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

had a salutary effect on the development of the empire.

However, in any imperial civilization, the complex prob-

lems of human nature are troublesome factors complicating the

legal regulations of public affairs and administrative functions.

This begets a tendency to dismiss such matters and develop a

concept of human personality simplified enough to serve the

purposes of law. Roman citizens could achieve their goals and

develop their personal attitudes within the framework set by

fate and legal principles, which characterized an individual’s

situation based on premises having little to do with actual psy-

chological properties. The spiritual life of people lacking the

rights of citizenship was not an appropriate subject of deeper

studies. Thus, cognitive psychology remained barren, a condi-

tion which always produces moral recession at both the indi-

vidual and public levels.

Christianity had stronger ties with the ancient cultures of the

Asiatic continent, including their philosophical and psycho-

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47

logical reflections. This was of course a dynamic factor render-

ing it more attractive, but it was not the most important one.

Observing and understanding the apparent transformations

faith caused in human personalities created a psychological

school of thought and art on the part of the early believers. This

new relationship to another person, i.e. one’s neighbor, charac-

terized by understanding, forgiveness, and love, opened the

door to a psychological cognition which, often supported by

charismatic phenomena, bore abundant fruit during the first

three centuries after Christ.

An observer at the time might have expected Christianity to

help develop the art of human understanding to a higher level

than the older cultures and religions, and to hope that such

knowledge would protect future generations from the dangers

of speculative thought divorced from that profound psycho-

logical reality which can only be comprehended through sin-

cere respect for another human being.

History, however, has not confirmed such an expectation.

The symptoms of decay in sensitivity and psychological com-

prehension, as well as the Roman Imperial tendency to impose

extrinsic patterns upon human beings, can be observed as early

as 350 A.D. During later eras, Christianity passed through all

those difficulties which result from insufficient psychological

cognition of reality. Exhaustive studies on the historical rea-

sons for suppressing the development of human cognition in

our civilization would be an extremely useful endeavor.

First of all, Christianity adapted the Greek heritage of phi-

losophical thought and language to its purposes. This made it

possible to develop its own philosophy, but the primeval and

materialistic traits of that language imposed certain limits

which hampered communication between Christianity and

other religious cultures for many centuries.

Christ’s message expanded along the seacoast and beaten

paths of the Roman empire’s transportation lines, within the

imperial civilization, but only through bloody persecutions and

ultimate compromises with Rome’s power and law. Rome fi-

nally dealt with the threat by appropriating Christianity to its

own purposes and, as a result, the Christian Church appropri-

ated Roman organizational forms and adapted to existing social

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SOME INDESPENSIBLE CONCEPTS

institutions. As a result of this unavoidable process of adapta-

tion, Christianity inherited Roman habits of legal thinking,

including its indifference to human nature and its variety.

Two heterogeneous systems were thus linked together so

permanently that later centuries forgot just how strange they

actually were to each other. However, time and compromise

did not eliminate the internal inconsistencies, and Roman influ-

ence divested Christianity of some of its profound primeval

psychological knowledge. Christian tribes developing under

different cultural conditions created forms so variegated that

maintaining unity turned out to be an historical impossibility.

A “Western civilization” thus arose hampered by a serious

deficiency in an area which both can and does play a creative

role, and which is supposed to protect societies from various

kinds of evil. This civilization developed formulations in the

area of law, whether national, civil, or finally canon, which

were conceived for invented and simplified beings . These for-

mulations gave short shrift to the total contents of the human

personality and the great psychological differences between

individual members of the species Homo sapiens. For many

centuries any understanding of certain psychological anomalies

found among some individuals was out of the question, even

though these anomalies repeatedly caused disasters.

This civilization was insufficiently resistant to evil , which

originates beyond the easily accessible areas of human con-

sciousness and takes advantage of the enormous gap between

formal or legal thought and psychological reality. In a civiliza-

tion deficient in psychological cognition, hyperactive individu-

als driven by their internal doubts caused by a feelings of being

different easily find a ready echo in other people’s insuffi-

ciently developed consciousness. Such individuals dream of

imposing their power and their different experiential manner

upon their environment and their society.Unfortunately, in a

psychologically ignorant society, their dreams have a good

chance of becoming reality for them and a nightmare for oth-

ers.

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49

Psychology

In the 1870s, a tempestuous event occurred: a search for the

hidden truth about human nature was initiated as a secular

movement based on biological and medical progress, thus its

cognition originated in the material sphere. From the very out-

set, many researchers had a vision of the great future role of

this science for the good of peace and order. However, since it

relegated prior knowledge to the spiritual sphere, any such

approach to the human personality was necessarily one-sided.

People like Ivan Pavlov, C.G. Jung, and others soon noticed

this one-sidedness and attempted to reach a synthesis. Pavlov,

however, was not allowed to state his convictions in public.

Psychology is the only science wherein the observer and the

observed belong to the same species, even to the same person

in an act of introspection. It is thus easy for subjective error to

steal into the reasoning process of the thinking person’s com-

monly used imaginings and individual habits. Error then often

bites its own tail in a vicious circle, thus giving rise to prob-

lems due to the lack of distance between observer and ob-

served, a difficulty unknown in other disciplines.

Some people, such as the behaviorists, attempted to avoid

the above error at all costs. In the process, they impoverished

the cognitive contents to such an extent that there was very

little matter left. However, they produced a very profitable

discipline of thought. Progress was very often elaborated by

persons simultaneously driven by internal anxieties and search-

ing for a method of ordering their own personalities via the

road of knowledge and self-knowledge. If these anxieties were

caused by a defective upbringing, then overcoming these diffi-

culties gave rise to excellent discoveries. However, if the cause

for such anxieties rested within human nature , it resulted in a

permanent tendency to deform the understanding of psycho-

logical phenomena. Within this science, progress is unfortu-

nately very contingent upon the individual values and nature of

its practitioners. It is also dependent upon the social climate.

Wherever a society has become enslaved to others or to the rule

of an overly-privileged native class, psychology is the first

discipline to suffer from censorship and incursions on the part

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SOME INDESPENSIBLE CONCEPTS

of an administrative body which starts claiming the last word

as to what represents scientific truth.

Thanks to the work of outstanding pathfinders, however, the

scientific discipline exists and continues to develop in spite of

all these difficulties; it is useful for the life of society. Many

researchers fill in the gaps of this science with detailed data

which function as a corrective to the subjectivity and vagueness

of famous pioneers. The childhood ailments of any new disci-

pline persist, including a lack of general order and synthesis, as

does the tendency to splinter into individual schools, expound-

ing upon certain theoretical and practical achievements, at the

cost of limiting themselves in other areas.

At the same time, however, findings of a practical nature are

gleaned for the good of people who need help. The direct ob-

servations furnished by everyday work of therapists in the field

are more instrumental in forming scientific comprehension and

developing the language of contemporary psychology than any

academic experiments or deliberations undertaken in a labora-

tory. After all, life itself provides variegated conditions,

whether comfortable or tragic, which subject human individu-

als to experiments no scientist in any laboratory would ever

undertake. This very volume exists because of studies, in the

field, of inhuman experimentation upon entire nations.

Experience teaches a psychologist’s mind how to track an-

other person’s life quickly and effectively, discovering the

causes that conditioned the development of his personality and

behavior. Our minds can thus also reconstruct those factors

which influenced him, although he himself may be unaware of

them. In doing this, we do not, as a rule, use the natural struc-

ture of concepts, often referred to as “common sense” relied

upon by public opinion and many individuals. Rather, we use

categories which are as objective as we can possibly achieve.

Psychologists utilize conceptual language with descriptions of

phenomena that are independent of any common imaginings,

and this is an indispensable tool of practical activity. In prac-

tice, however, it usually turns into clinical slang rather than the

distinguished scientific language it would behoove us to foster.

An analogy can be drawn between this conceptual language of

psychology and mathematical symbols. Very often, a single

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51

Greek letter stands for many pages of mathematical operations

which is instantly recognized by the mathematician.

Objective language

In the categories of psychological objectivity, cognition and

thought are based on the same logical and methodological prin-

ciples shown to be the best tool in many other areas of natural-

istic studies. Exceptions to these rules have become a tradition

for ourselves and for creatures similar to us, but they turn out to

engender more error than usefulness. At the same time, how-