Andrew Lobaczewski - Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes
order to arrive at the correct political decisions and apply it to
an overall therapy of the world.
8 Do not attempt to cure what you do not understand.
CHAPTER II
SOME INDISPENSABLE CONCEPTS
Three principal heterogeneous items coincided in order to
form our European civilization: Greek philosophy, Roman
imperial and legal civilization, and Christianity, consolidated
by time and effort of later generations. The culture of cogni-
tive/spiritual heritage thus born was internally fuzzy wherever
the language of concepts, being overly attached to matter and
law, turned out to be too stiff to comprehend aspects of psycho-
logical and spiritual life.
Such a state of affairs had negative repercussions upon our
ability to comprehend reality, especially that reality which
concerns humanity and society. Europeans became unwilling to
study reality (subordinating intellect to facts), but rather tended
to impose upon nature their subjective ideational schemes,
which are extrinsic and not completely coherent. Not until
modern times, thanks to great developments in the hard sci-
ences, which study facts by their very nature, as well as the
apperception of the philosophical heritage of other cultures,
could we help clarify our world of concepts and permit its own
homogenization.
It is surprising to observe what an autonomous tribe the cul-
ture of the ancient Greeks represented. Even in those days, a
civilization could hardly develop in isolation, without being
affected by older cultures in particular. However, even with
that consideration, it seems that Greece was relatively isolated,
culturally speaking. This was probably due to the era of decay
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SOME INDESPENSIBLE CONCEPTS
the archaeologist refer to as the “dark age”, which occurred in
those Mediterranean areas between 1200 and 800 B.C., and
also to the Achaean tribes’ belligerence.
Among the Greeks, a rich mythological imagination, devel-
oped in direct contact with nature and the experiences of life
and war, furnished an image of this link with the nature of the
country and peoples. These conditions saw the birth of a liter-
ary tradition, and later of philosophical reflections searching
for generalities, essential contents, and criteria of values. The
Greek heritage is fascinating due to its richness and individual-
ity, but above all due to its primeval nature. Our civilization,
however, would have been better served if the Greeks had
made more ample use of the achievements of other civiliza-
tions.
Rome was too vital and practical to reflect profoundly upon
the Greek thoughts it had appropriated. In this imperial civili-
zation, administrative needs and juridical developments im-
posed practical priorities. For the Romans, the role of philoso-
phy was more didactic, useful for helping to develop the think-
ing process which would later be utilized for the discharge of
administrative functions and the exercise of political options.
The Greek reflective influence softened Roman customs, which
had a salutary effect on the development of the empire.
However, in any imperial civilization, the complex prob-
lems of human nature are troublesome factors complicating the
legal regulations of public affairs and administrative functions.
This begets a tendency to dismiss such matters and develop a
concept of human personality simplified enough to serve the
purposes of law. Roman citizens could achieve their goals and
develop their personal attitudes within the framework set by
fate and legal principles, which characterized an individual’s
situation based on premises having little to do with actual psy-
chological properties. The spiritual life of people lacking the
rights of citizenship was not an appropriate subject of deeper
studies. Thus, cognitive psychology remained barren, a condi-
tion which always produces moral recession at both the indi-
vidual and public levels.
Christianity had stronger ties with the ancient cultures of the
Asiatic continent, including their philosophical and psycho-
POLITICAL PONEROLOGY
47
logical reflections. This was of course a dynamic factor render-
ing it more attractive, but it was not the most important one.
Observing and understanding the apparent transformations
faith caused in human personalities created a psychological
school of thought and art on the part of the early believers. This
new relationship to another person, i.e. one’s neighbor, charac-
terized by understanding, forgiveness, and love, opened the
door to a psychological cognition which, often supported by
charismatic phenomena, bore abundant fruit during the first
three centuries after Christ.
An observer at the time might have expected Christianity to
help develop the art of human understanding to a higher level
than the older cultures and religions, and to hope that such
knowledge would protect future generations from the dangers
of speculative thought divorced from that profound psycho-
logical reality which can only be comprehended through sin-
cere respect for another human being.
History, however, has not confirmed such an expectation.
The symptoms of decay in sensitivity and psychological com-
prehension, as well as the Roman Imperial tendency to impose
extrinsic patterns upon human beings, can be observed as early
as 350 A.D. During later eras, Christianity passed through all
those difficulties which result from insufficient psychological
cognition of reality. Exhaustive studies on the historical rea-
sons for suppressing the development of human cognition in
our civilization would be an extremely useful endeavor.
First of all, Christianity adapted the Greek heritage of phi-
losophical thought and language to its purposes. This made it
possible to develop its own philosophy, but the primeval and
materialistic traits of that language imposed certain limits
which hampered communication between Christianity and
other religious cultures for many centuries.
Christ’s message expanded along the seacoast and beaten
paths of the Roman empire’s transportation lines, within the
imperial civilization, but only through bloody persecutions and
ultimate compromises with Rome’s power and law. Rome fi-
nally dealt with the threat by appropriating Christianity to its
own purposes and, as a result, the Christian Church appropri-
ated Roman organizational forms and adapted to existing social
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SOME INDESPENSIBLE CONCEPTS
institutions. As a result of this unavoidable process of adapta-
tion, Christianity inherited Roman habits of legal thinking,
including its indifference to human nature and its variety.
Two heterogeneous systems were thus linked together so
permanently that later centuries forgot just how strange they
actually were to each other. However, time and compromise
did not eliminate the internal inconsistencies, and Roman influ-
ence divested Christianity of some of its profound primeval
psychological knowledge. Christian tribes developing under
different cultural conditions created forms so variegated that
maintaining unity turned out to be an historical impossibility.
A “Western civilization” thus arose hampered by a serious
deficiency in an area which both can and does play a creative
role, and which is supposed to protect societies from various
kinds of evil. This civilization developed formulations in the
area of law, whether national, civil, or finally canon, which
were conceived for invented and simplified beings. These for-
mulations gave short shrift to the total contents of the human
personality and the great psychological differences between
individual members of the species Homo sapiens. For many
centuries any understanding of certain psychological anomalies
found among some individuals was out of the question, even
though these anomalies repeatedly caused disasters.
This civilization was insufficiently resistant to evil, which
originates beyond the easily accessible areas of human con-
sciousness and takes advantage of the enormous gap between
formal or legal thought and psychological reality. In a civiliza-
tion deficient in psychological cognition, hyperactive individu-
als driven by their internal doubts caused by a feelings of being
different easily find a ready echo in other people’s insuffi-
ciently developed consciousness. Such individuals dream of
imposing their power and their different experiential manner
upon their environment and their society.Unfortunately, in a
psychologically ignorant society, their dreams have a good
chance of becoming reality for them and a nightmare for oth-
ers.
POLITICAL PONEROLOGY
49
Psychology
In the 1870s, a tempestuous event occurred: a search for the
hidden truth about human nature was initiated as a secular
movement based on biological and medical progress, thus its
cognition originated in the material sphere. From the very out-
set, many researchers had a vision of the great future role of
this science for the good of peace and order. However, since it
relegated prior knowledge to the spiritual sphere, any such
approach to the human personality was necessarily one-sided.
People like Ivan Pavlov, C.G. Jung, and others soon noticed
this one-sidedness and attempted to reach a synthesis. Pavlov,
however, was not allowed to state his convictions in public.
Psychology is the only science wherein the observer and the
observed belong to the same species, even to the same person
in an act of introspection. It is thus easy for subjective error to
steal into the reasoning process of the thinking person’s com-
monly used imaginings and individual habits. Error then often
bites its own tail in a vicious circle, thus giving rise to prob-
lems due to the lack of distance between observer and ob-
served, a difficulty unknown in other disciplines.
Some people, such as the behaviorists, attempted to avoid
the above error at all costs. In the process, they impoverished
the cognitive contents to such an extent that there was very
little matter left. However, they produced a very profitable
discipline of thought. Progress was very often elaborated by
persons simultaneously driven by internal anxieties and search-
ing for a method of ordering their own personalities via the
road of knowledge and self-knowledge. If these anxieties were
caused by a defective upbringing, then overcoming these diffi-
culties gave rise to excellent discoveries. However, if the cause
for such anxieties rested within human nature, it resulted in a
permanent tendency to deform the understanding of psycho-
logical phenomena. Within this science, progress is unfortu-
nately very contingent upon the individual values and nature of
its practitioners. It is also dependent upon the social climate.
Wherever a society has become enslaved to others or to the rule
of an overly-privileged native class, psychology is the first
discipline to suffer from censorship and incursions on the part
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SOME INDESPENSIBLE CONCEPTS
of an administrative body which starts claiming the last word
as to what represents scientific truth.
Thanks to the work of outstanding pathfinders, however, the
scientific discipline exists and continues to develop in spite of
all these difficulties; it is useful for the life of society. Many
researchers fill in the gaps of this science with detailed data
which function as a corrective to the subjectivity and vagueness
of famous pioneers. The childhood ailments of any new disci-
pline persist, including a lack of general order and synthesis, as
does the tendency to splinter into individual schools, expound-
ing upon certain theoretical and practical achievements, at the
cost of limiting themselves in other areas.
At the same time, however, findings of a practical nature are
gleaned for the good of people who need help. The direct ob-
servations furnished by everyday work of therapists in the field
are more instrumental in forming scientific comprehension and
developing the language of contemporary psychology than any
academic experiments or deliberations undertaken in a labora-
tory. After all, life itself provides variegated conditions,
whether comfortable or tragic, which subject human individu-
als to experiments no scientist in any laboratory would ever
undertake. This very volume exists because of studies, in the
field, of inhuman experimentation upon entire nations.
Experience teaches a psychologist’s mind how to track an-
other person’s life quickly and effectively, discovering the
causes that conditioned the development of his personality and
behavior. Our minds can thus also reconstruct those factors
which influenced him, although he himself may be unaware of
them. In doing this, we do not, as a rule, use the natural struc-
ture of concepts, often referred to as “common sense” relied
upon by public opinion and many individuals. Rather, we use
categories which are as objective as we can possibly achieve.
Psychologists utilize conceptual language with descriptions of
phenomena that are independent of any common imaginings,
and this is an indispensable tool of practical activity. In prac-
tice, however, it usually turns into clinical slang rather than the
