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

“overeducated” is heard more and more often. Such “overquali-

fied” individuals finally hide out in some foundation laboratory

where they are allowed to earn the Nobel prize as long as they

don’t do anything really useful. In the meantime, the country as

whole suffers due to a deficit in the inspirational role of highly

gifted individuals.

As a result, America is stifling progress in all areas of life,

from culture to technology and economics, not excluding po-

litical incompetence. When linked to other deficiencies, an

egotist’s incapability of understanding other people and nations

leads to political error and the scapegoating of outsiders.

Slamming the brakes on the evolution of political structures

and social institutions increases both administrative inertia and

discontent on the part of its victims.

We should realize that the most dramatic social difficulties

and tensions occur at least ten years after the first observable

indications of having emerged from a psychological crisis.

Being a sequel, they also constitute a delayed reaction to the

cause or are stimulated by the same psychological activation

process. The time span for effective countermeasures is thus

rather limited.

Is Europe entitled to look down on America for suffering

from the same sickness the former has succumbed to several

times in the past? Is America’s feeling of superiority toward

Europe derived from these past events and their inhuman and

tragic results? If so, is this attitude anything more than a harm-

fless anachronism? It would be most useful if the European

nations took advantage of their historical experience and more

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93

modern psychological knowledge so as to help America most

effectively.

East Central Europe, now under Soviet domination,32 is part

of the European cycle, albeit somewhat delayed; the same ap-

plies to the Soviet empire, especially to the European portion.

There, however, tracking these changes and isolating them

from more dramatic phenomena eludes the possibilities of ob-

servation, even if it is only a matter of methodology. Even

there, however, there is progressive growth in the grass-roots

resistance of the regenerative power of healthy common sense.

Year by year, the dominant system feels weaker vis-a-vis these

organic transformations. May we add to this a phenomenon the

West finds totally incomprehensible, and which shall be dis-

cussed in greater detail: namely, the growing specific, practical

knowledge about the governing reality within countries whose

regimes are similar. This facilitates individual resistance and a

reconstruction of social links. Such processes shall, in the final

analysis, produce a watershed situation, although it will proba-

bly not be a bloody counter-revolution.

The question suggests itself: Will the time ever come when

this eternal cycle rendering the nations almost helpless can be

conquered? Can countries permanently maintain their creative

and critical activities at a consistently high level? Our era con-

tains many exceptional moments; our contemporary Macbeth

witches’ cauldron holds not only poisonous ingredients, but

also progress and understanding such as humanity has not seen

in millennia.

Upbeat economists point out that humanity has gained a

powerful slave in the form of electric energy and that war, con-

quest, and subjugation of other countries is becoming increas-

ingly unprofitable in the long run. Unfortunately, as we shall

see later in this work, nations can be pushed into economically

irrational desires and actions by other motives whose character

is meta-economic. That is why overcoming these other causes

and phenomena which give rise to evil is a difficult, albeit at

least theoretically attainable, task. However, in order to master

it, we must understand the nature and dynamics of said phe-

32 At the time of writing, 1984.

94

THE HYSTEROIDAL CYCLE

nomena: an old principle of medicine that I will repeat again

and again is: “ Ignota, nulla curatio morbi. ”

One accomplishment of modern science, contributing to the

destruction of these eternal cycles, is the development of com-

munication systems which have linked our globe into one huge

“village”. The time cycles sketched herein used to run their

course almost independently in various civilizations at different

geographical locations. Their phases neither were, nor are,

synchronized. We can assume that the American phase lags 80

years behind the European. When the world becomes an inter-

related structure from the viewpoint of communicating both

information and news, different social contents and opinions

caused by unlike phases of said cycles, inter alia , will overflow

all boundaries and information security systems. This will give

rise to pressures which can change the causative dependencies

herein. A more plastic psychological situation thus emerges,

which increases the possibilities for pinpointed action based on

an understanding of the phenomena.

At the same time, in spite of many difficulties of a scien-

tific, social and political nature, we see the development of a

new community of factors which may eventually contribute to

the liberation of mankind from the effects of uncomprehended

historical causation. The development of science, whose final

goal is a better understanding of man and the laws of social

life, could, in the long run, cause public opinion to accept the

essential knowledge about human nature and the development

of the human personality, which will enable the harmful proc-

esses to be controlled. Some forms of international cooperation

and supervision will be needed for this.

The development of human personality and its capacity for

proper thinking and accurate comprehension of reality entails a

certain amount of risk and demands overcoming comfortable

laziness and applying the efforts of special scientific work un-

der conditions quite different from those under which we have

been raised.

Under such conditions, an egotistic personality, accustomed

to a comfortably narrow environment, superficial thinking, and

uncontrolled emotionalism, will experience very favorable

changes, which cannot be induced by anything else. Specially

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95

altered conditions will cause such a personality to begin disin-

tegrating, thus giving rise to intellectual and cognitive efforts

and moral reflection.

One example of such a program of experience is the Ameri-

can Peace Corps. Young people travel to many poor develop-

ing countries in order to live and work there, often under primi-

tive conditions. They learn to understand other nations and

customs, and their egotism decreases. Their world view devel-

ops and becomes more realistic. They thus lose the characteris-

tic defects of the modern American character.

In order to overcome something whose origin is shrouded in

the mists of time immemorial, we often feel we must battle the

ever-turning windmills of history. However, the end goal of

such effort is the possibility that an objective understanding of

human nature and its eternal weaknesses, plus the resulting

transformation of societal psychology, may enable us effec-

tively to counteract or prevent the destructive and tragic results

sometime in the not too distant future.

Our times are exceptional, and suffering now gives rise to

better comprehension than it did centuries ago. This under-

standing and knowledge fit better into the total picture, since

they are based on objective data. Such a view therefore be-

comes realistic, and people and problems mature in action.

Such action should not be limited to theoretical contemplations,

but rather, acquire organization and form.

In order to facilitate this, let us consider the selected ques-

tions and the draft of a new scientific discipline which would

study evil, discovering its factors of genesis, insufficiently

understood properties, and weak spots, thereby outlining new

possibilities to counteract the origin of human suffering.

CHAPTER V

PATHOCRACY

The Genesis of the Phenomenon

The time-cycle sketched in Chapter III was referred to as

hysteroidal because the intensification or diminution of a soci-

ety’s hysterical condition can be considered its chief measure-

ment. It does not, of course, constitute the only quality subject

to change within the framework of certain periodicity. The

present chapter shall deal with the phenomenon which can

emerge from the phase of maximal intensification of hysteria.

Such a sequence does not appear to result from any relatively

constant laws of history; quite the contrary, some additional

circumstances and factors must participate in such a period of a

society’s general spiritual crisis and cause its reason and social

structure to degenerate in such a way as to bring about the

spontaneous generation of this worst disease of society. Let us

call this societal disease phenomenon “pathocracy”; this is not

the first time it has emerged during the history of our planet.

It appears that this phenomenon, whose causes also appear

to be potentially present in every society, has its own character-

istic process of genesis, only partially conditioned by, and hid-

den within, the maximal hysterical intensity of the above-

described cycle. As a result, unhappy times become exception-

ally cruel and enduring and their causes impossible to under-

stand within the categories of natural human concepts. Let us

therefore bring this process of the origin of pathocracy closer,

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PATHOCRACY

methodically isolating it from other phenomena we can recog-

nize as being conditional or even accompanying it.

A psychologically normal, highly intelligent person called

to high office normally experiences doubts as to whether he

can meet the demands expected of him and seeks the assistance

of others whose opinions he values. At the same time, he feels

nostalgia for his old life, freer and less burdensome, to which

he would like to return after fulfilling his social obligations.

Every society worldwide contains individuals whose dreams

of power arise very early as we have already discussed. They

are generally discriminated against in some way by society,

which uses a moralizing interpretation with regard to their fail-

ings and difficulties, although these individuals are rarely

guilty of them in the precise terms of morality. They would like

to change this unfriendly world into something else. Dreams of

power also represent overcompensation for the feeling of hu-

miliation, the second angle in Adler’s rhombus.89 A significant

and active proportion of this group is composed of individuals

with various deviations who imagine this better world in their

own way, of which we are already familiar.

In the prior chapter, the readers have become acquainted

with examples of these deviations selected in such a way as to