The Long Road of Degeneration

How psyops facilitated our decline into pathocracy

Us, unfortunately.

I’ve been reading a book by Joseph P. Farrell lately: Saucers, Swastikas and Psyops: A History of A Breakaway Civilization: Hidden Aerospace Technologies and Psychological Operations. It is a fun read, even if I don’t always agree with him. So far, he is arguing that regardless of the nature of UFOs (extraterrestrial vs. human black projects),¹ the technology aspect is intrinsically intertwined with a technique: advanced psychological operations. In that regard, he has a lot to say that is relevant to ponerology. Psychological operations are a pathocratic specialty, after all.

First, however, here is the passage that got my attention:

It is important to understand that psychological warfare operations developed during World War Two largely as a response to the totalitarian system of Nazi Germany, and its ideological understanding that psychological warfare was a “World View Warfare” [Weltanschauungskrieg] …

He quotes Christopher Simpson, who wrote:

William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, then the director of the newly established U.S. intelligence agency Office of Strategic Services (OSS), viewed an understanding of Nazi psychological tactics as a vital source of ideas for ‘Americanized’ versions of many of the same stratagems. Use of the new term [“psychological warfare”] quickly became widespread throughout the U.S. intelligence community. For Donovan psychological warfare was destined to become a full arm of the U.S. military, equal in status to the army, navy, and air force.

Farrell concludes:

Of course, this raises the philosophical question of just how much of this essentially Nazi conception can be “borrowed” and “Americanized” before the Nazi ideology itself comes to dominate the process, transforming the society adopting it.

Farrell is almost right. But he’s stuck in the “common worldview,” the ordinary world of concepts that sees all these dynamics in terms of surface-level features like political ideologies (or economics, or religion). I doubt there is any risk of the intelligence community and aerospace companies becoming “literal Nazis” because they happened to have counted a significant number of actual Nazis among their founding members in the late 1940s, or because they happened to adopt the psychological warfare techniques of their WWII adversary. They won’t be Sieg Heiling, Mein Kampf quoting, and sporting fashionable Schutzstaffel uniforms any time soon.

But Farrell isn’t totally wrong here. He’s just looking at a particular dynamic through a conventional lens, producing a slightly distorted picture of reality. Rephrased slightly, the dynamic he is sensing is very close to the truth:

This raises the ponerological question of just how much of this essentially pathocratic conception can be “borrowed” and “Americanized” before the pathocratic ideology itself comes to dominate the process, transforming the society adopting it into a pathocracy.

If you adopt the psychological techniques of a pathocracy, you’ll probably end up adopting the psychology (and psychological demographics) of a pathocracy. The risk isn’t becoming literal Nazis; it is becoming progressively more pathocratic. All pathocracies are fundamentally compatible with each other despite whatever seeming incompatibilities their ideologies might possess. And the Western world is becoming progressively more pathocratic.

Lobaczewski makes this point when discussing means and ends:

The adherents of such ideas tend to lose sight of the fact that the means used, not just the end, will be decisive for the result of their activities. Whenever they reach for overly radical methods of action, still convinced that they are serving their idea, they are not aware that their goal has already changed. The principle “the end justifies the means” opens the door to a different kind of person for whom a great idea is useful for purposes of liberating themselves from the uncomfortable chains of normal human custom, respect for mankind, and moral values. (p. 203)

There’s a deep reason for this, which I tried to approach in my review of Mattias Desmet’s book.

When you adopt the means of a psychopathic enemy, you put yourself within the “gravity well” of a ponerogenic telon or attractor. You change the goal to which your actions are directed. A complex phenomenon (pathocracy) is implicit within a set of simple, practically mindless rules. Follow the simple rules, and the complex phenomenon will emerge, whether you want it to or not.

Over the course of the Cold War, the American intelligence agencies and their allies increasingly adopted the psychological, revolutionary, and political warfare techniques of their enemies: the Germans and the Russians. These means were essentially pathocratic in nature—they are the natural extension of a certain kind of mentality or world view.² No doubt many did so with what can be considered good intentions, even a sense of necessity. It may have seemed the only way to win. (They were wrong, but that’s beside the point.) Along the way, the intel agencies have allied themselves with criminals, terrorists, con artists, and generally some of the most reprehensible individuals and groups on the planet. (But it was all worth it, they’ll tell you, because national security.)

Things escalated, to put it mildly, to the absurd point that these same groups were funding and utilizing the very ideology they were publicly calling the next great world evil: revolutionary Islamism. One hand fought what the other hand armed. It’s hard to say which side of this relationship was more pathetic: the Western strategists who thought it was a winning strategy or the jihadi dupes who fell for it. I suppose each probably thought they were putting one over on the other. In fact, they both serve the same master. Islamism is just transparently pathocratic. The cynical use of it for revolutionary and political warfare purposes, by contrast, is opaque enough to go under many people’s radar, and perhaps even to convince some of those engaging in it that they’re actually performing a necessary evil. But the true initiates on both sides know the game: that it is all a game.

That is just one example. Official Western society today is practically 100% worldview warfare. It may technically be illegal to run psyops on the American people, but that doesn’t stop them. The Washington elite have just convinced themselves that it’s not psyops if you call it “perception management,” “nudge psychology,” “truth projection,” or some other conversive euphemism. This kind of thinking goes into every government press briefing, every corporate statement, every major speech, every policy justification. It informs how the managerial class speaks, its “messaging,” and the tone and content of the vast majority of mass media. This filters down to the public understanding of these subjects, which is the whole point.

Once you learn to see it, it’s impossible to miss, because everyone mindlessly parrots the same talking points. They can’t help but to repeat someone else’s words while convincing themselves that they’re their own. It’s just “obvious,” and anyone saying otherwise is automatically seen as the one who is brainwashed.³ Their worldview has in fact been shaped by some millennial staffer, psychological warfare officer, or corporate hack brainstorming in a conference room. On top of that, we have fallen into a surveillance state the scope of which dwarfs anything the Gestapo, Stasi, or NKVD could’ve imagined in their heyday—and aside from a few toothless protests, we’ve just rolled over and taken it.

But note what I said above about simple rules—plural. Worldview warfare is just one of them, and it’s more of a symptom than anything. Here are a few of the key ingredients:

1. the society in question must be in the crisis period of a secular cycle in order for pathocracy to emerge and consolidate itself after the crisis

2. it must have lost the collective ability to accurately see psychopathology for what it is

3. a psychologically impoverished (i.e. reality-impoverished) ideology must exist as a live option, societally.

All three are true in the Western world:

1. we entered the crisis period in the last 15 years or so, and still have a handful of years to go

2. transparently deranged people are not only treated with kid gloves, but given special treatment and privileges

3. “Wokism”⁴

If I had to pick a prime candidate on which to place the blame, I wouldn’t choose “the universities” or “the politicians” or even “the managerial class.” The causal links of ponerogenesis are many and complex, and to some degree everyone shares a portion of the blame. But my money is on the intelligence agencies for pushing us over the edge. Not the analysts, or even the covert operatives and counterintelligence personnel. Some no doubt played a role, but I’m talking about the strategists. The guys like Donovan, Dulles, Angleton, and more whose names we’ll probably never know, who grabbed the tiger by the tail and convinced themselves they were gods in the process. By doing so, they set a process in motion that will be difficult to stop.

They opened the door.⁵

They opened it to “a different kind of person for whom a great idea is useful for purposes of liberating themselves from the uncomfortable chains of normal human custom, respect for mankind, and moral values.” And this type of person operates seamlessly in the world that they created, because the rules that were put into place were their rules, their playbook. Perception management comes naturally to them. They know the game better than any of its players—and we’re all players.

They know how to psychologically terrorize a regular person into submission. They know how to get the competent fired in order to usurp their positions. They know how to insinuate their own worldview into your own so that you accept it as valid. They know how to frame you for something you didn’t do; to convince you that you did something wrong, when you didn’t. They know how to play your emotions so you do what they want you to do. They know how to create situations where those emotions come naturally, and you couldn’t imagine acting in any other way or holding any other opinion. They know how to write the perfect DEI statement.

It only takes one psychopath in a group to destroy its cohesion and cause morale to nosedive.

One of the issues that came up repeatedly in the recent reading workshop was how to properly diagnose the current state of affairs in Western nations. On the one hand, we show many of the signs of ponerogenesis, yet we still don’t resemble the “typical” pathocracy Lobaczewski describes (i.e. a single-party totalitarianism). Yet with that said, I cite some Polish critics of the current state of affairs who see many features as currently worse than they were under communist pathocracy. It seems to me that we are currently in a kind of hybrid system which has the potential to get much worse over the next decade or two.

In Logocracy, Lobaczewski describes such a hybrid system: western democracy. Here are some of the things he had to say about it:

The self-righteous and naive egotism of the common psychological worldview on which democracy is excessively based has proved to be an unwitting ally of such “totalitarian” systems. For it does not allow for an understanding of their pathological nature and thus for the most effective countermeasures.

Since the introduction of universal political rights, American democracy, like everywhere else, has become a façade system, behind which other forces hide to exercise power.

Democracy impedes the formation of a healthy and active socio-psychological structure of societies. Instead, it encourages the organization of elites that have an internal oligarchic structure and are led by individuals with less than ideal aptitudes and character traits.

In every country, there are individuals who wish to achieve importance and prosperity through their awareness of the existence of those less critical people, whom they secretly despise. What societies and sociologists do not realize is that these leaders often possess the specific psychological knowledge that we find in psychopathic individuals.

In every democracy there are organized minorities that take advantage of the weaknesses described above to try to get to positions of power. Their activities are in fact semi-secret, because they are shielded by official programs and propaganda, and it is very difficult for citizens to uncover their true motives.

In other words, it is possible for small pathocratic cliques to covertly subvert and control a democracy in key ways, occupying key strategic positions of power and influence, without necessarily completely reshaping the existing sociopolitical system. The danger is that their influence will precipitate such a transformation, which usually takes one of two forms: revolution from above or below. Lobaczewski described pre-revolutionary France and Russia as exhibiting pathocratic tendencies developing both among the existing rulers and the masses. I think we’re in a similar situation. The ruling elite (“led by individuals with less than ideal aptitudes and character traits”) is becoming increasingly pathological, for the reasons Lobaczewski gives above, and we are seeing the growth of ponerogenic social movements from below, following the stereotypical progression Lobaczewski describes.

But because of the special role played by the intelligence agencies and their criminal networks, I’m going to propose a third option: the pathocratic hydraulic press. The normal majority is getting hammered from both above and below. Ponerization of the ruling elite proceeds parallel to (and perhaps even covertly steers and influences) ponerization of social movements in “civil society.” This may facilitate a pathocratic takeover and transformation without a radical revolution that tears down all the existing institutions, as happened in the communist revolutions of the twentieth century. In this case, the institutions are simply coopted from within—from above and below—like some invasive parasite that hollows out the body while keeping the dead exterior as a functional meat suit. The only question is whether or not such a state of affairs is really viable in the long term, or whether such a hybrid pathocracy must necessarily transform into a more typical one.

As Gordon Hahn wrote a few years ago:

There are, of course, other options in the outcome of the present American crisis, but for the first time in U.S. history such a bloody, totalitarian outcome has some significant potential to come to rotten fruition. If or when it does, no one will know how the outcome came out; virtual reality will have become ‘reality’ with no hope of return to real reality. As one Soviet era novel banished from its homeland and having found refuge in the then democratic U.S. noted: “(I)n the days of the triumph of materialism (i.e., socialism – GMH), matter turned into a concept and the question of ‘food supply’ and ‘fuel supply’ came to substitute for food and fuel themselves” (Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago cited in Epstein, Postmodernism in Russia, p. 43). Similarly, today in late postmodern America, a ‘Democratic’ Party demands ‘free and fair’ elections abroad (on a selective basis, albeit), while it rigs and engages in [unfair] elections at home and seeks to establish one-party rule (see the Biden-Harris regime’s HR 1). That same party expounds falsely about ‘democracy’ and ‘equity for all’ but eliminates republican democracy and silences those who would uphold truly republican government. They do this in line with dictates of minority identitarianism and the supreme value of diversity limited to minorities and those who agree with the new ‘democracy.’

Or, as he put it last year, commenting on the role of the intelligence agencies:

The end of the Cold War offered an opportunity to return to the founding fathers’ original principles of distance from European conflicts and large military and security apparati, but 9/11 intervened and invigorated the military-security state to new heights. The Patriot Act, among other things, allowed police agents to write their own, open-ended search warrants, a violation of American revolution’s principle of specific search warrants signed off on by a court, not a secret court and a security agent’s brief. The CIA, NSA, and FBI began spying on Americans, stripping them of their right “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” under the Fourth Amendment. Since then the American state’s violations of Americans’ natural law rights have expanded and intensified further.

This socialist identitarianism is a soft version of fascism (national socialism) with communist face—communo-fascism. It involves political economic fascism in its alliance of large capital with the military-security state, the reverse racism and identitarianism of ‘cultural Marxism’, and a primarily anti-Christian secularism. The power of the military-security state began to be deployed abroad in the service of the globalization of this presently soft communo-fascism or socialist identitarianism.

He calls this a revolution from above on the part of the military-security state: “this revolution now aims to create a single-party dominant, soft authoritarian system in order to complete and consolidate a new socialist-identitarian state.” However it plays out over the next years, it will be interesting to watch, that’s for sure.

1. There are many more options than that, of course, including my bro

Mark Bisone

’s: “Devil Worshipping Aliens From Dimension X.”

2. See the section on Political Ponerology on “artificially infected pathocracy,” i.e. political/revolutionary warfare.

3. “Russian Troll.”

4. I know some would place “Trumpism” or “MAGA” here, but whatever their flaws I just don’t see them as live ponerogenic options at the present time.

5. In more ways than one, but that’s another topic.