Peterson, Rogan, Psychopathy, Ponerology

Parsing Peterson on political psychopathology

Love him or hate him, I have always thought Jordan Peterson one of the best-placed public intellectuals to popularize political ponerology. His motivations for writing his first book, Maps of Meaning, were pretty much identical to Lobaczewski’s—though they came from vastly different circumstances. Peterson was a young Canadian at the time, pondering nuclear war and the ideological conflict between east and west, communism and western democracy. Lobaczewski was a practicing psychologist living in communist Poland, trying to understand the psychopathology of the system in which he lived and systematize that understanding for communication with other scientists. And of course, both are or were psychologists applying their clinical insights to politics.

I have my strong disagreements with some of Peterson’s positions (as I do with every public intellectual), but I’m always interested to hear what he might have to say about ponerological ideas. His recent appearance on Joe Rogan fits the bill, so here are my thoughts on what he said there. I will first focus strictly on what he had to say about political psychopathy, saving any side-issues and specific applications of the general ideas and implications for a bit further below.

(Timestamp) JBP: I think that virtualization has enabled the psychopaths. … The psychopathic types, they’re always the death of everything. I’m seeing this come up on the right now. So imagine this, I’ve been working on a new theory of political psychopathology, and I like it quite a lot.

JR: Is this where the term “the woke right” comes in?

JBP: Yeah, well, Lindsay is pointing at that, but he hasn’t got the diagnosis exactly right. It isn’t woke. That’s not the issue. It’s not exactly. He’s one level—

JR: I think what they’re talking about is like, similar types of behavior.

JBP: He is talking about that, yeah.

JR: “Woke” just lets you clarify in your head: “Oh, it’s like that.”

JBP: Yeah, but the problem is— (JR: It’s like Antifa.) Yeah, absolutely, but the problem is that that argument is predicated on the claim that the ideas are the problem, like the woke ideas, for example, on the right or the left, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that 4 to 5% of the population, something like that, is Cluster B—that’s the DSM-5 terms—histrionic, narcissistic, antisocial, psychopathic [sic; this should be borderline], or they have—and they have Dark Tetrad traits: they’re Machiavellian, they’re sadistic. That’s about 4%, okay, so, the question is: how do these people maneuver? And the answer is, they go to where the power is, and they adopt those ideas and they put themselves even on the forefront of that, but the ideas are completely irrelevant. All they’re doing is, they’re the Pharisees, they’re the modern version of the Pharisees, they’re the people who use God’s name in vain, right, they proclaim moral virtue, doesn’t matter whether it’s right or left or Christian or Jewish or Islam, they invade the idea space, and then they use that those ideas as false weapons to advance their narcissistic advantage.

I quipped on X that Lobaczewski already created this “new” theory of psychopathology 40 years ago, so there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. What Peterson is describing here is absolutely correct, and it’s one of Lobaczewski’s main points: ideology is simply the Trojan horse that political psychopaths (pathocrats) use in order to gain power. Once they get there, it becomes clear to everyone—particularly those who actually believed the ideology—that this is the case. Ideology is to pathocracy what the “mask of sanity” is to the individual psychopath. Pathocrats simply use the ideology as a mask at that point, and even hold it in contempt. And it’s the true believers who get purged, most often violently, because they are the ones who will attempt to hold the new ruling elite to standards and policies that they have no intention of upholding or enacting.

Lobaczewski’s ponerology is more detailed than Peterson’s presentation here. He highlighted the importance—and the specific roles—of several different types of psychopathology, for example. However, he agreed with Peterson that psychopathy is the most essential feature of political evil in general and of pathocratic, totalitarian government in particular.

And so then you have the problem—and the right’s going to face this more and more particularly, because the left had to face it when they were in power—how do you identify the psychopathic parasites, 4% of the population, who are clothed in your clothing and waving your flags but who are who are only in it for narcissistic benefit? You know, the people who studied the Dark Triad, these were people who originally studied psychopaths, and they moved into ordinary personality, so to speak, on the fringes. They showed that the noncriminal psychopaths, so the fringe cases, are Machiavellian (they use their language to manipulate), they’re narcissistic (they want unearned reputation—that’s what a narcissist wants), and they’re psychopathic, which makes them predators or parasites, okay. That’s pretty bad, those three things, but they had to expand the nomenclature after a while, because they found that they were also sadistic, which implied that if you’re Machiavellian and narcissistic and psychopathic, you develop a sufficiently bad view of your fellow man that their undeserved pain is a source of pleasure to you, and that’s what’s being enabled online.

Again, accurate. The way Lobaczewski described it, these people see normal humanity not only as inferior, but ridiculous. They see compassion as a silly weakness to be exploited, and they make it their goal to eliminate normal people by any means necessary, whether through physical warfare and murder or psychological “re-education” (which is never as successful as they would like, because human nature is stubbornly persistent). This contempt for humanity expresses itself in their sadistic torture methods, their insane propaganda, and their total disregard for human life—and their reframing of these behaviors as, in fact, moral, and of their critics as naive and dangerous, or hateful and immoral.

In fact, Lobaczewski stated that subclinical psychopaths are the worst. Dr. Karen Mitchell might simply call these high-functioning psychopaths (or predatory personalities). They are extremely adept at fooling others, even professionals who think they can’t be fooled. This makes answering Peterson’s question particularly thorny. It can be quite difficult to identify a high-functioning psychopath. They may take off their mask when given anonymity, but in person they will be charming, convincing, and everything you could want them to be.

Lobaczewski’s solution was simple, though perhaps a challenge to implement. The prerequisite was knowledge. People need to know 1) that psychopaths exist, 2) their main characteristics, and 3) the tactics they use (interpersonally and politically), and 4) the range of responses they elicit. And then such people need to be excluded from any group, association, or significant leadership position. Barring specific knowledge and interventions like this, Lobaczewski commented on the positive effect of common sense and religious/moral values, which are at least partially effective, but which on their own are inadequate to deal with the problem. (Thus his oft-repeated warning that you cannot cure a disease you do not understand.)

See, because we’ve evolved real specific mechanisms to keep such things under control in face-to-face interaction—lack of anonymity, for example, within a community. Psychopaths in the real world, they wander; they have to move from place to place, because people who figure out who they are, and they’re held responsible. They’re particularly held responsible by men.

This applies mostly to low-functioning psychopaths. At the very least, face-to-face interaction mitigates the damage that can be done by psychopaths who are less intelligent and have lower impulse control. It’s better than nothing.

But online, they escape from that, they escape from that … system of constraints, and they have free rein, and they can find other people like them very rapidly, and they can gang together, and so this is like—I can really see this starting to happen on the right. Like, I’ve been tracking psychopathic behavior on the right for probably four years, something like that, especially on the antisemitic side, because that’s really where it reared its head first, and—

JR: Why is that?

JBP: There’s nothing more annoying than a successful minority, right. Now that’s part of it. …

JR: It’s interesting, because if you don’t criticize it [Israel, presumably] enough, you’re compromised; if you criticize, you know, it’s like, when it comes to antisemitism, it’s one of those things where you can’t separate a—it’s a religion and it’s also a race and it’s also a government. That’s where things get weird. And then there’s also the concept of intelligence agencies and compromise that also gets attached to it, the manipulation of world markets and money, and there’s a lot to unpack. And then there’s regular Jewish people have nothing to do with that.

JBP: Well, the Jews too are very successful, and so what you would expect—from a purely statistical point of view—you’d expect them to be overrepresented at the extreme.

This is an interesting exchange. So far, Peterson has limited himself to general ideas, and they’ve all passed ponerological muster. This is how Lobaczewski wrote his book: intentionally generalizing so that the concepts could be applied to any pathocracy using any ideology. Every once in a while he would cite an historical example, usually drawn from his own personal history (communism was the inspiration for the book, after all). Sometimes this came across to me as frustratingly obscure, so I tried to add a variety of specific examples in the footnotes, especially when it was clear that he was referring to something in particular.

But here, Peterson gets specific: antisemitism. He doesn’t provide specific examples, so interpretation is left up to the listener (or those who are familiar with his other public statements). Rogan implies that this is a complex issue. Is it antisemitic to criticize Judaism (“religion”)? Zionism (“government”)? Jews as an ethnicity (“race”)? Blackmail operations (“compromise”)? Mossad (“intel agencies”)? Peterson seems to acknowledge this to some degree, making the point that Jews will be overrepresented at the extreme.

I’m not sure if he intended this, but the statement has another implication: that Jews may be overrepresented at the extremes in more ways than one. American Jews, for example, were at the apex of organized crime in the 20th century (Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Mickey Cohen). I think it’s a valid question to ask whether or not Jews or Israelis may also have an overrepresentation of high-functioning political psychopaths. If this is the case, how might it affect the antisemitism debate?

When asked for a reason for the rise of antisemitism, Peterson says that one part is that “there’s nothing more annoying than a successful minority.” This strikes me as a particularly weak and unsatisfactory explanation, and framing it in such a way makes it sound like a fairly understandable response, which contradicts his framing of it as somehow related to psychopathy. Black Africans, for instance, might have found minority white African success annoying, just as Russians might have found minority Mongol success annoying. I agree that such a sentiment probably plays a part, but I would think it a relatively small one, at least for what Peterson is referring to. In the case of the Mongols, for example, Russians had other reasons for resentment.

Also, I don’t see similar trends when it comes to East Asians, who are also a successful minority; and there are of course minorities that are hated who are not comparably successful. Take the Gypsies in Europe. I’ve had conversations with Europeans whose anti-Gypsy sentiment matches some of the most vocal anonymous antisemites. If Gypsies were to gain a disproportionate share of power in those countries, I believe such sentiments would probably become more widespread.

Twentieth-century communism was also arguably a form of minority overrepresentation: the psychopathological minority, according to Lobaczewski. The majorities of such populations came to resent this minority and to see themselves as in opposition to the minority on a very basic level (a Party member might be identified as one of “them”). I’m sure petty jealousy played a role here, but, again, as with the Mongols, it was probably a secondary or tertiary concern when stacked against other factors, pride of place probably being simply the collective actions of that minority and the way it treated them.

So, if it is true that antisemitism first ramped up over the past four years or so, I think we need two things: a clear definition of antisemitism (what it is and what it isn’t) and a list of reasons for its prevalence that is as exhaustive as possible. It’s clear to me, at least—in line with Peterson’s and Lobaczewski’s idea that psychology is the problem and not ideas—that antisemitism is not essentially reducible to or a direct expression of psychopathy. It can just as easily be held by a jealous and resentful normie as it can by a cold and calculated psychopath.

It’s possible that what Peterson intended to convey here, however, was a kind of psychopathic envy, which, unlike normal envy, is more motivated be an attitude of extreme self-importance. Psychopaths feel inherently superior to others and deserving of power, so when others are perceived to have it at the expense of themselves, they will naturally maneuver to take it. (I’ve noticed this in quite a few of what I’d consider the most zealous antisemites. Take the most extreme caricature of Jewish power and influence: that’s what they want, and they’re angry that Jews have it and they don’t.) This may result in conflict either with a relatively psychologically normal elite, or with a psychopathic elite into which the psychopaths in question have trouble gaining entry. Lobaczewski cites two examples of the latter: pre-revolutionary France and Russia, both of which, he argued, saw a ponerized revolutionary movement exploiting popular dissatisfaction with an increasingly ponerized ruling class.

The argument can be made that online we have both a group of psychopathic spellbinders utilizing antisemitism as one of the tools with which they hope to usurp power, and a larger group of disaffected normies whose antisemitism is the product of processes that are more normal by comparison.

If I adopt a maximalist definition of antisemitism that includes all of the options listed by Rogan (race=government=religion), then I would categorize antisemites into a number of subgroups, including those who resent what they perceive to be outsized Jewish influence over domestic and foreign policy, those who for moral reasons are disturbed by Israel’s conduct in her war on Gaza, those who adopt it for purely ideological reasons like anticolonialist leftism, and those who could be considered Nazis or one form or another. Among the Nazis, I see two broad categories: the revisionists who argue that the Nazis weren’t as bad as history has painted them to be and are innocent of many or all of the crimes of which they are accused, and those who accept the mainstream portrayal and who approve of them regardless. Sometimes the two might overlap in a typical example of doublethink. (In this regard, they resemble the Stalinists who will say “the Gulag is a myth” at one moment, and “the Gulag victims deserved it” the next.)

Because our culture perceives Nazis as the epitome of evil, and psychopaths are unmoved by the pressure to conform to consensus beliefs, I would argue that psychopaths are more likely to adopt the Nazi position than normies (though not exclusively so), so psychopaths are probably overrepresented among online Nazis. Non-psychopaths are more likely to accept cultural norms reflexively. However, psychopathic pretenders can put on the clothes of any of these groups, just as easily as they can put on a dress and pretend to be a woman. (And, of course, like Peterson said, they can put on the garb of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or any other, depending on what they want to achieve.)

This may be why subcultures and the social fringes are a breeding ground for psychopaths and con men. Having no natural affinity for the mainstream (for which they have contempt), they move easily within circles populated by otherwise normal individuals who reject social consensus for other reasons, e.g., openness to ideas and disagreeableness, a value for the pursuit of truth above all else, a dissatisfaction with majority mediocrity and outdated paradigms.

JR: They’re also a walled garden, right? (JBP: Meaning?) Meaning, it’s very difficult to join. They don’t proselytize, they don’t try to get you to join, and they’re all very tightly knit. They call themselves the clan; they’re all, like, locked in the, you know, Jewish clan … tribe … community. They’re very tight-knit in that regard, you know, they stick together. And if you understand the history, obviously, of Nazi Germany and of persecution in Eastern Europe, like, yeah, you have to, yeah, of course.

This seems to me to be both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, this strategy offers the protection of the group, and longevity through hardship. On the other, it promotes circling the wagons and alienating outsiders. Circling the wagons is ripe for the “first criterion of ponerogenesis” when it comes to protecting one of “us” whom the majority might find reprehensible, out of group solidarity. Outsiders will see the group protecting one of its own, “innocent or guilty.” This can be self-defeating and off-putting, as with the blind support for criminals like George Floyd or Karmelo Anthony. As a ponerogenic phenomenon, it also fosters an environment in which psychopaths feel they will be protected by virtue of their inclusion in the group, thus incentivizing them to make further use of the opportunity with a sense of impunity, which further alienates outsiders. I wrote about this dynamic in general terms here:

Whoa, this is getting long! If you’ve made it this far, you might as well go ahead and click the button below.

JBP: Yeah, well, all these complex things are multi-dimensional. I mean, I watched your whole conversation with Douglas [Murray and Dave Smith] and I thought you guys did a very credible job, all three of you, of navigating unbelievably choppy waters … But then, underneath all that, I thought there’s a really unbelievably tricky problem here … and the issue is, how do you identify the psychopathic pretenders—and it’s even worse now—and then make a barrier? Now the right was calling for the left to do that for decades and they didn’t and they couldn’t, and the left is not good at drawing barriers, partly temperamentally. The right is somewhat better, but there’s no shortage of monstrosity there, and so then the question is, how do you draw the line? And that’s kind of what I was—because I’ve been watching these right-wing—they’re not right-wing—these psychopathic types manipulate the edge of the conservative movement for their own gain, and a lot of that’s cloaked in antisemitic guise. There’s plenty of antisemitism on the left, too, by the way, so it’s not unique to the right, but—

JR: Particularly now.

JBP: Yes, yes, yes, particularly now. And so, you know, you’ve let your curiosity guide you—your curiosity and your desire for knowledge—this quest—you’ve let that guide you as a podcaster, and I’m, by the way, I’m trying to work through exactly the same sort of thing. How do you know, given your radical increase in stature over the last 10 years—how do you know when your curiosity and even your skepticism about the fact that things aren’t the way that people say they are—because that’s certainly been demonstrated in the last 10 years—how should anyone decide what guardrails to put up, like, what do you look for? Do you have a a conceptual system worked out for that?

JR: Do you mean, in what way? How do I look for—in terms of people to talk to?

JBP: Yeah, yeah, because you have this insanely immense platform and you’re inviting people onto it and, you know, you said to Douglas, and I know this to be true, that you’re not really thinking about the outcome, exactly, you’re thinking about, “this is an interesting person to talk to and I’d like to go on that quest,” but then you have the additional conundrum … once you gain in reach and authority, then how do you know that—how do you take great care that the people you’re talking to aren’t—what would you say—eliciting or feeding a subculture—yeah, that’s right—that hasn’t got the proper aims? Like, I guess the legacy media probably worked that out by having people—mediators—right, and guests, and that was also back when we could rely on the structures of authority in some sense to filter, and now we’re in this helter skelter world where everything is up for grabs.

Later on, Peterson reframes the question:

(Timestamp) JBP: How do you pursue your interest in a landscape that’s been shorn of reliable expert input? Who do you rely on if you don’t know who to rely on? How do you keep the bloody psychopaths at bay, you know, and the conspiracy-theorist mongers and the people who aren’t trying to discover the truth, but who are using the conspiratorial edge, let’s say. (JR: The grifters.) Yeah, the groypers [a reference to Nick Fuentes and his followers], for that matter. These are people who are clear clearly playing power games for their own benefit, and they’re spinning up these conspiratorial narratives and riding on them and occupying them in this parasitical manner …

It is a tricky problem, but I think that is always the case with an Overton window or similar phenomenon. There will always be the proscribed bounds of acceptable beliefs and opinions, and those who ignore such bounds for one reason or another, e.g., for the pursuit of truth or parasitic manipulation. Those on the inside of any particular window will always see those on the outside in a negative light—even in those cases where the outsiders turn out to be correct—and concerned with putting up the proper guardrails to keep them there.

It’s not as if the previous status quo was without its problems. Even when we had “reliable expert input,” was it always so expert? When we “knew who to rely on” (i.e., mainstream, official sources), were they really reliable? Sometimes yes, often no. Now that the expert class has tanked its own credibility (at least some of which was undeserved), we are in a new situation with its own problems, and we must learn to navigate it. Personally, I think crowdsourcing the truth has had better results to a large degree. As a conspiracy theorist, I’ll be the first to admit that there are a lot of crazy conspiracy theorists and shameless conspiracy-mongers. But no matter the issue, I find more reasonable conspiracy theorists demolishing them online.

I won’t pretend to know the answer to all these questions, though. All I can say is that for me, I usually draw the line at actions and personality, not ideas.¹ Just as I disagree on some issues with Peterson, I also agree on some issues with people like Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate, whom I otherwise consider to be exactly the kind of psychopathic parasites Peterson is referring to. To repeat his point a third time, it’s not the ideas that are the problem. As

L.P. Koch

put it, “An edgy take does not a psychopath make.”

We can look to the “left” for another solution to this problem. When confronted with the problem of Pakistani rape gangs in the UK (or other migrant crime in Europe), for example, you will find people in government and the media justifying keeping the race of the perpetrators secret because publicizing such data might make people racist. They are more concerned with forestalling a perceived negative (perhaps “apocalyptic”) outcome than they are with the truth. The same goes for “black crime statistics.” I think Peterson might agree that in these cases, media mediation and silencing of the voices talking openly and honestly about the situation does not help and probably makes things worse. I personally think that free and open discussion is the better alternative. I’m with Bret Weinstein on this particular debate. He recently said this:

[Free speech] is the exact thing that the founders of this great country put first on the list of our enumerated rights for a goddamn reason. … They couldn’t have called out Joe Rogan, but they came as close as they could come to saying, “Sorry, there’s no source of high-quality information versus low-quality information, malinformation, disinformation.” You can’t know ahead of time. The mechanism by which you come to understand what is true, Douglas, is discussion. It is discussion in which nobody gets to set the rules about what kinds of opinions can be investigated, and yes, that does cause some garbage stuff to be said, but what reveals that it is garbage stuff? Free and open inquiry that reveals that actually it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. That’s how you do it, Konstantin Kisin. I don’t know what’s wrong with these people. It’s really like somebody has figured out how to threaten them into saying things that they full well know aren’t true. … They are becoming what they were fighting against, and I must say, in both of those cases, I feel like I don’t think I was duped to begin with, that they actually held free speech as a high value, so the fact that they are backing away from it and calling for some kind of standard, self-imposed or otherwise, to prevent certain—you know, the fact is, heterodoxy is heterodoxy, and it often sounds crazy, and most of it is, but the good stuff is the stuff that sounds crazy that then does strangely stand up to scrutiny. That’s how you figure out what’s coming, is you look at the heterodox stuff and you figure out what has predictive power, and you can’t get around that, and the people who tried, failed.

A bonus to this approach is that it allows for the free and open informational spoliation of exactly the type of person Peterson is concerned about. If Peterson is looking for an online strategy to match that of the in-person one, I can’t think of a better example than the type exemplified by

Christopher Brunet

’s epic takedown of Fuentes and his pedo-groypers—“Top 50 Nick Fuentes Pedophile Scandals.” This is how it’s done:

Top 50 Nick Fuentes Pedophile Scandals

Later in the interview, Peterson gives another example of the general principle in operation:

(Timestamp) JBP: The psychopaths are edge cases. They’ll move wherever the power is. They find a narrative that can be used to strike fear in the hearts of people and to justify compulsion, they ally themselves with that belief claim, and then they ratchet themselves up status hierarchies without any true reputational validity, riding on that edge of fear and power. … The climate apocalypse narrative is a social contagion that’s driven by power-mad psychopaths who are hellbent on using fear and compulsion to make sure everyone steps in line so that they can continue with their acquisition of undeserved power.

JR: It’s also effective enough that the people that are underneath the power comply and do the job of the man for the man.

JBP: Yeah, well, that’s the advantage of using fear and compulsion, right. It’s like, well, I have to go along with this, because my leaders, who had built up a certain degree of credibility, are telling me that, you know, the apocalypse is nigh and who am I to—well, first of all—question, because, God, there’s a hard thing to figure out. You know, what’s the global effect of human activity on the climate for the next hundred years? Well, good luck figuring that out. But this is why I’m making it more psychological this time. It’s like, the climate fluctuates, and for complex reasons, but that doesn’t mean that you get to look a hundred years into the future and you get to conjure up an apocalyptic narrative and you get to say, “We’re the only people that can save you,” and you get to say, “You have to change every single thing you do in your life and prioritize our concern above all else …”

At the risk of belaboring the point: if you take any idea within the political landscape, you will have normal people believing it and psychopaths grifting it. It doesn’t even matter whether the idea is true or not; all that matters is if it can the instrumentalized to the benefit of the psychopaths donning the ideology. Since psychopaths are a permanent minority, and a relatively small one, they will almost always be a minority in a given ideological space. In other words, the majority of the people believing the idea will be normal. A psychopathic spellbinder may attract a following larger than it would otherwise be, however, and steer their followers in a direction of their choosing. In that case, there are two main responses: expose the psychopath without mercy, and deal with the ideas rationally. If the idea is true, it can be dissociated from the psychopath. If it’s obviously false, the exposure of that fact is supposed to be what free speech is designed to achieve. But if the truth is an uncomfortable one, that needs to be dealt with openly, not quarantined because of some hypothetical outcome the intended prevention of which may in fact lead to precisely that outcome.

“Psychologizing” in this way, however, risks becoming conflated with the ideas, when these are two separate phenomena, as in “psychopath says X, therefore X is wrong and anyone who says X is tainted.” Many online are interpreting Peterson’s statements as a blanket “everyone who disagrees with me is a psychopath” (e.g., Candace Owens), or perhaps a slightly more charitable “everyone who disagrees with me about Israel is a psychopath.” Given the context of his support for the Israeli government and his teaming up with the pro-censorship ADL-affiliate NCRI on his Dark Tetrad/“Christ is King” paper, I can understand that response. I would just add that, to my knowledge, he hasn’t ever actually said that. He complimented Dave Smith’s appearance on Rogan, for example.

Unfortunately, by taking it personally and letting Peterson’s own political biases cloud their interpretation of what he actually said, people like Candace Owens are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Technically, everything Peterson said about political psychopathy is on point. Of course, not everyone who agrees with you is like you; some will obviously be psychopaths. Of course, some people saying “Christ is King” online are psychopathic low-lifes “taking the Lord’s name in vain.” That’s trivially true (though even that idea can be weaponized). I like Owens, but she could learn a thing or two from Peterson on the subject.

But I don’t think a lot of these people will take Peterson seriously, because, to them, he could probably use a taste of his own medicine. What guardrails does he put up? To paraphrase some of his own questions:

• How do you identify the (Jewish or Zionist) psychopathic parasites who are clothed in your clothing and waving your flags but who are who are only in it for narcissistic benefit?

• How do you identify the (Jewish or Zionist) psychopathic pretenders and then make a barrier? How do you draw the line?

• How do you take great care that the people you’re talking to aren’t eliciting or feeding a subculture that hasn’t got the proper aims and can lead to a highly regrettable outcome?

I think everyone should agree that these are fair questions. Every group has its psychopaths, and just as there is “no shortage of monstrosity” on “the right,” the same goes for Jews. You can see blatant displays of exactly these types on X. In response to displays such as this, Nassim Nicholas Taleb makes Peterson’s point, but from the opposite side of the fence: “Gaza is the second intellectual shock I’ve had in my life: it shows the prevalence of psychopaths among otherwise well-functioning, seemingly civilized people.”

Here’s one final excerpt from the interview, with another specific application of the idea:

(Timestamp) JBP: They [psychopaths] use false claims of victimization to manipulate and so this is a particularly pernicious pathway, because they parasitize empathy. And the left is unbelievably susceptible to that, because the left is full of empathic people, and so those who parasitize empathy have a field day on the left.

JR: Right, right, because the left is generally thought to be more educated, more compassionate, kinder, looking out for marginalized people. That’s part of the ethics of it all.

JBP: The ethic is pretty straightforward: anything that cries is a baby. It’s like, no, some things that cry are monsters. … Let’s take the case of Nicola Sturgeon … the previous Scottish prime minister. “Any man who wants to can be a woman.” Okay, any man. You mean any man, do you? Have you encountered the nightmare men? “Oh, they don’t exist. They’re all victims.” You just bloody well wait till you encounter one. You’ll change your story very rapidly. And for the naive and sheltered empaths of the radical left, they’re either psychopaths—so they’re wolves in sheep’s clothing—or they’re people so that are so naive that … Red Riding Hood’s “grandmother” can definitely have his way with them

JR: Yes, that’s literally something that I use as an example in my Netflix special. I said that I think there are people that feel like they’re trapped in a woman’s body and then there’s also people that are out of their fucking mind. They're crazy and … all throughout history when you wanted to make like a killer in a movie scarier, you put them in a dress, like Norman Bates in Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, and I used the Big Bad Wolf. I’m like, it’s literally a wolf dressed up like a woman. Like that’s literally what it is, and they’ve somehow or another completely abandoned this one aspect of masculinity that’s one of the more terrifying—is the predatory pervert, and they’ve given the predatory pervert a privileged position … One of the craziest things about it is they’ve completely abandoned the idea of the pedophile and then the monster and the sexual pervert and the attacker, the assaulter, the person who—when you give a guy, you say, all you have to do is say you’re a woman, now you have access to … all the women’s spaces. You could victimize them, you could fight them, you could beat them in sports, you could dominate them in all games. It’s bizarre, bizarre that no one’s caught on to that and … that’s the weirder, that’s the more cult-like and even, you could say, religious aspect of leftist thinking …

JBP: You know, there are no shortage of naive people who’ve never really encountered a monster and have no imagination for it, and they don’t want to.

JR: But there’s also people that are willing to justify the monster’s behavior because the monster is a part of a protected class now, which is crazy.

JBP: Yeah, well, that’s part of that. The Cluster B types use proclamation of victimization to parasitize. That’s part of their clinical pathology. “Poor me, I get to do anything.”

JR: And they’re so common. That’s what’s really crazy.

Yep.

This is already much longer than normal for me, so let me close with one final thought. Near the beginning of the interview, Peterson says:

A situation can be ugly in a multitude of ways … that’s when it’s very difficult to pick your moral pathway forward. All your choices are not good.

Looking back upon history, this is no doubt true. If I were forced to choose, for example, I would side with “the West” over the USSR any day of the week. But that doesn’t mean I think the CIA was any less psychopathic; it parasitized the American system in ways that brought it to where we are today. That’s a whole other discussion (one I covered in part on my articles on psychological warfare). But in the context of ponerology, I have to add that Lobaczewski was a harsh critic of American anticommunism. He thought it was idiotic, ineffective, and counterproductive. And he thought that warfare was not an useful strategy for fighting pathocracy. It simply creates new grievances for psychopaths to parasitize, renewing the cycle. Recall his three features of every pathocratic social movement: “the motivations of an aggrieved group, radical redress of the grievance, and the higher value of the individuals who have joined the group.”

He strongly believed there was a third way, writing:

International reason must therefore prevail, reinforced by rediscovered moral values and naturalistic science concerning the causes and genesis of evil. The “new weapon” suggested herein kills no one; it is nevertheless capable of stifling the process of the genesis of evil within a person [or society] and activating his own curative powers.

1. That’s not to say there aren’t ideas that are basically psychopathic in nature, but these are more basic, on the worldview level, and not typically associated with most political issues. Lobaczewski’s discussion of ideologies and religions is relevant here. I’ll probably write a separate piece on this.