Over on the Deimos Station slack channel,1 Michael Martin wrote up this little piece that I thought worth sharing with a wider audience. (For a related post, see A Modest Proposal for Covid Amnesty). Please share your thoughts in the comments!
Lustration Laws – A Post-Pathocratic Necessity
by Michael Martin
The most recent chapter of Łobaczewski’s Logocracy has reminded me of the way many former Iron Curtain countries dealt with former Communist officials. Most of these countries passed what were known as “lustration laws” to exclude former high-ranking Communist party officials from public office or from any high-level management or executive role. The “lustration period” would usually last anywhere from 5 to 15 years.
The intent of these laws was to make a clean break from the past, and to ensure that members of the former regime could not subvert the new public order.
Wikipedia has an entry explaining the concept here.
The website Beyond Intractability goes into the pros and cons of lustration laws here.
Once the current pathocracy meets its inevitable and inglorious end, and a “society of normal man” is re-established, there will have to be ways and means of excluding the people whom Łobaczewski calls the “nobility” (psychopaths) and the “bourgeoisie” (characteropaths, schizoids, etc.) of the pathocracy from positions of public influence, power, and authority.
To that end, I consider it important that lustration laws not be drawn so broadly as to entangle every low-level functionary of the pathocratic regime. In a pathocracy, no institution is free from corruption, and if lustration laws were drawn too broadly, a plurality of the population could get entangled by them, which would benefit nobody.
I propose that a lustration law should exclude from public life anyone who occupies the following categories of positions under the pathocracy:
All government ministers, cabinet secretaries, and executive officers of government departments.
All managers and executives of news media and of entertainment industries (e.g., Hollywood).
All managers, executives, and members of boards of directors of any corporation involved in the implementation or enforcement of pathocratic government policies. This would remove all Silicon Valley executives.
All managers and executive officers of any NGO or “Quango”2 involved in the development or implementation of pathocratic policies, whether domestically or abroad.
Those falling under the scope of lustration laws should be excluded for life from the following categories of employment:
Elected political office
Appointed political office
Law enforcement
Management or executive office in any government agency
Boards of directors of any corporation
Employment in news media or entertainment
These lists are not exhaustive, but they are a start.
I also believe that lustration laws must be completely separate from any prosecutions for crimes against humanity. The purpose of a lustration law is not to determine forensic guilt or innocence, but to “wipe the slate clean” so that a post-pathocratic society can rebuild on a solid foundation.
I also think that some sort of “Truth and Reconciliation” process should be considered, to provide limited immunity from prosecution to those who are prepared to fully and publicly disclose everything they ever did, and to submit to psychiatric evaluation, for the purpose of establishing preventive measures against future pathocracies. Such a “Truth and Reconciliation” process should be completely separate from any lustration law.
Such are my thoughts. Feedback is welcome, encouraged and eagerly sought!
HK: Here’s what Lobaczewski had to say on the topic. Some form of lustration is implicit in his recommendations. For example, he recommended legislation protecting “against the entry of mentally abnormal persons into positions of power” (Political Ponerology, p. 333), which would automatically include most individuals in positions of power in a pathocracy. And here he is on criminal prosecution of former pathocrats, in line with his general call for amnesty:
In today’s actual state of affairs, there is only one scientifically and morally justified solution which could remedy the current plight of nations and also furnish a proper beginning for solving the problem of societies’ genetic burden with a view to the future. That would be an appropriate law based upon the best possible understanding of macrosocial pathological phenomena and their causes, which would limit pathocrats’ responsibility to those cases alone (usually of a criminal sadistic nature) in which it is hard to accept the inability to discern the significance of such an act. However, the issue would be resolved in the light of scientific and social awareness and within the framework of adequate law, not outside of it. Nothing else could enable the societies of normal people to take over power and liberate the internal talents which could ensure a nation’s return to normal life. (Political Ponerology, p. 316)
In Chapter 13 of Logocracy, on the logocratic association, he writes: “Former members of pathocratic organizations could be admitted under exceptional circumstances.” As Michael writes above, “if lustration laws were drawn too broadly, a plurality of the population could get entangled by them.” However, participation in the previous regime should probably warrant additional hurdles at the very least.
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Quasi autonomous NGO.
I just thought of another point which I should have included in my article. Anyone subject to lustration should be permanently deprived of the right to vote. They must be stripped of the franchise.
This is in keeping with the premise that the most important thing is to ensure that former pathocrats can never exercise public influence or authority ever again.
Excellent proposal! In the short-term, such a law would help get a new system off the ground without being subverted by the old guard. Long-term, there would need to be some means of keeping psychopaths out of power (which may be impossible) or at least minimizing the harms they can cause. Breaking up concentrations of power and adhering to a Distributist philosophy seems to me to be the best best for that. The problem today is that in most Western nations, political and economic power is so centralized that once the psychopaths get inside, it doesn't take long to redirect every institution towards buttressing their pathocracy. Obviously corruption exists within many local governments, but at least such governments, being smaller and weaker, have less capacity to inflict harm on citizens, not to mention that it's easier to move away from a town or county than it is to emigrate from a country.