

In the end, it is a simple question: do we want to be governed by children?

Not by stupid children — some of these men are highly intelligent. Not by weak children — they control armies and economies. But by emotionally immature people who never learned what every child in primary school is supposed to learn: that the world does not belong to you. That other people have rights you cannot revoke. That your name does not need to be written on everything. That "no" is a valid word. That greatness is not measured in square metres.

Developmental psychology says: the omnipotence fantasy is overcome when the child learns that love and recognition do not depend on controlling everything. When it discovers that it is safe even without omnipotence. When it finds that the world becomes more interesting when other people have room in it.

Perhaps that is the deepest political question of our time: not which system, which party, which ideology — but whether we are prepared to be governed by adults. By people who know they are fallible. Who call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of Mexico, because that is its name. Who call a mountain Denali, because the people who have lived there for ten thousand years call it that. Who do not name a peace institute after themselves, because they have understood that peace is not a possession.

The little boy in the sandbox says: "Everything belongs to me." The adult says: "I belong here — together with others." The question that defines our time is: to whom have we given the keys?