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

those citizens who were able to feather their nest into a rela-

tively comfortable modus vivendi . Outside, other societies start

to feel the pathological quality of the phenomenon quite dis-

tinctly. Such a state of affairs cannot last long. One must then

be prepared for ever more rapid changes, and also behave with

great circumspection.

Pathocracy is a disease of great social movements followed

by entire societies, nations, and empires. In the course of hu-

man history, it has affected social, political, and religious

movements, as well as the accompanying ideologies, character-

istic for the time and the ethnological conditions, and turned

them into caricatures of themselves. This occurs as a result of

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the activities of similar etiological factors in this phenomenon,

namely the participation of pathological agents in a pathody-

namically similar process. That explains why all the pathocra-

cies of the world are and have been so similar in their essential

properties. Contemporaneous ones easily find a common lan-

guage, even if the ideologies nourishing them and protecting

their pathological contents from exposure differ widely.

Identifying these phenomena through history and properly

qualifying them according to their true nature and contents, not

according to the ideology in question, which succumbed to the

characteristic process of caricaturization, is a job for historians.

However, it must be understood that the primary ideology was

undoubtedly socially dynamic and contained creative elements,

otherwise it would have been incapable of nurturing and pro-

tecting the pathocratic phenomenon from recognition and criti-

cism for very long. It would also have been incapable of fur-

nishing the pathological caricature with the tools for imple-

menting its expansionist goals on the outside.

Defining the moment at which a movement has been trans-

formed into something we can call a pathocracy as a result of

the ponerogenic process is a matter of convention. The process

is temporally cumulative and reaches a point of no return at

some particular moment. Eventually, however, internal con-

frontation with the adherents of the original ideology occurs,

thus finally affixing the seal of the pathocratic character of the

phenomenon. Naziism most certainly passed this point of no

return, but was prevented from all-out confrontation with the

adherents of the original ideology because the Allied armies

smashed its entire military might.

Pathocracy and Its Ideology

It should be noted that a great ideology with mesmerizing

values can also easily deprive people of the capacity for self-

critical control over their behavior. The adherents of such ideas

tend to lose sight of the fact that the means used, not just the

end, will be decisive for the result of their activities. Whenever

they reach for overly radical methods of action, still convinced

that they are serving their idea, they are not aware that their

goal has already changed. The principle “the end justifies the

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means” opens the door to a different kind of person for whom a

great idea is useful for purposes of liberating themselves from

the uncomfortable pressure of normal human custom. Every

great ideology thus contains danger, especially for small minds.

Therefore, every great social movement and its ideology can

become a host upon which some pathocracy initiates its para-

sitic life.

The ideology in question may have been marked by deficits

in truth and moral criteria from the very outset, or by the ef-

fects of activities by pathological factors. The original, very

high-minded idea, may also have succumbed to early contami-

nation characteristic of a particular time and social circum-

stance. If such an ideology is infiltrated by foreign, local cul-

tural material which, being heterogeneous, destroys the original

coherent structure of the idea, the actual value may become so

enfeebled that it loses some of its attractiveness for reasonable

people. Once weakened, however, the sociological structure

can succumb to further degeneration, including the activation

of pathological factors, until it has become transformed into its

caricature: the name is the same, but the contents are different.

Differentiating the essence of the pathological phenomenon

from its contemporary ideological host is thus a basic and nec-

essary task, both for scientific-theoretical purposes and for

finding practical solutions for the problems derived from the

existence of the above-mentioned macrosocial phenomena.

If, in order to designate a pathological phenomenon, we ac-

cept the name furnished by the ideology of a social movement

which succumbed to degenerative processes, we lose any abil-

ity to understand or evaluate that ideology and its original con-

tents or to effect proper classification of the phenomenon, per

se. This error is not semantic; it is the keystone of all other

comprehension errors regarding such phenomena, rendering us

intellectually helpless, and depriving us of our capacity for

purposeful, practical action.

This error is based upon compatible propaganda elements of

incompatible social systems. This has, unfortunately, become

much too common and is reminiscent of the very first clumsy

attempts to classify mental diseases according to the systems of

delusions manifested by the patients. Even today, people who

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have not received training in this field will consider a sick per-

son who manifests sexual delusions to be crazy in this area, or

someone with religious delusions to be a “religious maniac”.

The author has even encountered a patient who insisted that he

had become the object of cold and hot rays (paresthesia) on the

basis of a special agreement concluded by the U.S.A. and the

U.S.S.R.

As early as the end of the nineteenth century, famous pio-

neers of contemporary psychiatry correctly distinguished be-

tween the disease and the patient’s system of delusions. A dis-

ease has its own etiological causes, whether determined or not,

and its own pathodynamics and symptomatics which distin-

guish its nature. Various delusional systems can become mani-

fest within the same disease, and similar systems can appear in

various diseases. The delusions, which have sometimes become

so systemic that they convey the impression of an actual story,

originate in the patient’s nature and intelligence, especially in

the imaginations of the environment within which he grew up.

These can be disease-induced caricaturizations of his former

political and social convictions. After all, every mental illness

has its particular style of deforming human minds, producing

nuanced but characteristic differences known for some time to

psychiatrists, and which help them render a diagnosis.

Thus deformed, the world of former fantasies is put to work

for a different purpose: concealing the dramatic state of the

disease from one’s own consciousness and from public opinion

for as long as possible. An experienced psychiatrist does not

attempt premature disillusionment of such a delusional system;

that would provoke the patient’s suicidal tendencies. The doc-

tor’s main object of interest remains the disease he is trying to