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

areas may yield a new understanding of human problems that

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PREFACE

have plagued humanity for millennia. Ponerology may buttress

the centuries old moral sciencea by a modern natural approach.

Thus this work may contribute to progress toward a universal

peace.

That is the reason that I laboured to retype on my computer

the whole already fading manuscript after twenty years. No

essential changes have been introduced, and it is presented as it

was written in New York all those many years ago. So let it

remain as a document of a very dangerous work of eminent

scientists and myself, undertaken in dark and tragic times under

impossible conditions; still a piece of good science.

The author’s desire is to place this work in the hands of

those who are capable of taking this burden over and progress-

ing with the theoretical research in ponerology, enrich it with

detailed data to replace that which has been lost, and put it in

praxis for various valuable purposes it may serve – for the good

of individual people and for all nations.

I am thankful to Madame Laura Knight-Jadczyk and Profes-

sor Arkadiusz Jadczyk, and their Friends for their heartfelt

encouragement, understanding, and their labour in bringing my

old work to be published.

Andrew M. !obaczewski.

Rzeszów – Poland, December 2005

CHAPTER IV

PONEROLOGY

Ever since ancient times, philosophers and religious think-

ers representing various attitudes in different cultures have

been searching for the truth regarding moral values, attempting

to find criteria for what is right, and what constitutes good ad-

vice. They have described the virtues of human character at

length and suggested these be acquired. They have created a

heritage containing centuries of experience and reflection. In

spite of the obvious differences of originating cultures and

attitudes, even though they worked in widely divergent times

and places, the similarity, or complementary nature, of the

conclusions reached by famous ancient philosophers are strik-

ing. It demonstrates that whatever is valuable is conditioned

and caused by the laws of nature acting upon the personalities

of both individual human beings and collective societies.

It is equally thought-provoking to see how relatively little

has been said about the opposite side of the coin; the nature,

causes, and genesis of evil. These matters are usually cloaked

behind the above generalized conclusions with a certain

amount of secrecy. Such a state of affairs can be partially as-

cribed to the social conditions and historical circumstances

under which these thinkers worked; their modus operandi may

have been dictated at least in part by personal fate, inherited

traditions, or even prudishness. After all, justice and virtue are

the opposites of force and perversity; the same applies to truth-

fulness vs. mendacity, similarly like health is the opposite of an

POLITICAL PONEROLOGY

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illness. It is also possible that whatever they thought or said

about the true nature of evil was later expunged and hidden by

those very forces they sought to expose.

The character and genesis of evil thus remained hidden in

discreet shadows, leaving it to literature to deal with the subject

in highly expressive language. But, expressive though the liter-

ary language might be, it has never reached the primeval source

of the phenomena. A certain cognitive space remained as an

uninvestigated thicket of moral questions which resist under-

standing and philosophical generalizations.

Present-day philosophers developing meta-ethics are trying

to push on along the elastic space leading to an analysis of the

language of ethics, contributing bits and pieces toward elimi-

nating the imperfections and habits of natural conceptual lan-

guage. Penetrating this ever-mysterious nucleus is highly

tempting to a scientist.

At the same time, active practitioners in social life and nor-

mal people searching for their way are significantly condi-

tioned by their trust in certain authorities. Eternal temptations

such as trivializing insufficiently-proven moral values or dis-

loyally taking advantage of naive human respect for them, find

no adequate counterweight within a rational understanding of

reality.

If physicians behaved like ethicists, i.e. relegated to the

shadow of their personal experience relatively un-esthetic dis-

ease phenomena because they were primarily interested in

studying questions of physical and mental hygiene, there would

be no such thing as modern medicine. Even the roots of this

health-maintenance science would be hidden in similar shad-

ows. In spite of the fact that the theory of hygiene has been

linked to medicine since its ancient beginnings, physicians

were correct in their emphasis upon studying disease above all.

They risked their own health and made sacrifices in order to

discover the causes and biological properties of illnesses and,

afterwards, to understand the patho-dynamics of the courses of

these illnesses. A comprehension of the nature of a disease, and

the course it runs, after all, enables the proper curative means

to be elaborated.

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PONEROLOGY

While studying an organisms’ ability to fight off disease,

scientists invented vaccination, which allows organisms to

become resistant to an illness without passing through it in its

full-blown manifestation. Thanks to this, medicine conquers

and prevents phenomena which, in its scope of activity, are

considered a type of evil.

The question thus arises: could some analogous modus op-

erandi not be used to study the causes and genesis of other

kinds of evil scourging human individuals, families, and socie-

ties, in spite of the fact that they appear even more insulting to

our moral feelings than do diseases? Experience has taught the

author that evil is similar to disease in nature, although possibly

more complex and elusive to our understanding. Its genesis

reveals many factors, pathological, especially psychopathologi-

cal, in character, whose essence medicine and psychology have

already studied, or whose understanding demands further in-

vestigation in these realms.

Parallel to the traditional approach, problems commonly

perceived to be moral may also be treated on the basis of data

provided by biology, medicine, and psychology, as factors of

this kind are simultaneously present in the question as a whole.

Experience teaches us that a comprehension of the essence and

genesis of evil generally makes use of data from these areas.

Philosophical reflection alone is insufficient. Philosophical

thought may have engendered all the scientific disciplines, but

the other scientific disciplines did not mature until they became

independent, based on detailed data and a relationship to other

disciplines supplying such data.

Encouraged by the often “coincidental” discovery of these

naturalistic aspects of evil, the author has imitated the method-

ology of medicine; a clinical psychologist and medical co-

worker by profession, he had such tendencies anyway. As is

the case with physicians and disease, he took the risks of close

contact with evil and suffered the consequences. His purpose

was to ascertain the possibilities of understanding the nature of