Andrew Lobaczewski - Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes

As a youth, I read a book about a naturalist wandering

through the Amazon-basin wilderness. At some moment a

small animal fell from a tree onto the nape of his neck, clawing

his skin painfully and sucking his blood. The biologist cau-

tiously removed it -- without anger, since that was its form of

feeding -- and proceeded to study it carefully. This story stub-

bornly stuck in my mind during those very difficult times when

a vampire fell onto our necks, sucking the blood of an unhappy

nation.

Maintaining the attitude of a naturalist, while attempting to

track the nature of macrosocial phenomenon in spite of all ad-

versity, insures a certain intellectual distance and better psy-

chological hygiene in the face of horrors that might otherwise

be difficult to contemplate. Such an attitude also slightly in-

creases the feeling of safety and furnishes an insight that this

POLITICAL PONEROLOGY

37

very method may help find a certain creative solution. This

requires strict control of the natural, moralizing reflexes of

revulsion, and other painful emotions that the phenomenon

provokes in any normal person when it deprives him of his joy

of life and personal safety, ruining his own future and that of

his nation. Scientific curiosity therefore becomes a loyal ally

during such times.

~~~

Hopefully, my readers will forgive me for recounting here a

youthful reminiscence that will lead us directly into the subject.

My uncle, a very lonely man, would visit our house periodi-

cally. He had survived the great Soviet Revolution in the

depths of Russia, where he had been shipped out by the Czarist

police. For over a year he wandered from Siberia to Poland.

Whenever he met with an armed group during his travels, he

quickly tried to determine which ideology they represented,

white or red, and thereupon skillfully pretended to profess it.

Had his ruse been unsuccessful, he would have had his head

blown off as a suspected enemy sympathizer. It was safest to

have a gun and belong to a gang. So he would wander and war

alongside either group, usually only until he found an opportu-

nity to desert westward toward his native Poland, a country

which had just regained its freedom.

When he finally reached his beloved homeland again, he

managed to finish his long-interrupted law studies, to become a

decent person, and to achieve a responsible position. However,

he was never able to liberate himself from his nightmarish

memories . Women were frightened by his stories of the bad old

days and thought it would make no sense to bring a new life

into an uncertain future. Thus, he never started a family. Per-

haps he would have been unable to relate to his loved ones

properly.

This uncle of mine would recapture his past by telling the

children in my family stories about what he had seen, experi-

enced and taken part in; our young imaginations were unable to

come to terms with any of it. Nightmarish terror shuddered in

our bones. We would think of questions: why did people lose

all their humanity, what was the reason for all this? Some sort

38

INTRODUCTION

of apprehensive premonition choked its way into our young

minds; unfortunately, it was to come true in the future.

~~~

If a collection were to be made of all those books which de-

scribe the horrors of wars, the cruelties of revolutions, and the

bloody deeds of political leaders and their systems, many read-

ers would avoid such a library. Ancient works would be placed

alongside books by contemporary historians and reporters. The

documentary treatises on German extermination and concentra-

tion camps, and of the extermination of the Jewish Nation,

furnish approximate statistical data and describe the well-

organized “labor” of the destruction of human life, using a

properly calm language, and providing a concrete basis for the

acknowledgement of the nature of evil.

The autobiography of Rudolf Hoess, the commander of

camps in Oswiecim ( Auschwitz ) and Brzezinka ( Birkenau ), is a

classic example of how an intelligent psychopathic individual

with a deficit of human emotion thinks and feels.

Foremost among these would be books written by witnesses

to criminal insanity such as Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at

Noon, from prewar Soviet life; Smoke over Birkenau the per-

sonal memories of Severina Szmaglewska5 from the Oswiecim

German concentration camp for women; The Other World, the

Soviet memoires of Gustav Herling-Grudzinski6; and the Solz-

henitsyn volumes turgid with human suffering.

The collection would include works on the philosophy of

history discussing the social and moral aspects of the genesis of

evil, but they would also use the half-mysterious laws of his-

tory to partly justify the blood-stained solutions. However, an

5 Szmaglewska, Seweryna, 1916-92, writer; 1942-45 prisoner in Nazi con-

centration camps; wrote Dymy nad Birkenau (Smoke over Birkenau, 1945);

witness at Nuremberg Trial; stories and novels mainly concerned with war

and occupation: Zapowiada sie piekny dzien (Looks Like a Beautiful Day,

1960), Niewinni w Norymberdze (The Innocent at Nuremberg, 1972); novels

for young people; anthology of memoirs 1939-45: Wiezienna krata (Prison

Bars, 1964). [Editor’s note.]

6 Herling-Grudzinski, Gustav: Polish writer who after WWII lived in Napoli,

Italy. Married the daughter of well known Italian philosopher Benedetto

Croce. He wrote an account of his time in a Soviet gulag: A World Apart .

[Editor’s note.]

POLITICAL PONEROLOGY

39

alert reader would be able to detect a certain degree of evolu-

tion in the authors’ attitudes, from an ancient affirmation of

primitive enslavement and murder of vanquished peoples, to

the present-day moralizing condemnation of such methods of

behavior.

Such a library would nevertheless be missing a single work

offering a sufficient explanation of the causes and processes

whereby such historical dramas originate, of how and why

human frailties and ambitions degenerate into bloodthirsty

madness. Upon reading the present volume, the reader will

realize that writing such a book was scientifically impossible

until recently.

The old questions would remain unanswered: what made

this happen? Does everyone carry the seeds of crime within, or

is it only some of us? No matter how faithful and psychologi-

cally true, no literary description of occurrences, such as those

narrated by the above-mentioned authors, can answer these

questions, nor can they fully explain the origins of evil. They

are thus incapable of furnishing sufficiently effective principles

for counter-acting evil. The best literary description of a dis-

ease cannot produce an understanding of its essential etiology,

and thus furnishes no principles for treatment. In the same way,

such descriptions of historical tragedies are unable to elaborate

effective measures for counteracting the genesis, existence, or

spread of evil.

In using natural7 language to circumscribe psychological,

social, and moral concepts which cannot properly be described

within its sphere of utility, we produce a sort of surrogate com-

prehension leading to a nagging suspicion of helplessness. Our

natural system of concepts and imaginings is not equipped with

the necessary factual content to permit reasoned comprehen-

sion of the quality of the factors (particularly the psychological

ones) which were active before the birth of, and during, such

inhumanly cruel times

We must nevertheless point out that the authors of such lit-

erary descriptions sensed that their language was insufficient

and therefore attempted to infuse their words with the proper

7 Ordinary, everyday words which have various meanings, generally benign,

and often do not embrace a specific, scientific meaning. [Editor’s note.]

40

INTRODUCTION

scope of precision, almost as though they foresaw that someone

– at some point in time - might use their works in order to ex-

plain what cannot be explained, not even in the best literary

language. Had these writers not been so precise and descriptive

in their language, this author would have been unable to use

their works for his own scientific purposes.

In general, most people are horrified by such literature; in

hedonistic societies particularly, people have the tendency to

escape into ignorance or naive doctrines. Some people even

feel contempt for suffering persons. The influence of such

books can thus be partially harmful; we should counteract that

influence by indicating what the authors had to leave out be-

cause our ordinary world of concepts and imaginings cannot

contain it.

The reader will therefore find herein no bloodcurdling de-

scriptions of criminal behavior or human suffering. It is not the

author’s job to present a graphic return of material adduced by

people who saw and suffered more than he did, and whose

literary talents are greater. Introducing such descriptions into

this work would run counter to its purpose: it would not only

focus attention on some occurrences to the exclusion of many

others, but would also distract the mind from the real heart of

the matter, namely, the general laws of the origin of evil .

In tracking the behavioral mechanisms of the genesis of

evil, one must keep both abhorrence and fear under control,

submit to a passion for epistemological science, and develop

the calm outlook needed in natural history. We must never lose

sight of the objective: to trace the processes of ponerogenesis;

where they can lead and what threat they can pose to us in the

future.

This book therefore aims to take the reader by the hand into

a world beyond the concepts and imaginings he has relied on to

describe his world since childhood, in an overly egotistic way,

probably because his parents, surroundings, and the community

of his country used concepts similar to his own. Thereafter, we

must show him an appropriate selection from the world of fac-

tual concepts which have given birth to recent scientific think-

ing and which will allow him an understanding of what has

remained irrational in his everyday system of concepts.

POLITICAL PONEROLOGY

41

However, this tour of another reality will not be a psycho-

logical experiment conducted upon readers’ minds for the sole

purpose of exposing the weak points and gaps in their natural

world view. Rather, it an urgent necessity due to our contempo-

rary world’s pressing problems, which we can ignore only at

our peril.

It is important to realize that we cannot possibly distinguish

the path to nuclear catastrophe from the path to creative dedica-

tion unless we step beyond this world of natural egotism and

well known concepts. Then we can come to the understanding

that the path was chosen for us by powerful forces, against