The Polish clinical psychologist Dr Andrew M Lobaczewski adopted a Greek term ‘ponerology’ (poeneros =evil)[69] to name his psycho-historical study of the affects of psychopathy on society, history and politics. Ponerology therefore appears to be analogous to Psychohistory developed in the USA. Lobaczewski along with a team of psychologists covertly studied the role of psychopaths in Communist Poland.
Lobaczewski’s Political Ponerology
Lobaczewski’s manuscript for the book Political Ponerology
went through a circuitous process before being published in the 1980s in Canada. Lobaczewski destroyed the first draft after he was warned a few minutes before a search by State authorities. The second draft was given to an American tourist for delivery to a Vatican dignitary, but Lobaczewski was not able to discover anything further of it. Statistical material and case studies were thereby lost, and the third draft had to be written by Lobaczewski from memory in general terms when he arrived in the USA. [70] Then there were problems finding a publisher in the USA, and Lobaczewski was surprised by the extent of the influence of the American Left.[71]
Lobaczewski came to the same conclusions as Max Nordau and Lothrop Stoddard:
To individuals with various psychological deviations, the social structure dominated by normal people and their conceptual world appears to be a ‘system of force and oppression’. Psychopaths reach such a conclusion as a rule. If, at the same time, a good deal of injustice does in fact exist in a given society, pathological feelings of unfairness and suggestive statements emanating from deviants may then be easily propagated among both groups[72] although each group has completely different reasons for favoring such ideas.[73]
Leftist political doctrines serve as a means of recreating the world after the image of the psychopath, in the name of ‘justice’, while overthrowing those normal social laws, rules and morals that the psychopath regards as insufferable oppression.
In the psychopath, a dream emerges like some Utopia of a ‘happy’ world and a social system which does not reject them or force them to submit to laws and customs whose meaning is incomprehensible to them. They dream of a world in which their simple and radical way of experiencing and perceiving the world would dominate, where they would, of course, be assured safety and prosperity. In this Utopian dream they imagine that those ‘others’, different, but also more technically skilful than they are, should be put to work to achieve this goal for the psychopaths and others of their kin.[74]
Lobaczewski points out that psychopaths quickly realise the effects of their personalities in traumatising normal people, and they are able to use this as a means of reaching goals through terror.[75] This explains why such small groups of psychopaths can lead vast multitudes of normal people through the imposition of terror. ‘Subordinating a normal person to psychologically abnormal individuals has severe and deforming effects on his or her personality: it engenders trauma and neuroses.[76]
On an individual basis, one might observe the effects on a normal person living with a sociopathic spouse: that normal individual will probably eventually suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome, or other forms of neurosis that can be severe. When psychopaths assume total rule over an entire nation, or even over a small group, the negative influence of the psychopath is thereby extended using politics or religion as a control mechanism. This influence is readily observable in a cult, but the same factors are at work in politics.
Among the categories that Lobaczewski describes is pathological egotism, in which the individual represses anything of a self-critical nature. Lobaczewski relates this to deformities or injuries of the brain, as a symptom of prefrontal characteropathy.[77] He ascribed this condition to Lenin. As we shall see, the condition relates as well to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Mao Zedong, Leon Trotsky, et al.Ponerogenic Associations
Lobaczewski was describing the effects of individual psychosis on groups and entire states, with ideologies used as a mask for psychotic aims. This involves the formation of movements and the fermentation of revolts or riots in the name of some high sounding ideal. Lobaczewski writes of this:
It is a common phenomenon for a ponerogenic association or group to contain a particular ideology which always justifies its activities and furnishes motivational propaganda. Even a small-time gang of hoodlums has its own melodramatic ideology and pathological romanticism. Human nature demands that vile matters be haloed by an over-compensatory mystique in order to silence one’s consciousness and critical faculties, whether one’s own or those of others.
If such a ponerogenic union could be stripped of its ideology nothing would remain except psychological and moral pathology, naked and unattractive. [78]
The ponerogenic association and the doctrine that is developed to justify it is formulated and supported by individuals who sublimate their own psychological failings and free themselves from the need to abide by normal moral principles[79] The process was at work in the terrorism of the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany and the Weather Underground in the USA, who undertook criminal actions in the name of ideology. Andrea Baader was a common criminal before adopting communist doctrine to enhance his life as a sociopath. Donald DeFreeze, the founder of the 1970s communist terrorists in the USA, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), was a violent criminal before intellectualising his criminality with communist doctrine. He started his criminal career at the age of 14 as a gang member in New York, and was serving a sentence in Soledad Prison, California, for armed robbery, when he adopted Leftist doctrine. He had once robbed a prostitute of $10 and had turned a friend into the police. Those who knew him in prison regarded him as an unimpressive thug. DeFreeze escaped from Vacaville Prison in 1973, and while a fugitive founded the SLA.[80]
Despite its ideological pretensions, SLA continued serving as little more than a gang of bank robbers and kidnappers behind the mask of fighting for ‘equality’. One of the first actions of the SLA was to murder Oakland School Superintendent Marcus A Foster in November 1973 because of his endorsement of mandatory student identification cards to control juvenile crime.[81] To a sociopath such as DeFreeze such measures would indeed represent ‘injustice’, and the killing of an authority figure could be rationalised as the elimination of an oppressor.
Considering the premises established by Lobaczewski, Nordau and Stoddard, and the techniques of both Ponerology and Psychohistory, most forms of Leftism over the past several hundred years can be seen as the sublimated masks for individuals who would in other circumstances be thieves, rapists, sadists, and murderers. With the extremist notion that the ‘end justifies the means’, and, for example, that lying and any type of deceit are justified in the pursuit of the ideal, the psychopath is given a heroic and noble sanction. Such documents as The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, or Mao’s Little Red Book and the multitude of high-sounding manifestoes issued by the Baader-Meinhoff Gang or Weather Underground are the declarations of a psychopathic war against society, or what Lothrop Stoddard called the ‘revolt against civilisation’. In this credo of the Left, morality, religion and truth are regarded as nothing more than the props of the bourgeoisie. Lobaczewski maintained that gangs, mafias and mobs[82] are of the same type as a communist group.A phenomenon common to such groups is the loss of the individual member to perceive psychotic traits in their leaders; or the ‘atrophy of natural critical faculties’. Psychotic behaviour becomes interpreted as heroism.[83] One might think immediately of the heroic qualities bestowed upon charismatic psychopaths such as Jim Jones or Charles Manson, yet the same process is at work in glorifying the actions of certain political leaders and ponerogenic associations.
Pathocracy
Lobaczewski chose[84] the word pathocracy to describe a state that is run by psychopaths:
I shall accept the denomination of pathocracy for a system of government thus created, wherein a small pathological minority takes control over a society of normal people. The name thus selected, above all, emphasizes the basic quality of the macrasocial psychopathological phenomenon, and differentiates it from the many possible social systems dominated by normal people’s structure, custom, and law.[85]
Lobaczewski ascribes the origins of pathocracies to ‘a disease of great social movements’ that infects ‘entire societies, nations, and empires’.[86] The origin of pathocracies and ponerogenic associations among those of a common psychopathic mentality explains their similarity through history.[87]
The ponerogenic doctrine expounds the ‘end as justifying the means’, and such rationalisations for extreme actions of a psychopathic character open the way for psychopaths to enact their tendencies in the name of ideals. An ideology thereby becomes ‘useful for the purposes’ of liberating the psychopath ‘from the uncomfortable pressure of normal human custom’. Every great social movement can thereby become ‘a host upon which some pathocracy initiates its parasitic life’. Hence a great social movement might have been marked by psychopathic traits from its start, or might have been subsequently taken over by psychopaths. [88] An example of this is the original Labour movement that began with noble and necessary aims, which was taken over by Marxist and other ponerogenic doctrines and associations.
From: The Psychotic Left
From Jacobin France to the Occupy movement
by Kerry Bolton
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