We are all walking on eggs! They always come for the intellectuals, artists,(whatever) that see through the cracks. But as a man who has spent enough time in jails - there are people without conscience whatsoever and they should be put out of commission. Blank! It is revolting, it is a mistake of nature, for what that's worth. So what you gonna do? (I hope you're smiling) It's here yesterday, what do we say, where can we help? Maybe a big Z campaign for Zombies? It's on lasses and lads, what do we do? Great article, very enlightening, and at the level of my heart I wish Desmet to be wrong (wink), but we are still going to get it, especially in North Amerdica. That being said have a great weekend. Powerful work, thank you!
>“a spellbinder is always a pathological [often paranoid] individual
Funny how a certain group of self-styled chosen people that run everything nowadays and who sparked all those totalitarian movements in the first place are quite well-known for their extraordinarily high levels of paranoia and a persistent persecution complex. The picture that you provided in the header depicts one of them, no less!
All this talk about the Nazis. And yet, the picture used was of the Bolsheviks. Funny how it's OK to psychoanalyze one group but not the other.
Focus on the Nazis was unintentional on my part. Even Desmet devotes pretty much equal attention to both. I guess the quotes that I wanted to respond to just happened to be primarily about the Nazis. But I agree with you here. Ponerology was mostly about the Bolsheviks and communists and only tangentially referenced the Nazis, which I find to be a nice balance to the Nazi-heavy bias in most other accounts.
Thank you again for your insightful summary. It does give me even more appreciation for Lobaczewski's work, given he didn't have the long hindsight, resources, nor a matured understanding of personality disorders as Desmet has at his fingertips. Nevertheless it does sound like Desmet has some valuable commentary on the outcomes of psychopathic leadership even if he doesn't see the psychopath. Some will argue that personality disorders, including psychopathy, are not pathology at all (and so not disorders) but 'normal' variations in neural architecture that may be more or less fit for a situation or context (the psychopath soldier is going to be more effective, in certain respects, than one who is overly empathic). So the filtering out of psychopathology may not have included psychopathy because the elements of psychopathy could have been seen as strengths, not weaknesses (if detected at all, until maybe the purges you cite above).
Looking forward to the next post - going to have to get the book now!
Spellbinders as Rasputins to the aristocracy. The first one we know of, was in the Russian Czar's family. His wife fell for this.
British Prince Charles met his Rasputin Laurens van der Post in his youth, and has been living on an astral plane since. I suspect that his brother Andrew had a Rasputin-like relationship with Psychopath Jeffrey Epstein.
Norwegian Princess Märtha Louise was recently married to American "shaman" Durek Verrett.
Spellbinders/Rasputins and the gullible aristocrats are a match made in.....
From my humble perspective, Desmet and Arendt both run into the psychological version of Aristotle's "first mover" problem. In the psychological realm, that "first mover" could be an individual or a group of people at origin. Girard's "scapegoat" seems to apply here, and Desmet's thesis appears to suffer from finding a scapegoat that isn't human, in a human problem, instead of allowing the "Machiavellian" to emerge from his exploration during research phase.
Good point. He doesn't understand that even in an unconscious mass formation, it is a certain type of person that takes the reins and exploits the situation. AND sometimes they create the situation to begin with.
In the mass formation within a family which is part of Parental Alienation, the perpetrator parent is always a person with a Cluster-B disorder. Family totalitarianism.
I have begun to suspect that families in which one parent pushes the Trans-agenda on the child/children, and then illegitimately removes that child from the custody of the normal parent.....is also a form of Family Totalitarianism. The Trans-pusher quite possibly being a Cluster-B type, again.
"it is a certain type of person that takes the reins and exploits the situation"
THIS, right here. Or a group of people. And not necessarily with evil intent at first, either. But from this point of exploitation (which could initially come from "noble" intent), the mass formation psychosis Desmet identifies can propagate through larger groups of people.
There are a couple points in the book where Lobaczewski makes passing reference to the "demonological" interpretation of mass evil. Since he's presenting primarily a biological/scientific account, he doesn't expand, but that one always gets my imagination going. Berdyaev and Dostoevsky went there, but the possibilities are endless.
Haven't read a lot of him. He's one of the philosophers Putin sometimes references. One of his famous works is "The Philosophy of Inequality". As one amazon reviewer/detractor summed up the book: "I think his thesis can be boiled down to something like "proponents of equality are incapable of producing culture and cultural artifacts that are great because the elements of culture that produce greatness are derived from the unequal nature of the individual."" Sounds right to me!
This is the one I had in mind wrt demonology, from 1918:
"A minority can remain faithful to the positive and creative idea of the people, and from it can begin a renewal. But the path to renewal lies through repentance, through an awareness of sins, through a cleansing of the spirit of the people from spirits demonic. And the thing first of all necessary is to begin to discern spirits. Old Russia, in which there was much evil and ugliness, but likewise also much good and beauty, is dying away. The new Russia, born of its death pangs, is still enigmatic. It will not be such, as the figures and the ideologues of the revolution imagine it to themself. It will not be uniform in its spiritual visage. In it will be more harshly divided and opposed the Christian and the anti-Christian principles. The Anti-Christ spirits of the revolution will beget their dark domain. But the Christian spirit of Russia also has to manifest its strength. The power of this spirit can operate in the minority even if the majority falls away from it."
Life is such that I'm not able to devote the time or mental expenditure to reading Dr. Desmet's work at the minute (new kid), so I'm sincerely appreciative of this series. Thank you.
Thank you for this! Desmet's psychopath-free map appears naïve compared to Lobaczewski's much more complete map. I imagine that Desmet is subject to "incentives" to avoid calling attention to, say, those under investigation by the team at https://grand-jury.net/
Contrast his approach of avoiding mention of the (uber-powerful) psychopaths to the approach of many recent scientific paper authors. To get published, they modify their conclusions to conform to The Narrative, while managing to slip damning evidence into the body of their papers.
Link to https://grand-jury.net/ now fixed. I also sense that Desmet is stating his honest convictions. And I judge that it's dangerous to attribute to psychopaths what can be attributed to happenstance, especially when dealing with extremely powerful psychopaths such as some suspect are actively managing this progression toward totalitarianism.
As a collector of maps and heroes, I judge that most maps have uncharted areas, and most heroes have blind spots. I don't attribute any ill intent - good men can have blind spots.
And there's truth in the quote from Upton Sinclair — 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.'
I think that is probably the case too - It's just that Lobaczewski has had a much finer grained and complex (not "complicated", but complex) understanding - and living through what he did I'm guessing gave him a whole other dimension to an intuitive knowing of ponerology (I think lived experience counts for a lot, although maybe difficult to quantify).
I have to admit I gave up on this article fairly early, as it committed what I think of as an analytical failure, by missing the most obvious comment to make early in the piece when it would have made sense to point it out - specifically that: when anyone in the analysis of anything asks "is it (the cause / motivation / reason) this OR this OR that?", who says it's an "or" question? Quite obviously the reason for sociopaths in power is NOT "one or the other" of the reasons given, but a little bit of ALL OF THEM ... and if you don't think any cabals exist or have existed, you're just very ignorant of a lot quite well documented investigative journalism and history INCLUDING a great many open admissions made by such cabals ... and if you think no two people have ever conspired, well that's just bloody naive ... and so on.
> missing the most obvious comment ... a little bit of ALL OF THEM
Agreed, Trevor, that's why I wrote the subtitle the way I did. ;) So early in the article you missed it!
These themes continue in Chapter 8, so I'll try to address your main points in the next installment. As a preview, Desmet doesn't disagree that cabals exist. He just doesn't see them as an important factor in mass formation and the origin of totalitarianism. But I agree with you, it's not either/or but both/and.
Hey just another thought which perhaps you may want to add into your writing, there is one cabal that proves his hypothesis wrong when it comes to this idea that it's not important in terms of mass formation - and that's the cabal of religious indoctrination, which, whether we consider ourselves religious or not, we have all been exposed to ... and this indoctrination is arguably one of the earliest sources of the kind of faulty logic (eg: circular logic) used to justify the positions taken ... in other words again: once someone is trained to accept the kind of reasoning that says "god must exist because it says so in the bible, and the bible must be true because it is written/dictated by/from god", you can literally convince anyone of anything at all, and this is just one of a great many examples of faulty logic used throughout the ages in religious indoctrination, and which of course are now (for many decades) also used in advertising and academia ... and I would suggest that without this background training, it would not be so easy to create a mass formation psychosis. Secondly, it was then through the likes of Goebbels and others who further studied the ways people can be manipulated that these things became quite precise sciences, and if the Nazis were not a cabal ... and how about then the corporate ownership of academia, funding further experiments? Is that not a cabal? I would suggest the only reason anyone knows how to create such mass responses is precisely and only because of the work of prior cabals.
Do you mean you covered that in a different part of the collection of articles or in this one that I actually read ... sorry if I missed it, but I only started reading this one, and was just surprised as I kept reading that it wasn't mentioned
No, I haven't covered it yet in detail. Just pointing out that I'm aware of the distinction, acknowledged it in the subtitle, and will get into it in more detail with chapter 8, which is a continuation of the topics in chapter 7.
"For a very few people, the inferno is a paradise."
Puts me in mind of the psychopathic minds behind the Jehovah's Witnesses, a totalitarian group. They preach a utopia where they will be a small group rejoicing and stepping over the charred bodies of the rest of mankind, who have been annihilated when the JW Utopia arrives. Supposedly.
People who could rejoice at this consider themselves loving and godly, ideal human beings?
I witnessed a leader of a Family Totalitarian situation as his mind snapped. Incredibly frightening. If there had been an exorcist handy, I would have called him out.
We are all walking on eggs! They always come for the intellectuals, artists,(whatever) that see through the cracks. But as a man who has spent enough time in jails - there are people without conscience whatsoever and they should be put out of commission. Blank! It is revolting, it is a mistake of nature, for what that's worth. So what you gonna do? (I hope you're smiling) It's here yesterday, what do we say, where can we help? Maybe a big Z campaign for Zombies? It's on lasses and lads, what do we do? Great article, very enlightening, and at the level of my heart I wish Desmet to be wrong (wink), but we are still going to get it, especially in North Amerdica. That being said have a great weekend. Powerful work, thank you!
>“a spellbinder is always a pathological [often paranoid] individual
Funny how a certain group of self-styled chosen people that run everything nowadays and who sparked all those totalitarian movements in the first place are quite well-known for their extraordinarily high levels of paranoia and a persistent persecution complex. The picture that you provided in the header depicts one of them, no less!
All this talk about the Nazis. And yet, the picture used was of the Bolsheviks. Funny how it's OK to psychoanalyze one group but not the other.
Focus on the Nazis was unintentional on my part. Even Desmet devotes pretty much equal attention to both. I guess the quotes that I wanted to respond to just happened to be primarily about the Nazis. But I agree with you here. Ponerology was mostly about the Bolsheviks and communists and only tangentially referenced the Nazis, which I find to be a nice balance to the Nazi-heavy bias in most other accounts.
Thank you again for your insightful summary. It does give me even more appreciation for Lobaczewski's work, given he didn't have the long hindsight, resources, nor a matured understanding of personality disorders as Desmet has at his fingertips. Nevertheless it does sound like Desmet has some valuable commentary on the outcomes of psychopathic leadership even if he doesn't see the psychopath. Some will argue that personality disorders, including psychopathy, are not pathology at all (and so not disorders) but 'normal' variations in neural architecture that may be more or less fit for a situation or context (the psychopath soldier is going to be more effective, in certain respects, than one who is overly empathic). So the filtering out of psychopathology may not have included psychopathy because the elements of psychopathy could have been seen as strengths, not weaknesses (if detected at all, until maybe the purges you cite above).
Looking forward to the next post - going to have to get the book now!
Spellbinders as Rasputins to the aristocracy. The first one we know of, was in the Russian Czar's family. His wife fell for this.
British Prince Charles met his Rasputin Laurens van der Post in his youth, and has been living on an astral plane since. I suspect that his brother Andrew had a Rasputin-like relationship with Psychopath Jeffrey Epstein.
Norwegian Princess Märtha Louise was recently married to American "shaman" Durek Verrett.
Spellbinders/Rasputins and the gullible aristocrats are a match made in.....
From my humble perspective, Desmet and Arendt both run into the psychological version of Aristotle's "first mover" problem. In the psychological realm, that "first mover" could be an individual or a group of people at origin. Girard's "scapegoat" seems to apply here, and Desmet's thesis appears to suffer from finding a scapegoat that isn't human, in a human problem, instead of allowing the "Machiavellian" to emerge from his exploration during research phase.
Good point. He doesn't understand that even in an unconscious mass formation, it is a certain type of person that takes the reins and exploits the situation. AND sometimes they create the situation to begin with.
In the mass formation within a family which is part of Parental Alienation, the perpetrator parent is always a person with a Cluster-B disorder. Family totalitarianism.
I have begun to suspect that families in which one parent pushes the Trans-agenda on the child/children, and then illegitimately removes that child from the custody of the normal parent.....is also a form of Family Totalitarianism. The Trans-pusher quite possibly being a Cluster-B type, again.
"it is a certain type of person that takes the reins and exploits the situation"
THIS, right here. Or a group of people. And not necessarily with evil intent at first, either. But from this point of exploitation (which could initially come from "noble" intent), the mass formation psychosis Desmet identifies can propagate through larger groups of people.
I like the use of magic terminology like "spells" and so on.
Politics and manipulation of the masses really is a form of dark witchcraft.
I've been reading up on the power of sigils and symbols, this stuff is very very real,
There are a couple points in the book where Lobaczewski makes passing reference to the "demonological" interpretation of mass evil. Since he's presenting primarily a biological/scientific account, he doesn't expand, but that one always gets my imagination going. Berdyaev and Dostoevsky went there, but the possibilities are endless.
Can you share your thoughts on Berdyaev? I am not acquainted with his work.
Haven't read a lot of him. He's one of the philosophers Putin sometimes references. One of his famous works is "The Philosophy of Inequality". As one amazon reviewer/detractor summed up the book: "I think his thesis can be boiled down to something like "proponents of equality are incapable of producing culture and cultural artifacts that are great because the elements of culture that produce greatness are derived from the unequal nature of the individual."" Sounds right to me!
This is the one I had in mind wrt demonology, from 1918:
http://www.berdyaev.com/berdiaev/berd_lib/1918_299.html
Here's how he ends that one:
"A minority can remain faithful to the positive and creative idea of the people, and from it can begin a renewal. But the path to renewal lies through repentance, through an awareness of sins, through a cleansing of the spirit of the people from spirits demonic. And the thing first of all necessary is to begin to discern spirits. Old Russia, in which there was much evil and ugliness, but likewise also much good and beauty, is dying away. The new Russia, born of its death pangs, is still enigmatic. It will not be such, as the figures and the ideologues of the revolution imagine it to themself. It will not be uniform in its spiritual visage. In it will be more harshly divided and opposed the Christian and the anti-Christian principles. The Anti-Christ spirits of the revolution will beget their dark domain. But the Christian spirit of Russia also has to manifest its strength. The power of this spirit can operate in the minority even if the majority falls away from it."
Thanks for the in-depth reply, I'll check him out.
This post from Chris Langan speaks of pathocracy without yet having the word:
"In the advanced stage of social pathology called parasitic divergence..."
https://megafoundation.substack.com/p/great-resetism-and-the-meaning-of
Life is such that I'm not able to devote the time or mental expenditure to reading Dr. Desmet's work at the minute (new kid), so I'm sincerely appreciative of this series. Thank you.
You're welcome, Carson. Glad you're appreciating it.
Your series is excellent, Harrison. Thank you.
Thank you for this! Desmet's psychopath-free map appears naïve compared to Lobaczewski's much more complete map. I imagine that Desmet is subject to "incentives" to avoid calling attention to, say, those under investigation by the team at https://grand-jury.net/
Contrast his approach of avoiding mention of the (uber-powerful) psychopaths to the approach of many recent scientific paper authors. To get published, they modify their conclusions to conform to The Narrative, while managing to slip damning evidence into the body of their papers.
Does Desmet have to walk a similar "fine line"?
That link leads to a dead end for me.
Re: Desmet, I get the impression he is just stating his honest convictions.
Link to https://grand-jury.net/ now fixed. I also sense that Desmet is stating his honest convictions. And I judge that it's dangerous to attribute to psychopaths what can be attributed to happenstance, especially when dealing with extremely powerful psychopaths such as some suspect are actively managing this progression toward totalitarianism.
As a collector of maps and heroes, I judge that most maps have uncharted areas, and most heroes have blind spots. I don't attribute any ill intent - good men can have blind spots.
And there's truth in the quote from Upton Sinclair — 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.'
I think that is probably the case too - It's just that Lobaczewski has had a much finer grained and complex (not "complicated", but complex) understanding - and living through what he did I'm guessing gave him a whole other dimension to an intuitive knowing of ponerology (I think lived experience counts for a lot, although maybe difficult to quantify).
I have to admit I gave up on this article fairly early, as it committed what I think of as an analytical failure, by missing the most obvious comment to make early in the piece when it would have made sense to point it out - specifically that: when anyone in the analysis of anything asks "is it (the cause / motivation / reason) this OR this OR that?", who says it's an "or" question? Quite obviously the reason for sociopaths in power is NOT "one or the other" of the reasons given, but a little bit of ALL OF THEM ... and if you don't think any cabals exist or have existed, you're just very ignorant of a lot quite well documented investigative journalism and history INCLUDING a great many open admissions made by such cabals ... and if you think no two people have ever conspired, well that's just bloody naive ... and so on.
> missing the most obvious comment ... a little bit of ALL OF THEM
Agreed, Trevor, that's why I wrote the subtitle the way I did. ;) So early in the article you missed it!
These themes continue in Chapter 8, so I'll try to address your main points in the next installment. As a preview, Desmet doesn't disagree that cabals exist. He just doesn't see them as an important factor in mass formation and the origin of totalitarianism. But I agree with you, it's not either/or but both/and.
Hey just another thought which perhaps you may want to add into your writing, there is one cabal that proves his hypothesis wrong when it comes to this idea that it's not important in terms of mass formation - and that's the cabal of religious indoctrination, which, whether we consider ourselves religious or not, we have all been exposed to ... and this indoctrination is arguably one of the earliest sources of the kind of faulty logic (eg: circular logic) used to justify the positions taken ... in other words again: once someone is trained to accept the kind of reasoning that says "god must exist because it says so in the bible, and the bible must be true because it is written/dictated by/from god", you can literally convince anyone of anything at all, and this is just one of a great many examples of faulty logic used throughout the ages in religious indoctrination, and which of course are now (for many decades) also used in advertising and academia ... and I would suggest that without this background training, it would not be so easy to create a mass formation psychosis. Secondly, it was then through the likes of Goebbels and others who further studied the ways people can be manipulated that these things became quite precise sciences, and if the Nazis were not a cabal ... and how about then the corporate ownership of academia, funding further experiments? Is that not a cabal? I would suggest the only reason anyone knows how to create such mass responses is precisely and only because of the work of prior cabals.
Do you mean you covered that in a different part of the collection of articles or in this one that I actually read ... sorry if I missed it, but I only started reading this one, and was just surprised as I kept reading that it wasn't mentioned
No, I haven't covered it yet in detail. Just pointing out that I'm aware of the distinction, acknowledged it in the subtitle, and will get into it in more detail with chapter 8, which is a continuation of the topics in chapter 7.
"For a very few people, the inferno is a paradise."
Puts me in mind of the psychopathic minds behind the Jehovah's Witnesses, a totalitarian group. They preach a utopia where they will be a small group rejoicing and stepping over the charred bodies of the rest of mankind, who have been annihilated when the JW Utopia arrives. Supposedly.
People who could rejoice at this consider themselves loving and godly, ideal human beings?
I witnessed a leader of a Family Totalitarian situation as his mind snapped. Incredibly frightening. If there had been an exorcist handy, I would have called him out.
Thanks, Jean! Fixed.
Thanks! Fixed.