Andrew Lobaczewski - Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes
enables us to experience a disintegrative state, simultaneously
calming down the unpleasant components and furnishing crea-
tive ideas for a renewed reintegration of our own personalities.
True theater therefore causes the condition known as catharsis.
A disintegrative state provokes us to mental efforts in at-
tempts to overcome it in order to regain active homeostasis.
Overcoming such states, in effect, correcting our errors and
enriching our personalities, is a proper and creative process of
reintegration, leading to a higher level of understanding and
acceptance of the laws of life, to a better comprehension of self
and others, and to a more highly developed sensitivity in inter-
personal relationships. Our feelings also validate the successful
achievement of a reintegrative state: the unpleasant conditions
we have survived are endowed with meaning. Thus, the experi-
ence renders us better prepared to confront the next disintegra-
tive situation.
If, however, we have proved unable to master the problems
which occurred because our reflexes were too quick to repress
and substitute the uncomfortable material from our conscious-
ness, or for some similar reason, our personality undergoes
retroactive egotization,18 but it is not free of the sensation of
failure. The results are devolutionary; the person becomes more
difficult to get along with. If we cannot overcome such a disin-
tegrative state because the causative circumstances were over-
powering or because we lacked the information essential for
constructive use, our organism reacts with a neurotic condition.
~~~
The diagram of the human personality presented herein,
summarized and simplified for reasons of necessity, makes us
aware of how complex human beings are in their structure,
18 Similar to narcissistic withdrawal. [Editor’s note.]
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SOME INDESPENSIBLE CONCEPTS
their changes, and their mental and spiritual lives. If we wish to
create social sciences whose descriptions of our reality would
be capable of enabling us to rely on them in practice, we must
accept this complexity and make certain that it is sufficiently
respected. Any attempt to substitute this basic knowledge with
the help of oversimplifying schemes leads to loss of that indis-
pensable convergence between our reasoning and the reality we
are observing. It behooves us to reemphasize that using our
natural language of psychological imaginations for this purpose
cannot be a substitute for objective premises.
Similarly, it is extremely difficult for a psychologist to be-
lieve in the value of any social ideology based on simplified or
even naive psychological premises. This applies to any ideol-
ogy which attempts to over-simplify psychological reality,
whether it be one utilized by a totalitarian system or, unfortu-
nately, by democracy as well. People are different. Whatever is
qualitatively different and remains in a state of permanent evo-
lution cannot be equal.
~~~
The above-mentioned statements about human nature apply
to normal people, with a few exceptions. However, each soci-
ety on earth contains a certain percentage of individuals, a rela-
tively small but active minority, who cannot be considered
normal.
We emphasize that here we are dealing with qualitative, not
statistical, abnormality. Outstandingly intelligent persons are
statistically abnormal, but they can be quite normal members of
society from the qualitative point of view. We are going to be
looking at individuals that are statistically small in number, but
whose quality of difference is such that it can affect hundreds,
thousands, even millions of other human beings in negative
ways.
The individuals we wish to consider are people who reveal
morbid19 phenomena, and in whom mental deviations and
anomalies of various qualities and intensities can be observed.
Many such people are driven by internal anxieties: they search
for unconventional paths of action and adjustment to life with a
19 Diseased; caused by or altered by or manifesting disease or pathology.
[Editor’s note.]
POLITICAL PONEROLOGY
69
certain characteristic hyperactivity. In some cases, such activity
can be pioneering and creative, which ensures societal toler-
ance for some of these individuals. Some psychiatrists, espe-
cially Germans, have praised such people as embodying the
principal inspiration for the development of civilization; this is
a damagingly unilateral view of reality. Laymen in the field of
psychopathology frequently gain the impression that such per-
sons represent some extraordinary talents. This very science,
however, then goes on to explain that these individuals’ hyper-
activity and sense of being exceptional are derived from their
drive to overcompensate for a feeling of some deficiency. This
aberrant attitude results in the obscuration of the truth: that
normal people are the richest of all.
The fourth chapter of the book contains a concise descrip-
tion of some of these anomalies, their causes, and the biologi-
cal reality, selected in such a way as to facilitate comprehen-
sion of this work as a whole. Other data are distributed
throughout many specialized works that will not be included
here. However, we must consider the overall shape of our
knowledge in this area, which is so basic to our understanding
of, and practical solutions to, many difficult problems of social
life, is unsatisfactory. Many scientists treat this area of science
as being peripheral; others consider it “thankless” because it
easily leads to misunderstandings with other specialists. As a
consequence, various concepts and various semantic conven-
tions emerge, and the totality of knowledge in this science is
still characterized by an excessively descriptive nature. This
book therefore encompasses efforts whose purpose was to
bring to light the causative aspects of the descriptively known
phenomena.
The pathological phenomena in question, usually of a suffi-
ciently low intensity which can be more easily concealed from
environmental opinion, merge without much difficulty into the
eternal process of the genesis of evil, which later affects peo-
ple, families, and entire societies. Later in this book, we shall
learn that these pathological factors become indispensable
components in a synthesis which results in widescale human
suffering, and also that tracking their activities by means of
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SOME INDESPENSIBLE CONCEPTS
scientific control and social consciousness may prove to be an
effective weapon against evil.
For the above reasons, this scope of psychopathological sci-
ence represents an indispensable part of that objective language
we have dealt with before. Ever-increasing accuracy in biologi-
cal and psychological facts in this area is an essential precondi-
tion for an objective comprehension of many phenomena
which become extremely onerous for societies, as well as for a
modern solution to age-old problems. Biologists, physicians,
and psychologists who have been struggling with these elusive
and convoluted problems deserve assistance and encourage-
ment from society, since their work will enable the future pro-
tection of people and nations from an evil whose causes we do
not as yet sufficiently understand.
Society
Nature has designed man to be social, a state of affairs en-
coded early, on the instinctual level of our species as described
above. Our minds and personalities could not possibly develop
without contact and interaction with an ever-widening circle of
people. Our mind receives input from others, whether con-
sciously or unconsciously, in regard to matters of emotional
and mental life, tradition and thought, by means of resonant
sensitivity, identification, imitation, and by exchange of ideas,
and permanent rules. The material we obtain in these ways is
then transformed by our psyche in order to create a new human
personality, one we call “our own”. However, our existence is
contingent upon necessary links with those who lived before,
those who presently make up our society, and those who shall
exist in the future. Our existence only assumes meaning as a
function of societal bonds; hedonistic isolation causes us to
lose our selves.
It is man’s fate to actively cooperate in giving shape to the
fate of society by two principal means: forming his individual
and family life within it, and becoming active in the sum total
of social affairs based on his – hopefully sufficient - compre-
hension of what needs to be done, what ought to be done, and
whether or not he can do it. This requires an individual to de-
velop two somewhat overlapping areas of knowledge about
POLITICAL PONEROLOGY
71
things; his life depends on the quality of this development, as
does his nation and humanity as a whole.
If, say, we observe a beehive with a painter’s eye, we see
what looks like a crowding throng of insects linked by their
species-similarity. A beekeeper, however, tracks complicated
laws encoded in every insect’s instinct and in the collective
instinct of the hive as well; that helps him understand how to
cooperate with the laws of nature governing apiary society. The
beehive is a higher-order organism; no individual bee can exist
without it, and thus it submits to the absolute nature of its laws.
If we observe the throngs of people crowding the streets of
some great human metropolis, we see what looks like individu-
als driven by their business and problems, pursuing some
crumb of happiness. However, such an oversimplification of
reality causes us to disregard the laws of social life which ex-
isted long before the metropolis ever did, and which will con-
tinue to exist long after huge cities are emptied of people and
purpose. Loners in a crowd have a difficult time accepting that
reality, which – for them - exists in only potential form, al-
though they cannot perceive it directly.
In reality, accepting the laws of social life in all their com-
plexity, even if we find initial difficulties in comprehending
them, helps us to come, finally, to a certain level of understand-
ing that we acquire by something akin to osmosis. Thanks to
this comprehension, or even just an instinctive intuition of such
laws, an individual is able to reach his goals and mature his
personality in action. Thanks to sufficient intuition and com-
prehension of these conditions, a society is able to progress
culturally and economically and to achieve political maturity.
The more we progress in this understanding, the more social
doctrines strike us as primitive and psychologically naive, es-
pecially those based on the thoughts of thinkers living during
the 18th and 19th centuries which were characterized by a
dearth of psychological perception. The suggestive nature of
these doctrines derives from their oversimplification of reality,
something easily adapted and used in political propaganda.
These doctrines and ideologies show their basic faults, in re-
gard to the understanding of human personalities and differ-
ences among people, all rather clearly if viewed in the light of
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SOME INDESPENSIBLE CONCEPTS
our natural language of psychological concepts, and even more
so in the light of objective language.
A psychologist’s view of society, even if based only on pro-
fessional experience, always places the human individual in the
foreground; it then widens the perspective to include small
groups, such as families, and finally societies and humanity as
whole. We must then accept from the outset that an individ-
ual’s fate is significantly dependent upon circumstance. When
we gradually increase the scope of our observations, we also
gain a greater pictorial specificity of causative links, and statis-
tical data assume ever greater stability.
In order to describe the interdependence between someone’s
fate and personality, and the state of development of society,
we must study the entire body of information collected in this
area to date, adding a new work written in objective language.
Herein I shall adduce only a few examples of such reasoning in
order to open the door to questions presented in later chapters.
~~~
Throughout the ages and in various cultures, the best peda-
gogues have understood the importance, regarding the forma-
tion of a culture and a person’s character, of the scope of con-
cepts describing psychological phenomena. The quality and
richness of concepts and terminology20 mastered by an individ-
20 !obaczewski’s emphasis on language is very important. Semiotics is the
study of language or any other symbol system that conveys meaning. One of
the great philosophical discussions that has continued for centuries relates to
that of the alphabet giver and “namer” of things. In the monotheistic world,
Adam is, of course, the one we think of when we think of the “giving of
names” to things. In terms of the study of Semiotics, the question is: did he
name things based on what they were, in essence, or did he simply create a
convention, and arbitrarily name them whatever appealed to him?
The theories of Semiotics propose that there are two levels, or “planes of
articulation”. At the level of any given language, such as Greek, English,
Chinese, or whatever, there is what they call the “Expression plane” that
consists of a lexicon, a phonology and syntax. In other words, the Expression
Plane is the selection of words that belong to that language, the sounds that
the selection of words produce, and the way they are arranged to convey
