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

condition for social order and the liberation of creative values.

It also explains why the propriety and productivity of a struc-

ture-creation process constitute a criterion for a good political

system.

Politicians should also be aware that in each society there

are people whose basic intelligence, natural psychological

world view, and moral reasoning have developed improperly.

Some of these persons contain the cause within themselves,

others were subjected to psychologically abnormal people as

children. Such individuals’ comprehension of social and moral

questions is different, both from the natural and from the objec-

tive viewpoint; they constitute a destructive factor for the de-

velopment of society’s psychological concepts, social structure,

and internal bonds.

At the same time, such people easily interpenetrate the so-

cial structure with a ramified22 network of mutual pathological

conspiracies poorly connected to the main social structure.

These people and their networks participate in the genesis of

that evil which spares no nation. This substructure gives birth

to dreams of obtaining power and imposing one’s will upon

society, and is quite often actually brought about in various

countries, and during historical times as well. It is for this rea-

son that a significant portion of our consideration shall be de-

voted to an understanding of this age-old and dangerous source

of problems.

Some countries with a non-homogeneous population mani-

fest further factors which operate destructively upon the forma-

tion of social structure and the permanent developmental proc-

22 Showing one or more branches. In mathematics, ramification is a geomet-

ric term used for “branching out”. It is also used from the opposite perspec-

tive (branches coming together). [Editor’s note.]

POLITICAL PONEROLOGY

79

esses of a society’s psychological world view. Primarily among

these are the racial, ethnic, and cultural differences existing in

virtually every conquest-engendered nation. Memories of for-

mer sufferings and contempt for the vanquished continue to

divide the population for centuries. It is possible to overcome

these difficulties if understanding and goodwill prevail

throughout several generations.

Differences in religious beliefs and the moral convictions

related thereto continue to cause problems, albeit less danger-

ous than the above, unless aggravated by some doctrine of

intolerance or superiority of one faith above others. The crea-

tion of a social structure whose links are patriotic and supra-

religious has, after all, been demonstrated as possible.

All these difficulties become extremely destructive if a so-

cial or religious group, in keeping with its doctrine, demands

that its members be accorded positions which are in fact up-

ward-adjusted with relation to these people’s true talents.

A just social structure woven of individually adjusted per-

sons, i.e. creative and dynamic as a whole, can only take shape

if this process is subjected to its natural laws rather than some

conceptual doctrines. It benefits society as a whole for each

individual to be able to find his own way to self-realization

with assistance from a society which understands these laws,

individual interests and the common good.

One obstacle to the development of a society’s psychologi-

cal world view, the building of a healthy societal structure, and

the institution of proper forms for governing the nation, would

appear to be the enormous populations and vast distances of

giant countries. It is just precisely these nations which give rise

to the greatest ethnic and cultural variations. In a vast spreading

land containing hundreds of millions of people, individuals

lack the support of a familiar homeland and feel powerless to

exert an effect upon matters of high politics. The structure of

society becomes lost in wide-open spaces. What remains is

narrow, generally familial, links.

At the same time, governing such a country creates its own

unavoidable problems: giants suffer from what could be called

permanent macropathy (giant sickness), since the principal

authorities are far away from any individual or local matters.

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SOME INDESPENSIBLE CONCEPTS

The main symptom is the proliferation of regulations required

for administration; they may appear proper in the capital but

are often meaningless in outlying districts or when applied to

individual matters. Officials are forced to follow regulations

blindly; the scope of using their human reason and differentiat-

ing real situations becomes very narrow indeed. Such behav-

ioral procedures have an impact upon the society, which also

starts to think regulations instead of practical and psychological

reality. The psychological world view, which constitutes the

basic factor in cultural development and activates social life,

thus becomes involuted.

It thus behooves us to ask: Is good government possible?

Are giant countries capable of sustaining social and cultural

evolution? It would appear, rather, that the best candidates for

development are those countries whose populations number

between ten and twenty million, and where personal bonds

among citizens, and between citizens and their authorities, still

safeguard correct psychological differentiation and natural

relationships. Overly large countries should be divided into

smaller organisms enjoying considerable autonomy, especially

as regards cultural and economic matters; they could afford

their citizens a feeling of homeland within which their person-

alities could develop and mature.

If someone asked me what should be done to heal the

United States of America, a country which manifests symptoms

of macropathy, inter alia , I would advise subdividing that vast

nation into thirteen states--just like the original ones, except

correspondingly larger and with more natural boundaries. Such

states should then be given considerable autonomy. That would

afford citizens a feeling of homeland, albeit a smaller one, and

liberate the motivations of local patriotism and rivalry among

such states. This would, in turn, facilitate solutions to other

problems with a different origin.

~~~

Society is not an organism subordinating every cell to the

good of the whole; neither is it a colony of insects, where the

collective instinct acts like a dictator. However, it should also

avoid being a compendium of egocentric individuals linked

POLITICAL PONEROLOGY

81

purely by economic interests and legal and formal organiza-

tions.

Any society is a socio-psychological structure woven of in-

dividuals whose psychological organization is the highest, and

thus the most variegated. A significant scope of man’s individ-

ual freedom derives from this state of affairs and subsists in an

extremely complicated relationship to his manifold psychologi-

cal dependencies and duties, with regard to this collective

whole.

Isolating an individual’s personal interest as if it were at war

with collective interests is pure speculation which radically

oversimplifies real conditions instead of tracking their complex

nature. Asking questions based on such schemes is logically

defective, since it contains erroneous suggestions.

In reality, many ostensibly contradictory interests, such as

individual vs. collective or those of various social groups and

substructures, could be reconciled if we could be guided by a

sufficiently penetrating understanding of the good of man and

society, and if we could overcome the operations of emotions

as well as some more or less primitive doctrines. Such recon-

ciliation, however, requires transferring the human and social

problems in question to a higher level of understanding and

acceptance of the natural laws of life. At this level, even the

most difficult problems turn out to have a solution, since they

invariably derive from the same insidious operations of psy-

chopathological phenomena. We shall deal with this question

toward the end of this book.

A colony of insects, no matter how well-organized socially,

is doomed to extinction whenever its collective instinct contin-

ues to operate according to the psychogenetic code, although

the biological meaning has disappeared. If, for instance, a

queen bee does not affect her nuptial flight in time because the

weather has been particularly bad, she begins laying unfertil-

ized eggs which will hatch nothing but drones. The bees con-

tinue to defend their queen, as required by their instinct; of

course, and when the worker bees die out the hive becomes

extinct.

At that point, only a “higher authority” in the shape of a

beekeeper can save such a hive. He must find and destroy the

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SOME INDESPENSIBLE CONCEPTS

drone queen and insinuate a healthy fertilized queen into the

hive along with a few of her young workers. A net is required

for a few days to protect such a queen and her providers from

being stung by those bees loyal to the old queen. Then the hive

instinct accepts the new one. The apiarist generally suffers a

few painful stings in the process.

The following question derives from the above comparison:

Can the human hive inhabiting our globe achieve sufficient

comprehension of macrosocial pathological phenomenon

which is so dangerous, abhorrent, and fascinating at the same

time, before it is too late? At present, our individual and collec-

tive instincts and our natural psychological and moral world

view cannot furnish all the answers upon which to base skillful

counteractive measures.

Those fair-minded people who preach that all we have left

is to trust in the “Great Apiarist in the sky” and a return to His

commandments are glimpsing a general truth, but they also

tend to trivialize particular truths, especially the naturalistic

ones. It is the latter which constitute a basis for comprehending

phenomena and targeting practical action. The laws of nature

have made us very different from one another. Thanks to his

individual characteristics, exceptional life-circumstances, and

scientific effort, man may have achieved some mastery of the

art of objectively comprehending the phenomena of the above-

mentioned type, but we must underscore that this could only

occur because it was in accordance with the laws of nature.

If societies and their wise people are able to accept an ob-

jective understanding of social and sociopathological phenom-

ena, overcoming the emotionalism and egotism of the natural

world view for this purpose, they shall find a means of action

based on an understanding of the essence of the phenomena. It

will then become evident that a proper vaccine or treatment can

be found for each of the diseases scourging the earth in the

form of major or minor social epidemics.

Just as a sailor possessing an accurate nautical map enjoys

greater freedom of course-selection and maneuvering amid