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

Regardless of the social scale within which human indi-

viduals were forcibly reared by pathological persons, whether

individual, group, societal, or macrosocial, the principles of

psychotherapeutic action will thus be similar, and should be

based upon data known to us, and an understanding of the psy-

chological situation. Making a patient aware of the kind of

pathological factors which affected him, and jointly under-

standing the results of such effects, is basic to such therapy. We

do not utilize this method if, in an individual case, we have

indications that the patient has inherited this factor. However,

such limitations should not be consistent with regard to macro-

social phenomena affecting the welfare of entire nations.

From the Perspective of Time

If a person with a normal instinctive substratum and basic

intelligence has already heard and read about such a system of

ruthless autocratic rule “based on a fanatical ideology”, he feels

he has already formed an opinion on the subject. However,

direct confrontation with the phenomenon will inevitably pro-

duce in him the feeling of intellectual helplessness. All his

prior imaginings prove to be virtually useless; they explain next

to nothing. This provokes a nagging sensation that he and the

society in which he was educated were quite naive.

Anyone capable of accepting this bitter void with an aware-

ness of his own nescience, which would do a philosopher

proud, can also find an orientation path within this deviant

world. However, egotistically protecting his world view from

disintegrative disillusionment and attempting to combine them

with observations from this new divergent reality, only reaps

mental chaos. The latter has produced unnecessary conflicts

and disillusionment with the new rulership in some people;

others have subordinated themselves to the pathological reality.

One of the differences observed between a normally resistant

person and somebody who has undergone a transpersonifica-

tion is that the former is better able to survive this disintegrat-

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NORMAL PEOPLE UNDER PATHOCRATIC RULE

ing cognitive void, whereas the latter fills the void with the

pathologic propaganda material without sufficient controls.

When the human mind comes into contact with this new re-

ality so different from any experiences encountered by a person

raised in a society dominated by normal people, it releases

psychophysiological shock symptoms in the human brain with

a higher tonus of cortex inhibition and a stifling of feelings,

which then sometimes gush forth uncontrollably. The mind

then works more slowly and less keenly because the associative

mechanisms have become inefficient. Especially when a person

has direct contact with psychopathic representatives of the new

rule, who use their specific experience so as to traumatize the

minds of the “others” with their own personalities, his mind

succumbs to a state of short-term catatonia. Their humiliating

and arrogant techniques, brutal paramoralizations, and so forth

deaden his thought processes and his self-defense capabilities,

and their divergent experiential method anchors in his mind. In

the presence of this kind of phenomenon, any moralizing

evaluation of a person’s behavior in such a situation thus be-

comes inaccurate at best.

Only once these unbelievably unpleasant psychological

states have passed, thanks to rest in benevolent company, is it

possible to reflect, always a difficult and painful process, or to

become aware that one’s mind and common sense have been

fooled by something which cannot fit into the normal human

imagination .

Man and society stand at the beginning of a long road of

unknown experiences which, after much trial and error, finally

leads to a certain hermetic knowledge of what the qualities of

the phenomenon are and how best to build up psychological

resistance thereto. Especially during the dissimulative phase,

which makes it possible to adapt to life in this different world

and thus arrange more tolerable living conditions. We shall

then be able to observe psychological phenomena, knowledge,

immunization, and adaptation such as could not have been

predicted before and which cannot be understood in the world

remaining under the rule of normal man’s systems. A normal

person, however, can never completely adapt to a pathological

POLITICAL PONEROLOGY

237

system; it is easy to be pessimistic about the final results of

this.

Such experiences are exchanged during evening discussions

among a circle of friends, thereby creating within people’s

minds a kind of cognitive conglomeration which is initially

incoherent and contains factual deficiencies. The participation

of moral categories in such a comprehension of the macrosocial

phenomenon, and the manner in which particular individuals

behave, is proportionally much greater within such a new

world view than the above adduced scientific knowledge would

dictate. The ideology officially preached by the pathocracy

continues to retain its ever-diminishing suggestive powers until

such time as human reason manages to localize it as something

subordinate, which is not descriptive of the essence of phe-

nomenon.

Moral and religious values, as well as a nation’s centuries-

old cultural heritage, furnish most societies with support for the

long road of both individual and collective searching through

the jungle of strange phenomena. This apperceptive capacity

possessed by people within the framework of the natural world

view contains a deficiency which hides the nucleus of the phe-

nomenon for many years. Under such conditions, both instinct

and feelings, and the resulting basic intelligence, play instru-

mental roles, stimulating man to make selections which are to a

great extent subconscious.

Under the conditions created by imposed pathocratic rule in

particular, where the described psychological deficiencies are

decisive in joining the activities of such a system, our natural

human instinctive substratum is an instrumental factor in join-

ing the opposition.

Similarly, the environmental, economic, and ideological

motivations which influenced the formation of an individual

personality, including those political attitudes which were as-

sumed earlier, play the role of modifying factors, though they

are not as enduring in time. The activity of these latter factors,

albeit relatively clear with relation to individuals, disappear

within the statistical approach and diminish through the years

of pathocratic rule. The decisions and the choices made for the

side of the society of normal people are once again finally de-

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NORMAL PEOPLE UNDER PATHOCRATIC RULE

cided by factors usually inherited by biological means, and thus

not the product of the person’s option, and predominantly in

subconscious processes.

Man’s general intelligence, especially his intellectual level,

plays a relatively limited role in this process of selecting a path

of action, as expressed by statistically significant but low corre-

lation (-0.16). The higher a person’s general level of talent , the

harder it usually is for him to reconcile himself with this differ-

ent reality and to find a modus vivendi within it.

At the same time, there are gifted and talented people who

join the pathocracy, and harsh words of contempt for the sys-

tem can be heard on the part of simple, uneducated people.

Only those people with the highest degree of intelligence,

which, as mentioned, does not accompany psychopathies, are

unable to find meaning to life within such a system.106 They are

sometimes able to take advantage of their superior mentality in

order to find exceptional ways in which to be useful to others.

Wasting the best talents spells eventual catastrophe for any

social system.

Since those factors subject to the laws of genetics prove de-

cisive, society becomes divided, by means of criteria not

known before, into the adherents of the new rule, the new mid-

dle class mentioned above, and the majority opposition. Since

the properties which cause this new division appear in more or

less equal proportions within any old social group or level, this

new division cuts right through the traditional layers of society.

If we treat the former stratification, whose formation was deci-

sively influenced by the talent factor, as horizontal, the new

one should be referred to as vertical. The most instrumental

factor in the latter is good basic intelligence which, as we al-

ready know, is widely distributed throughout all social groups.

Even those people who were the object of social injustice in

the former system and then bestowed with another system,

which allegedly protected them, slowly start criticizing the

latter. Even though they were forced to join the pathocratic

party, most of the former prewar Communists in the author’s

106 Historically, pathocracies target the intelligentsia for elimination first. As

!obaczewski points out, this wasting of the best minds and talents eventually

leads to catastrophe. [Editor’s note.]

POLITICAL PONEROLOGY

239

homeland later gradually became critical, using the most em-

phatic of language. They were first to deny that the ruling sys-

tem was Communist in nature, persuasively pointing out the

actual differences between the ideology and reality. They tried

to inform their comrades in still independent countries of this

by letters. Worried about this “treason”, these comrades trans-

mitted such letters to their local party in those other countries,

from where these were returned to the security police of the

country of origin. The authors of the letters paid with their lives

or with years of prison; no other social group was finally sub-

jected to such stringent police surveillance as were they.

Regardless of whatever our evaluation of Communist ideol-

ogy or the parties might be, we are presumably justified in

believing that the old Communists were quite competent to

distinguish what was and what was not in accordance with their

ideology and beliefs. Their highly emphatic statements on the

subject, quite popular among Poland’s old Communists circles,

are impressive or even persuasive.107 Because of the operational

language used therein, however, we must designate them as

overly moralizing interpretations not in keeping with the char-

acter of this work. At the same time, we must admit that the

majority of Poland’s prewar Communists were not psycho-

paths.

From the point of view of economics and reality, any sys-

tem wherein most of the property and workplaces are state

owned de jure and de facto is state capitalism and not Commu-

nism. Such a system exhibits the traits of a primitive nine-

teenth-century capitalist exploiter who had an insufficient grasp

of his role in society and of how his interests were linked to his