A Journey into the Disturbing, Bizarre, Monomaniacal World of Ponerology!

A response to Ramon Glazov's review of Political Ponerology - Part 2

In part 1 of my response to Ramon Glazov’s review of Political Ponerology, I covered the ad hominem section. Today I will cover his objections of substance, with just a tad of my own ad hominem.

Let’s turn to the book itself. The ‘political ponerology’ of Łobaczewski’s title is, in his words, a ‘new branch of science’ dedicated to studying the ‘genesis of evil.’ This newness turns out to be overblown.

Glazov proceeds to list some of the ideas in ponerology that are not new, like secular cycles. He could have listed more, e.g., the general picture of personality disorders and their negative social effects, the link between psychopathology and political beliefs (pioneered by Lasswell, though with a Freudian bent). Though how anyone can read his chapter on pathocracy, for instance, and not at least admit that it is novel is beyond me.

Łobaczewski owes the better part of his thinking to fin de siecle eugenics – which he sometimes espouses openly – and to a cyclical model of history that is even more ancient.

I dealt with the eugenics bit in part 1. He doesn’t espouse such practices. What he does acknowledge is “natural eugenics.” I.e., human behaviors like mate selection, social ostracism, and punishment of criminals have the effect of selecting for or against certain human features or types. Glazov seemingly wants to give his readers the impression that Lobaczewski wanted to abort unfit babies, sterilize criminals, or euthanize bad apples. Read the book for yourself.

Societies (his theory goes) oscillate between good times and hard times. Good times ‘create moral weakness’ and ‘enable pathological plotters’ because idle, comfortable people are susceptible to decadent ideologies. Then disaster comes and adversity brings moral improvement. You can find more eloquent statements of this idea in Plato and Machiavelli, and it has even trickled down into a G. Michael Hopf quote much favoured by the online right: ‘Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.’

Yes, this idea isn’t new. It also seems to be true.

But the difference between ‘hard times’ and ‘good times’ nearly always depends on which stratum of society you belong to. Were Russians in 1901 having a good time or a hard time? Were they a nation of sybarites or a nation of paupers? It’s a meaningless question unless we ask: which Russians?

It’s funny Glazov brings this up, since he seems to have read this chapter, and it’s one of the shortest in the book. And yet, what do we find there?

Such contented periods—often rooted in some injustice to other people or nations—start to strangle the capacity for individual and societal consciousness … (p. 57)

Lobaczewski wasn’t a Marxist, but neither was he blind to certain roughly class-based realities. In fact, his description of upper classes isn’t very flattering. He makes comments like this at various points throughout the book. But that doesn’t make Glazov right, either. As Turchin shows in his analysis of the USA’s secular cycles, the periods of “good times” were actually pretty good, all around. As for Russians in 1901, fair point, if Lobaczewski had claimed 1901 was part of the “good times.” He never says one way or the other. In fact, in this particular secular cycle, Russia’s “good times” would have been somewhere in the 17th and 18th centuries, the first two centuries of Romanov rule. The revolutionary climate of the late 1800s and early 1900s was the tail-end of a much longer crisis.

Łobaczewski’s only innovation here is to rename this theory, ‘the hysteroidal cycle.’ Borrowing some language (if not much else) from Charcot and Freud, he likens people living in ‘good times’ to hysterics who repress moral strictures and bristle at killjoys who would ruin their buzz with such passé things as time-honoured, ancestral values. (Hysteria metaphors aside, this is a common idea in conservative thought, and, again, there’ve been wittier versions of it.)

He didn’t rename the theory, to my knowledge—he borrowed it from one of his professors, Eugeniusz Brzezicki, whom he cites. But the fact that it’s common to conservative thought must mean it’s wrong. (I should also mention that Lobaczewski also claims that the hysteria is highest among the very upper classes Glazov mentioned above.)

Had Łobaczewski stuck to that, his book wouldn’t be too bizarre, but nothing to write home about either.

If he’d have stuck to that, his book would have been 15 pages long, so naturally, nothing to write home about. Come on, let’s get to the bizarre stuff.

His ideas become more disturbing when he sets about explaining how ‘deviant individuals’ are supposed to corrupt and take over societies.

LOL.

Nations and institutions, Łobaczewski tells us, are like organisms.

Yeah…?

By extension, personality disordered people represent a ‘foreign body within the organism of society,’ akin to ‘germs [that are] not aware that they will be burned alive or buried deep in the ground along with the human body whose death they are causing.’

An apt metaphor. Perhaps Glazov is unaware that this is a typical feature of psychopathy. They will persist in their strangely self-defeating behaviors, even if it leads to their own destruction. He should read some Cleckley (though below, he implies that he has, in fact).

Dozens of times, the book refers to the social presence of personality disorder sufferers as an ‘infection,’ which carries an unpleasant echo of Nazi propaganda that compared Jewish communities to bacteria.

And thank you, sir, for seeing such an echo where few others would. Lobaczewski uses the language of disease, because the book is about disease. But just to give you an idea of the clearly dehumanizing usage of the word in the book, here are all of them, excluding actual mentions of biological infection. Lobaczewski also describes how ideology can “infect” nations, and how pathocracy itself as a macrosocial disease “infects” nations, but those are unrelated to Glazov’s objection:

• “Such a society, already infected by the hysteroidal state …” (p. 57, also p. 301)

• “… thus opening an ‘infection entry’ for the ponerologic role of pathological factors.” (p. 145)

• “This in turn opened the door to infection and activation of the pathological factors within …” (p. 153)

• “A given ideology may have contained weak spots from its inception, carrying errors of human thought and emotion within; or, during the course of its history, it may have been infiltrated by more primitive foreign material containing the effects of ponerogenic factors. Such material destroys an ideology’s internal homogeneity. The source of such infection by foreign ideological material may be the prevailing social system with its laws and customs based on a more primitive tradition, or the autocratic imperialism of a mendacious system of rule. (pp. 160-161)

• “The first [way in which pathocracy interacts with religion] occurs when the religious association itself succumbs to infection and the ponerogenic process …” (p. 288)

• “In order for the doors to be opened to infection by pathological factors, it suffices for such a religious movement to succumb to contamination sometime later in its history …” (p. 293)

I count maybe four that apply, not dozens. I don’t know about you, but I for one am deeply offended by these uses of the word infect and its variations. They sure do bring up images of the demonization of entire racial groups, don’t they?

The first group of ‘deviants’ in Łobaczewski’s line of fire are so-called ‘characteropaths.’

Emotional language which misrepresents Lobaczewski’s perspective, which is clinical to the point of dryness at most times.

These are people with ‘acquired deviations’ due to subtle brain damage. For unclear reasons, Łobaczewski believes that characteropaths are the most common kind of abnormal personalities and estimates that an improbable 5-7% of children have brain lesions from early injuries; over time, these cause ‘negative deformation of [people’s] characters.’

The chapter in which Glazov found this number is entitled his mom. Lobaczewski doesn’t give a percentage for characteropaths, but estimating from the diagram on p. 122 it looks like he probably thought it to be around 2%.

While it remains accepted science that brain damage can alter the personality, Łobaczewski lays an unusual – and almost monomaniacal – emphasis on its role in world history.

No, he doesn’t. His argument runs something like this:

1. There are people with personality-deforming brain injuries.

2. Sometimes these people acquire positions of power.

3. When they do, they tend to be bad leaders.

Everywhere, he imagines, there are people walking around with hidden brain lesions, not only from head injuries but bacterial infections, carbon monoxide exposure and the side-effects of antibiotics.

Let me paraphrase a previous sentence of Glazov’s: “it remains accepted science that certain bacterial infections, carbon monoxide exposure, and Streptomycin [the one antibiotic Lobaczewski mentions] cause brain damage, and can thus affect brain function and personality.”

At one point, he even claims that brain damage from childhood mumps is a major reason that teenagers join ‘felonious youth gangs’!

Here’s what he says: “Individuals with the above-mentioned post-mumps and post-diphtheria traits constitute less than 1% of the population as a whole, but their share reaches 20% in juvenile delinquent groups” (p. 152). An interesting observation. Maybe he was wrong, maybe not. But no, he’s obviously wrong, because Glazov used an exclamation point.

For Łobaczewski, the problem isn’t simply that characteropaths have personality flaws. They also exert an insidious sway on others, corrupting the normal people around them by their sheer presence: ‘[T]heir influence easily anchors in human minds, traumatizing our psyches, impoverishing and deforming our thoughts and feelings, and limiting individuals’ and societies’ ability to use common sense and to read a psychological or moral situation accurately.’

Yep. Tell it to the children of borderlines, buddy.

He blames the First World War on an early head injury that made Kaiser Wilhelm II into a characteropath and repeats the accusation with Stalin, whose characteropathy is supposedly betrayed in ‘some photographs’ by a ‘typical deformation of the forehead.’

Yeah, I found the “typical deformation” of Stalin’s head a bit much, too. But if there’s one thing we can be pretty certain of: Wilhelm and Stalin were not normal.

People who got knocked on the head as babies aren’t the sole culprits behind Łobaczewski’s pathocracies. More dangerous, apparently, are schizoids and psychopaths who have ‘inherited deviations.’

“…the heritability estimate of psychopathy is ~50–80%.”

Incredibly, Łobaczewski claims that these conditions are transmitted through simple Mendelian inheritance, just like haemophilia and colour blindness. (This would bring relief to a lot of frustrated geneticists if it were the least bit true.) Indeed, for all the importance Political Ponerology places on genetics and descriptive psychiatry, its understanding of both fields is firmly stuck in the 1920s, before anyone guessed that genes were much more complicated than allele charts.

Yes, Lobaczewski’s understanding of the genetics of personality disorders is woefully out of date, but very little of what he writes is dependent on that.

Under Łobaczewski’s theory, the early ground for a pathocracy is laid by schizoid intellectuals. Their detached introversion and doctrinaire black-and-white thinking make them the perfect midwives for deviant ideologies that ‘may poison the minds of society on a wide scale and for a long time.’

Yep, an idea not too dissimilar from Iain McGilchrist and Louis Sass’s take on “schizo-autistic” philosophy.

Here, Łobaczewski reverts to the classic obsessions of the Polish far right. He claims that schizoid personality disorder occurs at its highest ‘among Jews.’

Probably with good reason. Let’s look at the work of some Jewish researchers: In “A Family History Study of Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders” (1994), psychiatrist Ann B. Goodman cites increased risk for schizophrenia and autism among Ashkenazi (Eastern European) Jews, hypothesizing that “increased prevalence of various rare autosomal recessive diseases among the Ashkenazim might contribute to the increased vulnerability.” More recently, Israeli and American scientists discovered an Ashkenazi gene that predisposes for schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, and bipolar disorder, raising the chances of these disorders by 40% for carriers of the gene, compared to 15% in the general population (Haaretz, Nov. 26, 2013). See Lencz et al., “Genome-wide Association Study Implicates NDST3 in Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder” (2013).

And his favourite example of a Jewish schizoid philosopher is, to no one’s surprise, Karl Marx.

Naturally. The book is about communism. (And Glazov is writing in Jacobin. Hmm…)

He quotes a minor Polish psychiatrist who labelled Marx and Engels ‘bearded schizoidal fanatics’ and also alleges to find typical schizoid thinking in The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. (We find no acknowledgment that the latter document is a forgery. Łobaczewski seems to treat it as an actual manifesto.)

Here’s the quote in question: “men with bad instincts are more in number than the good, and therefore the best results in governing them are attained by violence and terrorism, and not by academic discussions. Every man aims at power, everyone would like to become a dictator if only he could, and rare indeed are the men who would not be willing to sacrifice the welfare of all for the sake of securing their own welfare.” Even as a forgery, it captures the thinking patterns of a political schizoid as described by Lobaczewski.

He also proposes that, ‘for purposes of proper mental hygiene,’ we shouldn’t read Marx by considering his ideas, but rather by scanning his works for ‘characteristic’ symptoms of schizoidia. To be doubly sure that no one will be seduced by Marxian pathology, Łobaczewski recommends this as an activity for ‘two or more people.’

Marx study groups. Sounds like a blast, no? Maybe Glazov should follow his advice!

The supposed hallmark of all deviant ideologies is something Łobaczewski calls ‘the schizoidal declaration.’ He phrases it as follows: “Human nature is so bad that order in human society can only be maintained by a strong power created by highly qualified individuals in the name of some higher idea.”

This statement might describe about half the history of political philosophy.

Probably half the history of political philosophy is written by schizo-autists.

We’ll even find that it fits Łobaczewski’s own worldview pretty well.

Not really.

Indeed, as one example of a schizoidal declaration, our author produces a quote from the Bolshevik secret police founder Felix Dzerzhinski which he could easily have written himself: ‘My forbearance derives not from my fancy, but rather from my clear vision of the cause[s] which give rise to evil.’

Lobaczewski didn’t quote this as a schizoidal declaration. He cited it as an example of an asthenic psychopath’s “different psychological knowledge.” Dzerzhinski’s “clear vision” was that of a murderous freak, in case Glazov had forgotten.

It’s a troubling fact that the kind of psychiatry Łobaczewski advocates has actually been a past ally of fascist dictatorships. Antonio Vallejo-Nájera – the ‘Spanish Mengele’ who was one of the top psychiatrists of Francisco Franco’s regime – also voiced a belief that Marxists were ‘schizoid’ and devoted his research to ‘investigating the bio-psychic roots of Marxism’ in the hope of finding a ‘red gene.’ Acting on his eugenic proposals, Franco’s government is estimated to have forcibly removed as many as 30,000 children from their parents and destroyed birth records.

That’s not Lobaczewski’s kind of psychiatry, obviously. What is up with this guy?

Among the less prominent ‘deviants’ in Łobaczewski’s book, we find ‘skirtoids,’ a hypothetical thuggish personality type that he suggests is the result of racial interbreeding. ‘If that were the case, North America should be full of skirtoids …’

That was partially the result of a poor translation in the first edition. Here’s what the Polish actually said: “Kretschmer was of the opinion that this anomaly was a biodynamic phenomenon caused by the crossing of two widely separated ethnic groups, which is frequent in that area of Europe. If that were the case, North America should be full of skirtoids, a hypothesis not born out by observation” (p. 121).

Googling the term, I can’t find a single mention of skirtoids by anyone save Łobaczewski. He claims to have gotten the concept from an unnamed work by Ernst Kretschmer, a prominent German psychiatrist of the 1920s and 30s.

Google harder. And read better. He says explicitly where he got the concept: “a type with deviant features which was isolated long ago by E. Brzezicki” (p. 120). Here’s the reference: Eugeniusz Brzezicki, “O potrzebie rozszerzenia typologii Kretschmera [On the Need to Expand Kretschmer’s Typology],” Życie Naukowe 1.1, no. 5 (1946).

Kretschmer’s career, like Vallejo-Nájera’s, gives us another example of an unsavoury alliance between eugenicist psychopathology and fascism. After Hitler’s rise to power, Kretschmer became a supporter of the Third Reich and an expert advisor for its 1933 involuntary sterilisation policy. Kieran McNally’s A Critical History of Schizophrenia (2016) notes that a key justification for the policy was the ‘erroneous belief’ that ‘a recessive Mendelian gene’ could account for mental illness. This is basically the same genetic theory that Łobaczewski espoused to the end of his life.

So far Glazov hasn’t mentioned that Lobaczewski thought the Nazis were also a bunch of psychopaths, and has a chapter on the pathocratic misuse of psychiatry. Wonder why …

The ultimate villains of Łobaczewski’s narrative are psychopaths, and he initially presents them more-or-less as they appear in Hervey Cleckley’s much more reputable book, The Mask of Sanity (1941): remorseless, deceitful and unable to form attachments.

Once a pathocracy takes over, we read, a cabal of disordered personalities – representing 6 per cent of the population – promptly occupy all important positions and become a new aristocratic class. Healthy people are expunged from the power structure until the pathocrats hold a monopoly over every institution, from academia to the police. Psychopaths form only a tenth of this 6 per cent but end up as the regime’s puppet masters.

Good summary! I may use it sometime.

Now we come to one of the book’s oddest statements. Because psychopaths are so rare, it isn’t easy to find enough of them to stack a whole country’s administration in the pathocracy’s favour. Consequently, once ‘such a system has lasted several years, one hundred percent of all cases of essential psychopathy are involved in pathocratic activity.’ (Were there any Russian psychopaths left at all in Siberia? Or were they all rescued and quickly promoted to government posts, regardless of how conspicuous gulag tattoos might’ve looked on a civil servant?)

It is an odd statement—and by odd I mean one of the most interesting, though I personally don’t find it so odd as to be unthinkable. Rather, when reading about the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, for instance, and wondering how things could be they way they were, I find myself asking how that is possible. After reading Lobaczewski’s explanation, I think, “Oh, now that explains it.”

Where there any Russian psychopaths left at all in Siberia? Probably. A few things to consider regarding Lobaczewski’s claim follow. To get into his frame of mind on the subject, consider this:

Let us now take individual cases into consideration. For instance: we meet two people whose behavior makes us suspect they are psychopaths, but their attitudes to the pathocratic system are quite different; the first is affirmative, the second painfully critical. Studies on the basis of tests detecting brain tissue damage will indicate such pathology in the second person, but not in the first; in the second case we are dealing with behavior which may be strongly reminiscent of psychopathy, but the substratum is different. (pp. 235-236)

Maybe he’s wrong. That’s a question for future research to confirm or deny. But we can at least take the idea seriously—that certain personality disorders are virtually diagnostic for participation in a “pathocratic” totalitarian regime.

It’s very possible that Lobaczewski’s “characteropath/psychopath” division is lacking. But it’s largely compatible with the current “biopsychosocial” model which posits distinct yet overlapping biological, psychological, and social risk factors for personality and behavioral dysfunction. What Lobaczewski is saying is that in the case of pathocracy, those with primarily social or environmental risk factors—and not underlying genetic and psychological factors—are less likely to support pathocratic governments, in contrast to those with primarily genetic/psychological risk factors.

This touches on the antisocial vs. psychopathy debate. Many with ASPD will be called psychopaths or sociopaths, even though the etiology of the disorder is different. Psychopathy is primarily emotional/interpersonal; antisocial is primarily behavioral. Some ASPDs are psychopaths, but not all. Many psychopaths are ASPDs, but not all.

The question to ask regards those with all the biopsychosocial risk factors. Do the genetic factors override the social ones? Or might the social ones cause, for instance, a level of executive dysfunction that puts such individuals at odds with the requirements of pathocratic procedure and government? We don’t know.

Achieving this would take a fantastic degree of collective self-awareness on behalf of the pathocrats, a personality disordered ‘class consciousness’ that hardly exists even in today’s milieu of online mental health communities.

Correct. The scary thing is that such a thing may be possible. The intriguing thing is that may explain why totalitarian governments are the way they are.

More than that, it would take a lot of mutual trust and cooperation, plus an excellent ability for long-term planning. The psychopaths Hervey Cleckley described weren’t exactly brimming with these qualities – despite Łobaczewski’s name-dropping of his work. Admittedly, some clinical texts – such as Otto Kernberg’s studies of large group psychology – theorise that cults and dictatorships can be led by malignant narcissists, the milder siblings of true psychopaths. Yet Kernberg doesn’t respond to this problem with the hysteria that we get from Łobaczewski.

Hysteria is the last word I would use to describe Lobaczewski’s writing. As for the first bit, it’s a valid question to ask, though perhaps overstated. It may not require the levels of mutual trust and cooperation Glazov thinks. Though it’s interesting to consider that psychopaths may be capable of such, under certain conditions (as in mafias, for instance). Or that those “successful” psychopaths with better frontal brain function fulfill those roles.

He notes that malignant narcissists who end up in power positions need at least some basic competence at their jobs and that their negative effects on institutions are often slow and subtle. Importantly, he cautions that, in politics, ‘malignant narcissistic leadership should not be exposed with diagnostic psychiatrist labels’ but by drawing attention to the corrupt behaviour instead. After all, creating stigma around narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) brings the risk that fewer people might seek therapy for it. Reviewing previous research on the dynamic psychology of fascism, Kernberg observes that one of its hallmarks is discourse that ‘depict[s] enemy groups with symbols … associated with bodily waste, vermin, [and] dangerous, or toxic animal traits.’ Łobaczewski’s own addiction to microbial metaphors should give us pause before enlisting him as an ally to anti-fascism.

Again, Glazov’s focus on Lobaczewski’s “addiction to microbial metaphors” is overblown. But Kernberg’s ideas above and below may have value.

While Kernberg states that malignant narcissist leaders might bring similarly narcissistic people into their inner circles, this is not the only possible scenario. From Kernberg’s other writings – such as his magnum opus, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (1975) – we might gather that narcissists can also be tremendously bad at maintaining stable relationships. Many of the patients he describes are troubled people with a chaotically high turnover rate for friends, lovers and allies, prone to fleeting honeymoon periods that quickly turn sour. Nor is it a given that Kernbergian narcissists will always choose other narcissists to smooch and discard. Insecure, clingy, dependent characters might be drawn to a narcissist, too, in an attraction of opposites. This ‘dependency group’ – a concept from the psychoanalyst WR Bion – is among the leadership structures that Kernberg’s latest paper mentions, and seemingly quite common in cult-like organisations.

Glazov then gets into a discussion of the use of ponerology in the context of Trump. I actually agree with many of his points, but this post is long as it is. So, until next time: Technocracy, Trump, and the Perils of Ponerology