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

referred to as anti-social personality disorder - as an extreme of

a particular personality type. I think it is more helpful to char-

acterize criminal psychopaths as “unsuccessful psychopaths”.

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EDITOR’S PREFACE

One researcher, Alan Harrington, goes so far as to say that

the psychopath is the new man being produced by the evolu-

tionary pressures of modern life.

Certainly, there have always been shysters and crooks, but

past concern was focused on ferreting out incompetents rather

than psychopaths. Unfortunately, all that has changed. We now

need to fear the super-sophisticated modern crook who does

know what he is doing ... and does it so well that no one else

knows. Yes, psychopaths love the business world.

Uninvolved with others, he coolly saw into their fears and

desires, and maneuvered them as he wished. Such a man

might not, after all, be doomed to a life of scrapes and esca-

pades ending ignominiously in the jailhouse. Instead of mur-

dering others, he might become a corporate raider and murder

companies, firing people instead of killing them, and chopping

up their functions rather than their bodies.

[…T]he consequences to the average citizen from business

crimes are staggering. As criminologist Georgette Bennett

says, “They account for nearly 30% of case filings in U.S.

District Courts - more than any other category of crime. The

combined burglary, mugging and other property losses in-

duced by the country’s street punks come to about $4 billion a

year. However, the seemingly upstanding citizens in our cor-

porate board rooms and the humble clerks in our retail stores

bilk us out of between $40 and $200 billion a year.”

Concern here is that the costume for the new masked san-

ity of a psychopath is just as likely to be a three-piece suit as a

ski mask and a gun. As Harrington says, “We also have the

psychopath in respectable circles, no longer assumed to be a

loser.” He quotes William Krasner as saying, “They - psycho-

path and part psychopath - do well in the more unscrupulous

types of sales work, because they take such delight in ‘putting

it over on them’, getting away with it - and have so little con-

science about defrauding their customers.” Our society is fast

becoming more materialistic, and success at any cost is the

credo of many businessmen. The typical psychopath thrives in

this kind of environment and is seen as a business “hero”.4

4 Ken Magid and Carole McKelvey: The Psychopaths Favourite Play-

ground:Business Relationships.

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19

The study of “ambulatory” psychopaths - what we call “The

Garden Variety Psychopath” - has, however, hardly begun.

Very little is known about subcriminal psychopathy. Some

researchers have begun to seriously consider the idea that it is

important to study psychopathy not as a pathological category

but as a general personality trait in the community at large. In

other words, psychopathy is being recognized as a more or less

a different type of human.

Hervey Cleckly actually comes very close to suggesting that

psychopaths are human in every respect - but that they lack a

soul. This lack of “soul quality” makes them very efficient

“machines”. They can write scholarly works, imitate the words

of emotion, but over time, it becomes clear that their words do

not match their actions. They are the type of person who can

claim that they are devastated by grief who then attend a party

“to forget”. The problem is: they really do forget.

Being very efficient machines, like a computer, they are

able to execute very complex routines designed to elicit from

others support for what they want. In this way, many psycho-

paths are able to reach very high positions in life. It is only

over time that their associates become aware of the fact that

their climb up the ladder of success is predicated on violating

the rights of others. “Even when they are indifferent to the

rights of their associates, they are often able to inspire feelings

of trust and confidence.”

The psychopath recognizes no flaw in his psyche, no need

for change.

Andrew !obaczewski addresses the problem of the psycho-

path and their extremely significant contribution to our macro-

social evils, their ability to act as the éminence grise behind the

very structure of our society. It is very important to keep in

mind that this influence comes from a relatively small segment

of humanity. The other 90-some percent of human beings are

not psychopaths.

But that 90-some percent of normal people know that some-

thing is wrong! They just can’t quite identify it; can’t quite put

their finger on it; and because they can’t, they tend to think that

there is nothing they can do about it, or maybe it is just God

punishing people.

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EDITOR’S PREFACE

What is actually the case is that when that 90-some percent

of human beings fall into a certain state, as !obaczewski will

describe, the psychopaths, like a virulent pathogen in a body,

strike at the weaknesses, and the entire society is plunged into

conditions that always and inevitably lead to horror and tragedy

on a very large scale.

The movie, The Matrix , touched a deep chord in society be-

cause it exemplified this mechanistic trap in which so many

people find their lives enmeshed, and from which they are un-

able to extricate themselves because they believe that everyone

around them who “looks human” is, in fact, just like them -

emotionally, spiritually, and otherwise.

To give an example of how psychopaths can directly affect

society at large: the “legal argument” as explicated by Robert

Canup in his work on the Socially Adept Psychopath . The legal

argument seems to be at the foundation of our society. We

believe that the legal argument is an advanced system of jus-

tice. This is a very cunning trick that has been foisted on nor-

mal people by psychopaths in order to have an advantage over

them. Just think about it for a moment: the legal argument

amounts to little more than the one who is the slickest at using

the structure for convincing a group of people of something, is

the one who is believed. Because this “legal argument” system

has been slowly installed as part of our culture, when it invades

our personal lives, we normally do not recognize it immedi-

ately. But here’s how it works.

Human beings have been accustomed to assume that other

human beings are - at the very least - trying to “do right” and

“be good” and fair and honest. And so, very often, we do not

take the time to use due diligence in order to determine if a

person who has entered our life is, in fact, a “good person”.

When a conflict ensues, we automatically fall into the legal

argument assumption that in any conflict, one side is partly

right one way, and the other is partly right the other, and that

we can form opinions about which side is mostly right or

wrong. Because of our exposure to the “legal argument” norms,

when any dispute arises, we automatically think that the truth

will lie somewhere between two extremes. In this case, applica-

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tion of a little mathematical logic to the problem of the legal

argument might be helpful.