Political ponerology is a concept popularized by Polish psychiatrist Andrzej Łobaczewski.[1] Łobaczewski advocated using the fields of psychology, sociology, philosophy, and history to account for such phenomena as aggressive war, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and despotism.
During World War II, Łobaczewski worked for the Polish Home Army, an underground Polish resistance organization. After the war, he studied at Jagiellonian University under professor of psychiatry Edward Brzezicki.[2] Łobaczewski's class was the last to receive an education uninfluenced by Soviet ideology and censorship, after which psychiatry was restricted to Pavlovian concepts. The study of genetics and psychopathy was forbidden.
Łobaczewski adopted the term "ponerology", which is derived from the Greek word poneros, from the branch of theology dealing with the study of evil. According to Łobaczewski, all societies fluctuate between "happy times" and "unhappy times". During happy times the privileged classes enjoy prosperity and suppress advanced psychological knowledge of psychopathological influence in the corridors of power. Though happy, these times are not necessarily morally advanced as the privileged classes' prosperity or happiness may be premised on the oppression or exploitation of others. To block out such inconvenient truths (the voice of conscience) the privileged use 'conversive thinking', which means changing the outcome of the reasoning process to a more convenient outcome. This is accompanied by a rise in egotism and emotionalism. This growing 'hysteria' of the privileged classes (emotionalism, egotism and conversive thinking) spreads across society over several generations. National hysteria is a natural cycle and forms a sine-wave almost 200 years long. Hysteria causes people to lose the ability to differentiate between psychologically healthy and pathological individuals. In this environment the behavior of 'characteropaths', or individuals with slight brain tissue damage (e.g. from toxic substances, viruses, difficult births, pathological parenting) is accepted as normal and this acts as a gateway to normalizing the behavior of those with genetic deviations, including psychopathy. Finally, near the point of maximum hysteria society becomes polarized and paralyzed and the most pathologically egotistical of all 'spellbinders' can come to power. The spellbinder worsens the psychological health of those under his or her influence. This may be the beginning of a 'pathocracy' (though not inevitable) in which individuals with biologically based psychopathology, including personality disorders (especially psychopathy) occupy positions of power and influence.
The spellbinder hides behind an 'ideological mask', a belief system that he uses to gain power. Any belief system can be used as an ideological mask, including religion. Psychopaths have no problems wearing personal masks or ideological masks and are accepted as normal within the spellbinder's movement. A network of psychopaths gradually begins to dominate, and they begin to eliminate the brain-tissue damaged and those who genuinely believe in the ideology. At a certain point the minority block of psychopaths has a showdown with all those they've usurped.
A full blown-pathocracy is known as a totalitarian state and characterized by a government turned against its own people. A pathocracy may emerge when a society is insufficiently guarded against the typical and inevitable minority of such abnormal pathology, which Łobaczewski asserts is caused by biology or genetics. He argues that in such cases these individuals infiltrate an institution or state, prevailing moral values are perverted into their opposite, and a coded language like Orwell's doublethink circulates into the mainstream, using paralogic and paramoralism in place of genuine logic and morality.
There are various identifiable stages of pathocracy described by Łobaczewski. Ultimately pathocracy dies because the pathological are promoted to positions of power, even though they have little or no talent or abilities.
The root of healthy social morality, according to Łobaczewski, is contained in the congenital instinctive infrastructure in the vast majority of the population, and while some in the normal population are more susceptible to pathocratic influence and become its lackeys, the majority instinctively resist. During unhappy times the intelligentsia and society at large can recover real values to resolve the new social order along mentally healthier lines.