Logocracy - Chapter 4: Ponerology: The Science of the Nature of Evil

Summarizing ponerology in the context of logocracy

Russian Revolution, October 1917, poster

This is the last chapter to share significant overlap with the content in Political Ponerology, consisting in a summary of some of its main points. Since the material is mostly repetitive, I won’t give an extensive summary. Though I recommend reading it even if you’ve read Ponerology; it is not a direct rewrite, some points are written in such a way as to expand on the original, and he makes a few points not found there (e.g. a brief overview of the historical background to Soviet pathocracy).

A few of the highlights for me:

1. Promoting moral values is only one half of the equation. That will have the effect of fostering virtue where the seed is sown into good soil, so to speak, but will have no effect on the pathologies underlying human evil. (You can’t encourage actual morality in psychopaths.) So the equation must be balanced out with the need to treat pathology causally, not simply reacting to it moralistically. That is, first the connection between evil and psychopathology needs to be recognized. Then, preventative measures must be taken before the processes of ponerogenesis have the opportunity to come to fruition. Moralizing and punitive measures do little to stop evil from happening. Stopping it requires thinking and acting causally, as in medicine.

2. One of the points that cleared up for me was the role of characteropaths in pathocracy. Despite brain damage, they still have more in common with the world of normal people than they do with the psychopathic world. “That is why their morbidly distorted worldview, their fanatical ideas, and their aspirations are born out of the problematic society of normal people.” In a well-established pathocracy, they will eventually associate more with normies than the power structure. Think of all the Woke neurotics and borderlines today. Eventually they will be pushed to the sidelines.

3. Lobaczewski includes a tidbit on Lenin not included in Ponerology: “Even the Russian version that the right hemisphere of his brain atrophied cannot be ruled out.” I find this interesting when considering McGilchrist’s work. It’s the only time Lobaczewski mentions hemisphere differences, which probably play a greater role in ponerogenic phenomena than he realized.

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Chapter 4

In revolutions, and especially democratic revolutions, madmen, and not those who are described as such by metaphor, but real madmen, have played a serious political role. —Charles Alexis de Tocqueville

Ethics is one of the oldest components of philosophical thought and its great output is worth studying and learning about. The efforts of human thought to oppose evil are as old as human civilizations, so ethical science also bears the experience of centuries. Nevertheless, under present conditions, the progress of empirical, medical, and psychological knowledge has unexpectedly opened avenues of research that were not possible during the long history of this science.

Since the last years before World War II, there has been steady progress in the study of the state of the human brain and mind. This consists of methods developed by medicine and technology. However, a fundamental breakthrough in the way psychologists and psychiatrists think was developed by psychological tests. We use them to study the efficiency of a person’s mind and talents, and thus to understand him and his social and occupational adaptation. In clinical cases, we use them primarily to detect and localize damage to brain tissue and for other purposes. Tests are an inexpensive and easy-to-use means, and in comparison with the aforementioned methods based on physical phenomena, they excel in sensitivity and remain indispensable where we are examining pathological changes that are very small or very long-established.

As a result, psychopathology, until recently a descriptive science that relied on the intuition of psychiatrists, is being transformed into knowledge based on increasingly rich objective criteria. A distinctive division of pathological states is being drawn into those caused or resulting in damage to brain tissue by any pathological agent, and those which are in the nature of disorders of mental function, aberrations of hereditary origin, or distortions of personality development. Being able to distinguish between these types of states and their qualities, we continue to use different ways of diagnostic reasoning and then treatment, such as pharmacological or psychotherapeutic.

As a typical clinical psychologist, the author found this modern way of thinking relatively early. It was confirmed by the validity of diagnostic results and prognoses on hundreds of patients. This approach also opened the way to good results in psychotherapy, based on a prior sufficiently insightful diagnosis of the patients’ mental states and their causes. The research paper, on the function of the frontal half of the cerebral cortex, was not allowed to be published, but I use it in the considerations presented below.

These changes and the maturation of a new style of thinking in psychology and psychopathology, and above all the enrichment of our knowledge of the workings of the human brain, the structure of the human personality, and the causality operating in it, have unexpectedly opened the way to such investigations, which were not possible during the previous centuries. A new field of cognition opened up in the hands of an experienced clinician, without any such prior intention. One day I realized that I was beginning to understand issues that had not been understood before. Moreover, tradition had developed some erroneous archetypes for understanding them, which contributes to our powerlessness in the face of the evils we encounter on the roads of life. This new avenue of research was born out of inquiries into the psychology and real nature of this macrosocial pathological phenomenon, which is still hidden under the misleading name of “communism,” and which were undertaken by scientists of the generation of my professors and their colleagues in other countries, and which I joined shortly before this clandestine movement was broken up by the political authorities of the time. Ponerology arose in conditions when reflection on the nature of evil had become a common phenomenon in our country, and it partly grew out of such reflections.

When common worldview concepts, as well as those accepted in the social sciences, proved to be completely unreliable in this field, all these researchers faced frustrating difficulties. The fundamental question then had to be asked: what psychological, hereditary, inborn, acquired characteristics, whether the result of upbringing or of faulty social adaptation, determine that some people succumb to a peculiar phenomenon of “transpersonification” and join this system which is so often criminal, while at the same time the great majority of people accept humiliation, dangers, and poverty in order to persist in the social, moral, or religious bonds and traditions of the nation? Such investigations unexpectedly pointed out that the decisive role was played by hereditarily transmitted characteristics, especially weaknesses and anomalies of the instinctive substrate, with psychopaths at the forefront. It was necessary to recognize the special leading role of psychopathy proper, which we will describe below. It was necessary, for this purpose, to create an advance of knowledge by studying more closely those psychic anomalies which played an important role in this phenomenon.

So I went to Tyniec, asking the Benedictine Fathers, excellent Greek philologists, to find a suitable name for my new field of knowledge. They decided that the word poneros as a name for that kind of evil which gives rise to human harm was most appropriate. Hence the new natural science of the nature of evil was exemplarily christened with the name “PONEROLOGY.” Accordingly, the processes of the birth of evil were called—ponerogenesis.

Thus appears a new discipline, the natural counterpart and complement of ethics. If we can compare ethics to the science of human hygiene, then ponerology should be considered the counterpart of general and specific pathology. Just as medicine owes its achievements to the study of the nature of diseases, their etiological factors, and the pathodynamics of their course, ponerology studies the etiological causes of the origin of evil, their different varieties, and the regularities that govern the processes of its genesis in human personalities and societies. In common with medicine and psychology, it has many biological, psychological, and pathological premises, especially those that have made it possible to open this new way of knowledge.

Just as doctors accept the risk of close contact with diseases and their infectious agents, the ponerologist must accept certain dangers of contact with evil, because this is necessary for learning about its nature. This, however, will allow us to work out more effective—because causally acting—methods of counteracting its genesis and eliminating its effects. I hope that this new way of cognition will develop and be enriched by the work of other researchers, so that it can effectively support the eternal efforts of moralists in counteracting evil in its many forms. This new discipline will find application in psychology, especially in psychotherapy, in the social sciences and law, in the field of historical research, and for overcoming evil that arises on a large political scale. The development of this new knowledge seems indispensable so that our intention to build a social and state system better than all past and present can be realized. Therefore, allow me to present it here in succinct summary.

Out of more than 5,000 sick, neurotic, and healthy patients, who made up the author’s experience, 384 adults were listed who had committed conduct seriously injurious to other people. They came from all social backgrounds, mostly from Upper Silesia with its oppressive living conditions and poisoned atmosphere. They represented a variety of worldviews and political attitudes. About 30 of these people had some form of punishment behind them, often excessively harsh. They were seeking a path of readaptation in social life, which led them to be frank with the psychologist. Others had harmed someone in a way that, in legal theory or practice, does not become the subject of legal proceedings. Some were protected by a political system that was itself an embryo of ponerogenesis. Beyond that, one could draw on the accounts of those who had been harmed, as well as one’s own observations and experiences.

All the subjects mentioned were interviewed and tested, with assessment of the general level of giftedness and its type, in order to detect or exclude damage to brain tissue, and to form a sufficiently comprehensive picture of their mental state. The results of their medical and laboratory tests could also be used.

It turned out that among this number of persons there were only 14 to 16% in whom an analysis of their personality and the genesis of their acts did not indicate the complicity of some pathological factor, most often psychopathological, which contributed significantly to their injurious acts. Thus, the natural reality turned out to be almost the opposite of the widespread beliefs that interpret evil in moral terms and to the exclusion of these factors, as well as in relation to judicial practice.

With regard to these several percent, it should be emphasized that the failure to detect a pathological factor in the genesis of their actions is not proof of its nonexistence. Certainly, it can be the result of our insufficient methods of examination and skills. This raises the hypothesis of the widespread participation of pathological factors in the processes of the genesis of evil. It seems all the more probable if we consider the already known conviction of ethicists that the evil of this world creates a common bond of mutual conditioning, hardly dependent on the individual motivations of the perpetrators. Therefore, this hypothesis awaits its inductive proof.

With regard to cases where the involvement of such factors has been demonstrated, one can usually indulge in reasoning of the exclusionary hypothesis type, wondering what would have happened if such a pathological factor had not cooperated in the genesis of the act. Then we most often come to the conclusion that the injurious act also would not have occurred, or the case would have ended in lesser difficulties. This initial hypothesis and reasoning together lead to a fundamental conclusion. If it were possible to put the pathological factor out of action in advance, or to bring it under the control of the consciousness of those involved, then the process of ponerogenesis would be effectively dammed. Psychotherapeutic practice confirms this conviction.

For the study of the role of various pathological factors in the processes of ponerogenesis, it was possible to use only a part of the above-mentioned number of subjects when circumstances permitted. As a result, it should be assumed that the role of a pathological factor in the process of the genesis of evil can be played by any such phenomenon, known to modern psychopathology, or not yet sufficiently studied, as well as some pathological states which are not included in psychopathology. Their activity in the processes of ponerogenesis, however, depends on other properties than the intensity or demonstrativeness of clinical symptoms.

The greatest ponerogenic activity is reached by a given factor at such an intensity when it is usually detectable and its quality can be established using the methods of clinical psychology and medicine, but it is not yet recognized as a pathological phenomenon by the opinion of the environment. Then such a factor can affect in a hidden way, both on the conduct of the bearer himself and on other people. Such a pathological deficit, acting from within the carrier, lowers his criticism, causes insufficient control of affect, as well as other abnormal tendencies. Acting from the outside, it influences other people by spellbinding them with something supposedly extraordinary, traumatizing their psyche and depriving part of their ability to use common sense. In children and adolescents such influences cause permanent distortions in personality development, especially in the psychological outlook of the world. This leads to later committing harmful acts with limited sense of guilt.

In the processes of ponerogenesis, the impact of pathological factors from the outside of individuals, from their carriers, plays a quantitatively greater role than their impact from the inside, which is sometimes more easily recognized by the courts and public opinion. A particularly malignant form of such influence appears when it triggers a kind of moralizing interpretation of intrinsically pathological phenomena, to which we all have a natural tendency. This impairs our ability to understand evil causally and thus to counteract it effectively. At the same time, it triggers vengeful feelings and a desire for punishment, which in turn becomes the beginning of new phases in the genesis of evil.

Thus, there is a moral idea running through all of ponerology that points to the need to master this common human tendency and turn our attention to causal knowledge of the nature of evil, since this serves to overcome it.

In the processes of ponerogenesis, human moral weaknesses, known for centuries, the deficiencies of our intelligence, knowledge, and correctness of reasoning, combine with the action of pathological factors. This creates a complex web of causality, often containing feedback relationships or closed systems. Practical causes and effects are often separated by a significant lapse of time. For example, the influence of the pathological character of one parent, which has caused distortions in the development of the child’s personality, will result in acts of harm to the now adult.

The processes of ponerogenesis remind us of a complex chemical synthesis in which the deficiency of one component causes a reduction or change in the overall process. Ethicists have advised the development of human moral self-control for centuries. Socrates and Confucius pointed to the role of knowing what is right. The ponerologist is closer to the latter, because the discernment of pathological factors and their role in the genesis of evil can be counted among the knowledge that shows the way of right conduct. Thus, limiting the action of pathological factors, or subjecting their role to conscious control, produces an effect at least analogous to improving the moral condition of man.

When, for example, in the course of psychotherapy, we make a person aware that in the genesis of his behaviour we find the effects of the influence of a person who betrayed ponerogenically active mental aberrations, we carry out a procedure that is painful for him and requires tact and experience. However, as a result of such an experience, the patient will develop a kind of self-knowledge that will allow him to correct his own personality and to avoid behaving in a way that harms others and himself. He will also become more critical and resistant to other such factors.

In considering the role of particular types of pathological factors, I have relied both on patients well known to me and on some historical figures sufficiently well described in this respect. The most typical or ponerogenically active examples will be discussed below. More extensive data can be found in my other works.

Nerve tissue is the least regenerative of all tissues in the human body. If it is damaged by a variety of mostly medically known causes, after the defect has healed a rehabilitation process occurs in which an adjacent healthy tissue takes over the functions of the damaged one. This substitution, however, is never so good that the effects of the damage cannot be registered with appropriate tests and do not leave some psychological difficulty or discomfort. Such matters constitute the most common problem and the daily bread of the clinical psychologist.

To the frequent and ponerogenically active consequences of such damage belong defective development of characters, called in Polish psychiatry characteropathies. (The name was introduced by Prof. T. Bilikiewicz). Intercerebral damage often becomes the basis of paranoid characteropathies. On the basis of small changes in the cerebral cortex, a pettifogging characteropathy¹ develops. The frontal characteropathy, which develops as a result of atrophy of the frontal fields of the cerebral cortex (BA10 according to Brodmann’s division), should be considered the most ponerogenically active. The latter will receive more attention as a very characteristic example.

These centers exist practically only in humans. Thanks to them we are able to capture in our field of attention a number of images and effect their internal inspection. Damage to these centers selectively impairs the mentioned function. A person with such a defect retains a good memory, the ability to form associations, and an instinctive sense of the psychological situation. His intelligence is therefore only unilaterally impaired. Children with such a defect initially learn normally, and school difficulties arise when the curriculum begins to load the impaired function. Such people develop a shortened thinking pathway that leads, bypassing the impaired function, from associations to statements and to decisions that are not subject to persuasion. The inner discussions and struggles of motives characteristic of the normal person are lacking, as well as the ability to make insights into one’s own mental state. Technical imagination is impaired. This ability to sense the psychological situation and to decide quickly is interpreted by such people as a sign of their own genius and on this basis they despise normal people who have to think for so long because they experience various doubts. Such characteropaths become cunning and violent over time and their personalities are characterized by the highest degree of pathological egotism. At the same time, they exhibit pathological vindictiveness, which often becomes their guiding idea. Such “Stalinist characters” are rarely recognized by their environment as pathological phenomena. On the contrary, they are regarded as extraordinary, even brilliant, and they spellbind, traumatize, and distort other personalities, influencing them with a specific dynamic.

At the beginning of his career as a clinical psychologist, the author had the opportunity to study all the siblings of people who were already elderly, mostly with higher education, including some who had served their country before the war, and who had undergone distorted personality development in childhood under the influence of the eldest sister with this kind of characteropathy. Later, when their sister betrayed an increasingly aggravated pathology of character and finally sacrificed her youngest son as the scapegoat of her vengeance, the whole family sympathized with her, participating with honor in her insane action.

When the situation and their mistakes were explained to them, they almost became violent. After some time, however, the correct effect of psychotherapy prevailed. They returned one by one, declaring that they would work together to smooth out the situation in the family and the fate of the unhappy boy.

These men were brought up under Franz Joseph, in the spirit of Prussian rather than Austrian militarism. Beaten in duels, they valued primitive notions of honor at its highest. Humanists, therefore, reflecting on their characters and conduct, concluded that it was in those times and customs that the causes should be sought. Meanwhile, psychological analysis pointed clearly to a factor of fundamental importance—the influence of an older sister with frontal characteropathy acting from early childhood, which led them to a participatory state in her pathology.

All the comparative material that has been captured today indicates that Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili was a case of this very malignant characteropathy. The conviction of his own genius in a man who was not outstanding, the making of irreversible decisions, pathological vindictiveness, and other of his qualities correspond to this very picture. We find characteristic data in the book of his daughter Svetlana, and now in more recent publications. In some pictures you can see the typical deformation of the frontal part of the skull that occurs when the loss of the cerebral cortex in the mentioned fields has already occurred in a newborn. However, it is usually hidden by a cap slipped deeply over such a forehead.

Thus, when we consider the enormity of the crimes patronized or inspired by this man as Stalin, any reasoning in moral terms proves unreliable and leads to a sense of powerlessness. Only a ponerological knowledge of the role of this characteropathy, as well as of the various pathological factors that were at work in the other founders of the Russian Revolution, can provide us with an understanding of such a situation when aberrant individuals appear at the head of the state. Lenin was a case of paranoid characteropathy, but a more accurate diagnosis of his brain damage runs into difficulties. Even the Russian version that the right hemisphere of his brain atrophied cannot be ruled out. However, it is fair to say that characteropaths played initiative roles in Russian drama. The psychopaths later took the lead.

Characteropathies act as pathological agents of ponerogenesis by insidious means. By the nature of their organisms and intact brain tissue, such people belong to the world of normal people. That is why their morbidly distorted worldview, their fanatical ideas, and their aspirations are born out of the problematic society of normal people. That is why their suggestive statements take root easily in the minds of the less critical. In social life, this very influence initiates new phases in the eternal processes of ponerogenesis. It also opens the way for the further activity of other pathological factors mostly of a hereditary nature.

The perception of the same matters in terms of “common sense” and the common psychological worldview, and in objective psychological and ponerological categories, therefore, often leads to different conclusions. In order to achieve valuable social and political goals, especially in times and matters of great difficulty, it is necessary to rely on the latter mode of reasoning.

The pathological factors of ponerogenesis that are transmitted by biological inheritance are primarily psychopathies. According to the best medical tradition, these should include, ex definitione, only those mental anomalies that have sufficiently probable genetic causes. The politically controlled science of the field, which classifies as psychopaths many cases of a different nature in such a way as to blur the possibility of properly differentiating these cases, cannot be invoked here. For in a country where power rested in the hands of psychopathic individuals, good knowledge in this field would threaten the existence of such a system.

The most frequently mentioned are, according to the approximate frequency of occurrence: schizoidia, psychopathy proper, asthenic psychopathy, anankastic psychopathy, skirtoidism, and others. These phenomena are subject to the laws of genetics and therefore it is also possible for them to fall out of the genotype. Since most of these abnormalities, with the exception of schizoidism and skirtoidism, are probably carried by the X chromosome, therefore, we can meet normal sons of psychopathic fathers. The fate of such people brought up in a pathological social system and seeking their way to the society of normal people is worth a psychological study and the pen of an outstanding writer.

Schizoids, in whom instinct and emotion operate as if skating on sand, have an efficient speculative intellect. They therefore create doctrines without a sense of psychological and moral reality. That is why, with Karl Marx at the head, they played an initiative role in the emergence of the macrosocial pathological phenomena we are experiencing. However, when a system of such power developed, they were sometimes critical and suspended between power and the society of normal people, or they formed something like a regime bourgeoisie. Their numbers can be estimated at 0.8% of the population.

Following a path similar to that of Kazimierz Dabrowski, the author distinguished psychopathy proper as a sufficiently homogenous phenomenon and considered its biological nature and genetic properties. Dabrowski said that it is responsible for half of the evil in the world and he was not exaggerating. In the light of biology, this anomaly may resemble Daltonism (or colorblindness). However, it occurs with a frequency ten times lower, about 0.6%, but similarly in all possible intensities, from barely perceptible to the specialist to an overt mental deficit. It reveals itself as deficits in the syntonic processing of mental stimuli from normal people. This indicates certain gaps in the instinctual substrate of such individuals. Psychiatrists of the old school called them moral-value Daltonists.

As a result, such individuals do not develop a common psychological worldview and are incapable of understanding normal people and their problems. In particular, the commonly accepted values of good morals seem to them to be a convention invented by someone to their detriment (probably priests). What separates them from the world of normal people is their sense of their own difference, which emerges already in childhood. When they cause harm to these para-heterospecific (normal) beings, they do not feel guilty. They also do not know the true feeling of love, but only the lust for erotic adventure. However, they know how to play the role of a lover so well that they often achieve their goal. In general, their life consists of constantly playing the role of normal people, which in reality they cannot become. That is why the outstanding researcher of these phenomena, Hervey Cleckley, titled his book devoted mainly to this variety of psychopathy—The Mask of Sanity. But woe betide the people to whom they remove that mask, as many of us have experienced.

However, apart from these obvious deficiencies in their outlook on life, such individuals develop a specific psychological knowledge which people with a common psychological outlook do not have. Only a researcher of these cases, through long experience, can learn their different knowledge and from it easily distinguish them from normal people. Such psychopaths are well aware of what the reader is perhaps only now realizing, that in every society of the world there is some percentage of people like them. They are able to easily recognize each other in a human crowd and organize themselves. At the same time they develop a specific knowledge of our human weaknesses, and how to exploit them for their own purposes. Deceiving and exploiting this alien and unwilling world of normal people is a matter of their honor. Already at an early age they begin to dream of such a wonderful new world, of a social system where their way of thinking and their customs—obvious, simple, and radical—would prevail. Dabrowski already knew that it does not happen that the bearer of this anomaly is not actively involved in the work of “people’s power.” Lev Bronstein, known as Trotsky, can be included in this anomaly, although some doubts remain about the details. Other psychopathies now play less active roles in the processes of the genesis of evil, as well as in the system of pathocratic power.

Asthenic psychopaths are sometimes not devoid of a certain idealism and a shallow sense of psychological realities. We meet them in various social organizations, where, depending on the severity and variability of this anomaly, they may play positive or ponerogenic roles. They are almost always characterized by aggression toward people with psychological skills.

Coarse-skinned and psychologically resilient skirtoids are good soldiers. However, in conditions of peace and comfort, they prove incapable of recognizing moral values, good education of the next generation, and easily become hysterical. Anankasts who are difficult-to-get-along-with silent despots become causes of neurosis in others.

In addition to individuals that we can classify as such typical cases of psychopathy, we also encounter those that can be considered as a cross between lighter burdens. Assuming statistical probabilities, these should be exceedingly rare cases. However, the characteristics of partner selection make them much more frequent. Such were often sadistic executors of orders from pathological authorities. From them are recruited the so-called jackals who undertake to carry out murderous orders.

The total number of aberrant people, mentioned here or not, in all intensities including the smallest, but without cases of characteropathy, can be estimated in Poland at 2 to 3% of the population. However, their characteristics and their hyperactivity allowed them to mobilize in one front to impose their power on the society of normal people. The characteropaths, the most famous of whom played leadership roles in the genesis of the macrosocial pathological phenomenon, then become estranged, and the vast majority of them gravitated to the society of normal people. Their ponerogenic role develops mostly on a much smaller social scale.

The personality of a normal person subjected for a long time to the pressure of psychopathic individuals undergoes variously profound destruction. The most characteristic influence on others is psychopathy proper. Under such influence, a decriterialization of thinking and worldview appears, and a sense of inability to reintegrate one’s shattered personality. This is attempted at the level of depreciated moral values and impoverished emotionality. Anxiety and periodic depressive states appear as more intense reactions. People subjected to such influence begin to “fight the demons” whose strange nature creeps into their souls. The mental pathological material gradually saturates such a personality and becomes a foreign factor in itself, but one that is difficult to eliminate.

Individual states of this kind are known to psychotherapists in many countries and there are already methods developed to help such people. The same psychologists, however, have no idea that in a lesser degree, but chronically and on a mass scale, similar states have become a reality in countries under the power of pathological systems in which psychopathy proper and other similar phenomena played an inspirational role and saturated the whole such system with their different way of feeling and thinking. In spite of the formal recovery of independence, the effects of this are not easy to eliminate from societies subjected for many years to such influence.

For the carriers of various psychopathic deviations, humane political, social or religious associations are not of interest. They shun such organizations, where the way of thinking of normal people, reason, and right moral values prevail. They despise all ideologies that grow out of “that” world of normal people, which is alien to them. At the same time, this world pushes them away in a more or less tactless manner, interpreting their biological deficits in moral terms.

It does happen, however, that a human association undergoes internal devolution as a result of various social, historical, or moral circumstances. It can be the penetration of foreign worldview material, which distorts the originally coherent ideological structure of the association. It may be the rule of a mentally limited or mentally incompletely-normal leader, or of a mentally restricted privileged class. We can call such transformations a moral crisis of association, if we do not take into account the ubiquitous role of pathological factors in every society.

Into such an association, where psychological criticism and common sense are already in deficit, individuals with various psychological deviations begin to infiltrate. They do so in the hope that they will be able to hide their deficiencies under the cloak of an insincerely adapted ideology and create for themselves a modus vivendi. Gradually, even unwillingly, they bend the content of such an association to their needs, which arise from their natures. A mysterious disease begins to afflict the association, unnoticed at first by some and criticized in moralizing terms by others. When this process is sufficiently advanced, deviant individuals gradually take over the leading functions, and psychopathy proper begins to play an inspirational role. Governments emerge of people who actually despise every human idea.

If such an association gains power, usually by revolutionary means, then there will be a rapid counter-selection of its membership. The former ideological adherents will be pushed out in a more or less violent manner. In their place will come “their own,” that is, individuals with appropriate mental deviations. Such an association will fundamentally change its content and purpose of existence, but it will retain its old names and some of its phraseology. These are phenomena already known to us from our experience of the difficult years. In its different varieties, the process of genesis of macrosocial pathological phenomena in different countries and times was and is similar. When a bond of deviant personalities has seized power in a given country, it spreads downwards reaching towns, workplaces, and villages, until it finally reaches every human soul.

Phenomena of this kind have appeared many times in the history of mankind, parasitic on various social movements and caricaturing their ideologies characteristic for given times and civilizations. They also appear today—always accompanied by a reign of bloody terror and imperialism. Individuals with features of psychopathy proper have probably also always played an inspirational role in them.

The identification of such phenomena according to their actual content, and not according to the various ideologies that nourished them and concealed their true nature, is a task for properly trained historians and political scientists. It is also a prerequisite for a scientific understanding of modernity. It also requires giving the phenomenon a name that, according to the requirements of semantics, would indicate its essence, being practically useful. Such requirements are sufficiently met by the term “PATHOCRACY.”

We have experienced the greatest realization in history of this macrosocial pathological phenomenon, which today must be viewed with the objectivity of modern science. Only such an approach provides sufficient grounds for the psychological and moral regeneration of society, as well as for our intention to build a state system organically immune to this mysterious disease of history.

Already under tsarist Russian self-rule, counter-selective conditions arose there, when individuals with psychopathic features had a better chance of advancement, and those with normal instincts, emotionality, and basic intelligence were pushed away. Since the Decembrists also abandoned the principle of non-violence, similar phenomena must also have affected opposition circles. Thus pathocracy was born in Russia over generations and when the First World War approached, it was already hanging over the country.

When, at the end of the 19th century, the ideology of subjugating the world to a chosen people with its great banks, and later the concept of mastering Russia, appeared, with the help of instrumental ideology and controlled revolution, the minds celebrating their wisdom did not foresee that this would give birth to a pathological bastard who would begin to live out his own right to inhuman cruelty. It should also not be forgotten that for the inspirers of the Russian Revolution, communism was from the beginning an instrumental ideology, intended for the naive, which was to be used to realize another ideology known to the initiates. This is the second reason why calling this phenomenon “communism” is the keystone of all the errors in its conception, and one of the causes of the difficulties on the road to the spiritual and political reconstruction of our own and other peoples.

Ponerology strips evil of its romantic robe, pointing at the same time to its psychological pathology and to the causes of the processes of its genesis. This deprives evil of its spellbinding appeal and opens up new ways of counteracting it by intervening in its inner causality. This is reminiscent of the therapeutic activity of doctors who, on the basis of their knowledge of the nature of illnesses, intervene in their causality, doing so for the good of the sick person.

These new ways of understanding the nature of evil and its origins should become knowledge accessible not only to a narrow circle of specialists, but should also be popularized for the benefit of the broader public. For this knowledge alone makes the human personality more critical and resistant to the temptations of evil. It often explains difficult life situations and indicates ways out. We all have a sense of the inadequacy of previous ways of fighting evil, and therefore these new developments should be applied in the practice of life.

This natural knowledge expands the scope of our knowledge of causality operating in human personalities and societies, and to that extent implies serious philosophical reflection. New light is shed on the perennial problems of moral philosophy, human freedom, and responsibility. Fascinated by these discoveries, the author, as a Christian, initially saw difficulties in reconciling this with traditional beliefs. It was not until a longer comparative study with the indications of the Gospels that the puzzling convergence of the results of this naturalistic approach with a number of the teachings contained therein was brought to light.

Knowledge that uncovers the causality of the genesis of evil, providing new opportunities to counteract it, gives us other benefits as well. By avoiding moralizing interpretations of the workings of pathological agents, we provide our minds with a good criterion base as well as mental hygiene. When we understand the individual perpetrator of evil as a flower growing from a mycelium that outgrows our world, the right to forgive gains rational justification. If the evils of the modern world grow out of the habituation to moral values, then the naturalistic justification of their parts restores their power in a much broader way. If this habituation appears in modern legislation, then reliance on a better knowledge of the nature of evil becomes the order of the day.

In a system based on knowledge of the laws of nature, this very knowledge, which gives a modern understanding of the nature and genesis of evil, and not the correctional tradition, should become the basis of law, social order, and the prevention of evil. It is obvious that such solutions, arising from the knowledge of complex causes, will lead to methods of procedure similarly more varied, which will result from a deeper understanding of individual cases. This will require more extensive knowledge and cooperation among specialists, as will be discussed further in Chapter 11.

A departure from the old legal traditions seems to be a necessary condition for the construction of a state and society that would be better than all those that have gone before or are now in decline. Such a work has already begun in many countries, but too many attempts and mistakes are still being made on this road. It will therefore require a great deal of research and constructive work.

A strange and tragic epoch is passing, in which power in many countries has fallen into the hands of aberrant individuals, and great masses of citizens have succumbed to the spellbinding of their supposedly extraordinary qualities. Pathological social structures were formed on a varying scale, and the common sense of most people was stunned by the violence, but at the same time by the incomprehensibility of such a situation. It can be predicted that history in the near future will call our times—the pathocratic era. Only the realization of such a character of these times can open the way for the era of the normal man and a better future, and for the realization of our intention.

Note: This work is a project of QFG/FOTCM and is planned to be published in book form soon.

1. HK: Or “foamy,” in Polish. As far as I can tell, the closest correlate in Western psychiatry would be “litigious paranoia”: “a type of paranoid disorder characterized by constant quarreling, claims of persecution, and insistence that one’s rights have been breached. The individual usually threatens to go to court—and frequently does so—to seek redress for exaggerated or imagined wrongs.”