Technocracy, Trump, and the Perils of Ponerology
A response to Ramon Glazov's review of Political Ponerology - Part 3
Here we come to the main point of Ramon Glazov’s review of Political Ponerology: why it is not a useful critique of Trump and MAGA, specifically—and presumably why it is therefore an ill-fitting tool for diagnosing and correcting the types of political evil Glazov sees in Trumpy politics.
Here is the section in question, presented without commentary:
The media commentators who cite Łobaczewski would have us believe that leaders like Trump and Johnson are progressively weeding out the healthy from their cabinets until only pathological cronies remain. But did Trump fall out with Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, John Bolton and Anthony Scaramucci because they were wholesome? Four years of Washington punditry have sought in vain to find any lasting pattern to Trump’s hiring and firing. And there’s a purely pragmatic reason why populists like Trump – and his Italian forerunner, Berlusconi – might want to keep their sycophants from becoming permanent fixtures. A crony with a limited shelf life is less likely to be tomorrow’s rival. Whether or not Trump is a narcissist, his turnover rate doesn’t seem to be a recipe for something as monolithic as a pathocracy. He likes people, and then he doesn’t.
Let’s also bear in mind that Kernberg’s ‘syndrome of malignant narcissism’ doesn’t include rudeness as one of its defining symptoms. As many true crime buffs will attest, even the worst psychopaths can still seem debonair and articulate. You couldn’t have asked for a less Trumpish aspiring Republican than Ted Bundy, who, despite being a serial lust murderer, would never have been caught saying anything as uncivil as ‘grab ’em by the pussy.’ His façade stayed firm up to his last interview on death row, when – with deadpan earnestness – he spoke out against pornography and violence on television. Offensiveness is an unreliable guide to how sick a person is. It may be tempting to suspect Trump of a personality disorder because his public demeanour is unashamedly vulgar. But vulgarity has proven a sound strategy at a time when a large chunk of the public resents people who talk like born politicians. Dr Allen Frances – one of the psychiatrists who wrote the DSM criteria for NPD – has dismissed suggestions that it explains Trump’s behaviour, precisely because talking like a cartoon narcissist has been so effective for his publicity.
The leaders we suspect of character pathology tend to be infamous ones, though there’s undoubtedly a selection bias here. We look for narcissism in the Hitlers, but not the Churchills. We assume it in crude, grotesque blowhards like Trump, but rarely consider how many polite, well-spoken narcissists – malignant or otherwise – may have coasted in and out of politics over the years, without causing any disasters or upsetting the status quo.
Łobaczewski’s other statements about pathocracies aren’t much better at explaining Trump. The 2016 Presidential Election didn’t need a schizoid intelligencia to scribble a manifesto of Trumpism. Bannon – the closest Trump had to a court philosopher – served him more as a backroom éminence grise than a flogger of Little Red Books. And, unlike Hitler or Stalin, Trump has made little effort to put his own people in charge of universities or newspapers or half the other institutions that a pathocracy is supposed to engulf. Who needs the loyalty of vice-chancellors when your opponent is Joe Biden?
These paragraphs surprised me for their lucidity. I tend to agree that Trump’s politics do not conform to the model of pathocracy as described by Lobaczewski. Personally, when he first announced he was running for office, I thought he’d be worse than he turned out to be. I had something like this in mind:
If we take into consideration those historical examples which should be qualified [as leading to pathocracy], we will most frequently observe the figure of an autocratic ruler whose intellectual mediocrity and infantile personality finally opened the door to the ponerogenesis of the phenomenon. Wherever a society’s common sense is sufficiently influential, its self-preservation instinct is able to overcome this ponerogenic process rather early. (Political Ponerology, p. 218)
Trump didn’t just activate common-sense criticism; he caused the U.S.’s political class to reveal just how rotten they were, and are. To use a “microbial metaphor,” he didn’t just trigger an immune response in some of the body politic; he triggered an autoimmune response. But that’s another story.
Glazov now returns to ponerology, and he gets even more wrong:
Łobaczewski isn’t just inadequate as a prophet of Trumpian power. He’s also strikingly dishonest about his favourite topic, Soviet power.
As we’ll see, this is laughably wrong—and, one might say, strikingly dishonest. You can almost hear the screech of Glazov’s buttons being pushed by this “favorite topic.”
Readers of Political Ponerology might imagine that psychologists in the Eastern Bloc suffered under a blanket taboo on personality disorder research – a cover-up imposed by pathocrats who were anxious not to be unmasked. But of all the charges to lay against Soviet psychiatry, this is a shoddy one. In 1933, at the height of Stalin’s reign, a major book on personality disorders, Manifestations of Psychopathies by Pyotr Gannushkin, was posthumously published. For the grave sin of describing schizoids and ‘antisocial psychopaths’ at length, the late Gannushkin was punished by having a hospital, a Moscow river embankment and an annual medical award named after him! Meanwhile, I can find no evidence that the organic brain condition sometimes called characteropathy was a forbidden topic for Polish researchers under Soviet rule. Several papers on it from Poland were openly published at the time. Safe to say, their authors never argued that it was a society-destroying menace.
Did the Soviet elite have any motive for the restrictions Łobaczewski claims existed? It’s more than likely that Stalin’s personality wasn’t on the healthy side, but that doesn’t mean that he recognised such problems in himself – just as, for Łobaczewski, the schizoids, paranoiacs and egotists are always other people.
Here Glazov’s reading comprehension fails him again. Lobaczewski didn’t claim or even imply there was a Soviet blanket taboo on PD research, or that characteropathy was a forbidden topic in Poland. First of all, here are the areas of psychology and psychopathology which Lobaczewski says were prohibited:
The prohibitions engulf depth psychology, the analysis of the human instinctive substratum, dream analysis, the psychology of emotion, and such phenomena as bimorphia and polymorphia of personality. … even research on the psychology of mate selection and marital adjustment is frowned upon, at best, since it requires comprehensive and subtle knowledge. (pp. 277-278)
It wasn’t personality disorders that were taboo, but psychopathy, specifically:
The essence of psychopathy may not, of course, be researched or elucidated. Sufficient darkness is cast upon this matter by means of an intentionally devised definition of psychopathy which includes various kinds of character disorders, together with those caused by completely different and known causes. (p. 278)
Glazov is right: Soviet science acknowledged personality disorders. Lobaczewski accepts this plainly—and he cites a Polish book published in the 1970s on personality disorders. But take a look at the contents of Gannushkin’s work, which Glazov references. You won’t find a disorder equivalent to psychopathy—partially because the best work on the subject wasn’t done until several years after Gannushkin’s work was published. Cleckley, Henderson, and Karpman published their groundbreaking work on psychopathy in the 1940s.
Now we come to the solution Łobaczewski proposes to safeguard society from pathocracy. The final chapter of Political Ponerology imagines a future where a ‘Council of Wise Men’ – consisting of top psychologists and psychiatrists – would have ‘the right to examine the physical and psychological health of candidates before the latter are elected to the highest government positions.’ We’re not told who would assess these assessors to ensure that they’re not psychopaths or schizoids themselves. Or who would assess the assessors’ assessors. Łobaczewski evades this infinite regress problem and continues that the ‘Wise Men’ would also give moral and psychological guidance to leaders, religious authorities and the public. At the same time, a eugenic ‘security system’ would bar personality disordered people from important positions and ‘help progressively diminish societies’ gene pool burdens of hereditary aberrations.’ Such measures would again be supervised by the ever-busy Council of Wise Men.
Who will watch the watchmen? It’s a fair question, and the problem is inherent in any such enterprise. Lobaczewski was optimistic, placing his trust in the talent and decency of those at the top of his field, but that optimism may very well have been misplaced. On the one hand, when I read works by great psychologists like Lobaczewski, Dabrowski, and Cleckley, for example, I think they would have done a decent job in such positions. But on the other hand, one look at the current state of psychology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy today does not inspire much hope …
The main problem seems to be one of selection. Clearly a society can lose its capacity to self-organize in an optimal manner and raise the right people to the right positions. The solution won’t be found in creating checklists and metrics.
Regardless, Lobaczewski’s primary solution wasn’t his Council of Wise Men—it was basic education. While he presents a snapshot image of his hope for a better system of government in chapter 10 (“A Vision of the Future”), it serves more as a postscript to the book. His main solutions are presented in chapter 9 (“Therapy for the World”). There he makes the analogy between patients who have experienced pathological upbringings and those who have lived under pathocracy. Just as the simple act of learning basic facts about personality disorders has a healing effect on the former, the same dynamic applies to the latter. And there’s hope that such education can also have a preventative effect on those who haven’t experienced it. Glazov mentions none of this in his summary.
That, in sum, is Łobaczewski’s own ‘schizoidal declaration.’ Humanity is so helpless to avoid ‘infection’ by deviants that a technocratic coterie must be given vast powers to veto election outcomes and enact ableist policies to stop ‘aberrant’ people from breeding. Łobaczewski concludes that ‘a system thus envisaged would be superior to all its predecessors.’
Many a dictatorship has made the same claim.
I think that’s a partially fair criticism, for what it’s worth. Lobaczewski’s logocracy is still technocratic—though that isn’t saying much, given that he wasn’t a revolutionary and practically all our systems of government are presently technocratic.
However, I wouldn’t call his take overly schizoidal. The problem with schizoidal thinking isn’t so much that it’s wrong as it is that it’s one-sidedly pessimistic about human nature and “devoid of psychological color” (p. 189). You can read some feminist literature to get the flavor. The left hemisphere of the schizoid theorist latches onto a problem, amplifies it, and then projects it onto all other things, making it into a monolith. For example, here’s Andrea Dworkin: “Many women, I think, resist feminism because it is an agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny which permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships.”
In this particular worldview, all men are evil, and this evil is present in all things. The patriarchy is omnipresent and omnipotent. As Camille Paglia put it, “Men have sacrificed and crippled themselves physically and emotionally to feed, house, and protect women and children. None of their pain or achievement is registered in feminist rhetoric, which portrays men as oppressive and callous exploiters.” That’s an example of the nuance and “psychological color” missing in schizoidal thinking. The same things missing in most identity-politics-based reasoning.
None of this is to deny the basic facts, though. Men are overwhelmingly responsible for the most physical violence, for example. Around 90% of murders are committed by men. It’s not schizoidal to acknowledge this. Likewise, humanity’s history does show that it has been mostly helpless to avoid pathocratic infection. Modernity has done nothing to forestall this; in fact, it made humanity even more susceptible, as Mattias Desmet argues.
Lobaczewski wasn’t a naive anarchist, and his ideas arguably proceed from an understanding of both the best and the worst that humanity has to offer. That doesn’t necessarily make him right about his political recommendations. One of my hopes in publishing translations from his book on logocracy is to spark some discussion on these ideas and see how they hold up.
But let’s assume Lobaczewski’s logocracy would be a failure, for the sake of argument. Where does that leave us? Does Glazov think it better in principle to allow a clinical psychopath to rule a nation, than to bar her from office if her psychopathy were demonstrable? He mentioned Ted Bundy above. If he had run for president, and won, would this demonstration of democracy have been morally superior to a system of government which barred him from office? Personally, I think that is the absolute minimum of “ableist” policies that humanity should find a way to implement. But maybe that’s just me.
Bonus: Make sure to check out the comments on the first two parts of this review. There’s some great stuff in there.
Thanks for this analysis. Very helpful.
I think we do have a rather knee jerk reaction to those with rougher exteriors. We tend to overlook the smooth talkers and fancy dancers as possible psychopaths. But then we tend to overlook women as being toxic narcissistic psychopaths as well when there are many of them.
We are way too susceptible to the persona of those like Joe Biden despite their obvious dissembling and criminal behavior. Obama and the Clintons are perfect examples of those we overlook at our peril.
It is also possible to have committed crimes but to not be a psychopath. As to the psychology of Trump, although I have met he and his family, I simply wouldn't be able to hazard a guess. In many ways he has been a better leader than the other obvious comparisons. Mutual friends whom I do admire do support him strongly. We are in desperate need of better personal yardsticks for verification.
We need he help of psychiatrists to become better judges of character.
The USSR famously had Article 51 of the Soviet Penal code referencing dissent as "Sluggish Schizophrenia" and tossed dissenters into psychiatric prison hospitals.
I do not know if other communist European states had the same law. This seems pretty psychopathic to me.