Andrew Lobaczewski - Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes
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all: the Essential Psychopath. He doesn’t give us a “checklist”
but rather discusses what is inside the psychopath. His descrip-
tion meshes very well with items in the paper quoted above.
Martha Stout also discusses the fact that psychopaths, like
anyone else, are born with different basic likes and dislikes and
desires, which is why some of them are doctors and presidents
and others are petty thieves or rapists.
“Likeable”, “Charming”, “Intelligent”, “Alert”, “Impres-
sive”, “Confidence-inspiring,” and “A great success with the
ladies”. This is how Hervey Cleckley described most of his
subjects in The Mask of Sanity. It seems that, in spite of the fact
that their actions prove them to be “irresponsible” and “self-
destructive”, psychopaths seem to have in abundance the very
traits most desired by normal persons. The smooth self-
assurance acts as an almost supernatural magnet to normal
people who have to read self-help books or go to counseling to
be able to interact with others in an untroubled way. The psy-
chopath, on the contrary, never has any neuroses, no self-
doubts, never experiences angst, and is what “normal” people
seek to be. What’s more, even if they aren’t that attractive, they
are “babe magnets”.
Cleckley's seminal hypothesis is that the psychopath suffers
from profound and incurable affective deficit. If he really feels
anything at all, they are emotions of only the shallowest kind.
He is able to do whatever he wants, based on whatever whim
strikes him, because consequences that would fill the ordinary
man with shame, self-loathing, and embarrassment simply do
not affect the psychopath at all. What to others would be a
horror or a disaster is to him merely a fleeting inconvenience.
Cleckley posits that psychopathy is quite common in the
community at large. His cases include examples of psychopaths
who generally function normally in the community as busi-
nessmen, doctors, and even psychiatrists. Nowadays, some of
the more astute researchers see criminal psychopathy - often
referred to as anti-social personality disorder - as an extreme of
a particular personality type. I think it is more helpful to char-
acterize criminal psychopaths as “unsuccessful psychopaths”.
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EDITOR’S PREFACE
One researcher, Alan Harrington, goes so far as to say that
the psychopath is the new man being produced by the evolu-
tionary pressures of modern life.
Certainly, there have always been shysters and crooks, but
past concern was focused on ferreting out incompetents rather
than psychopaths. Unfortunately, all that has changed. We now
need to fear the super-sophisticated modern crook who does
know what he is doing ... and does it so well that no one else
knows. Yes, psychopaths love the business world.
Uninvolved with others, he coolly saw into their fears and
desires, and maneuvered them as he wished. Such a man
might not, after all, be doomed to a life of scrapes and esca-
pades ending ignominiously in the jailhouse. Instead of mur-
dering others, he might become a corporate raider and murder
companies, firing people instead of killing them, and chopping
up their functions rather than their bodies.
[…T]he consequences to the average citizen from business
crimes are staggering. As criminologist Georgette Bennett
says, “They account for nearly 30% of case filings in U.S.
District Courts - more than any other category of crime. The
combined burglary, mugging and other property losses in-
duced by the country’s street punks come to about $4 billion a
year. However, the seemingly upstanding citizens in our cor-
porate board rooms and the humble clerks in our retail stores
bilk us out of between $40 and $200 billion a year.”
Concern here is that the costume for the new masked san-
ity of a psychopath is just as likely to be a three-piece suit as a
ski mask and a gun. As Harrington says, “We also have the
psychopath in respectable circles, no longer assumed to be a
loser.” He quotes William Krasner as saying, “They - psycho-
path and part psychopath - do well in the more unscrupulous
types of sales work, because they take such delight in ‘putting
it over on them’, getting away with it - and have so little con-
science about defrauding their customers.” Our society is fast
becoming more materialistic, and success at any cost is the
credo of many businessmen. The typical psychopath thrives in
this kind of environment and is seen as a business “hero”.4
4 Ken Magid and Carole McKelvey: The Psychopaths Favourite Play-
ground:Business Relationships.
POLITICAL PONEROLOGY
19
The study of “ambulatory” psychopaths - what we call “The
Garden Variety Psychopath” - has, however, hardly begun.
Very little is known about subcriminal psychopathy. Some
researchers have begun to seriously consider the idea that it is
important to study psychopathy not as a pathological category
but as a general personality trait in the community at large. In
other words, psychopathy is being recognized as a more or less
a different type of human.
Hervey Cleckly actually comes very close to suggesting that
psychopaths are human in every respect - but that they lack a
soul. This lack of “soul quality” makes them very efficient
“machines”. They can write scholarly works, imitate the words
of emotion, but over time, it becomes clear that their words do
not match their actions. They are the type of person who can
claim that they are devastated by grief who then attend a party
“to forget”. The problem is: they really do forget.
Being very efficient machines, like a computer, they are
able to execute very complex routines designed to elicit from
others support for what they want. In this way, many psycho-
paths are able to reach very high positions in life. It is only
over time that their associates become aware of the fact that
their climb up the ladder of success is predicated on violating
the rights of others. “Even when they are indifferent to the
rights of their associates, they are often able to inspire feelings
of trust and confidence.”
The psychopath recognizes no flaw in his psyche, no need
for change.
Andrew !obaczewski addresses the problem of the psycho-
path and their extremely significant contribution to our macro-
social evils, their ability to act as the éminence grise behind the
very structure of our society. It is very important to keep in
mind that this influence comes from a relatively small segment
of humanity. The other 90-some percent of human beings are
not psychopaths.
But that 90-some percent of normal people know that some-
thing is wrong! They just can’t quite identify it; can’t quite put
their finger on it; and because they can’t, they tend to think that
there is nothing they can do about it, or maybe it is just God
punishing people.
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EDITOR’S PREFACE
What is actually the case is that when that 90-some percent
of human beings fall into a certain state, as !obaczewski will
describe, the psychopaths, like a virulent pathogen in a body,
strike at the weaknesses, and the entire society is plunged into
conditions that always and inevitably lead to horror and tragedy
on a very large scale.
The movie, The Matrix, touched a deep chord in society be-
cause it exemplified this mechanistic trap in which so many
people find their lives enmeshed, and from which they are un-
able to extricate themselves because they believe that everyone
around them who “looks human” is, in fact, just like them -
emotionally, spiritually, and otherwise.
To give an example of how psychopaths can directly affect
society at large: the “legal argument” as explicated by Robert
Canup in his work on the Socially Adept Psychopath. The legal
argument seems to be at the foundation of our society. We
believe that the legal argument is an advanced system of jus-
tice. This is a very cunning trick that has been foisted on nor-
mal people by psychopaths in order to have an advantage over
them. Just think about it for a moment: the legal argument
amounts to little more than the one who is the slickest at using
the structure for convincing a group of people of something, is
the one who is believed. Because this “legal argument” system
has been slowly installed as part of our culture, when it invades
our personal lives, we normally do not recognize it immedi-
ately. But here’s how it works.
Human beings have been accustomed to assume that other
human beings are - at the very least - trying to “do right” and
“be good” and fair and honest. And so, very often, we do not
take the time to use due diligence in order to determine if a
person who has entered our life is, in fact, a “good person”.
When a conflict ensues, we automatically fall into the legal
argument assumption that in any conflict, one side is partly
right one way, and the other is partly right the other, and that
we can form opinions about which side is mostly right or
wrong. Because of our exposure to the “legal argument” norms,
when any dispute arises, we automatically think that the truth
will lie somewhere between two extremes. In this case, applica-
POLITICAL PONEROLOGY
21
tion of a little mathematical logic to the problem of the legal
argument might be helpful.
Let us assume that in a dispute, one side is innocent, honest,
and tells the truth. It is obvious that lying does an innocent
person no good; what lie can he tell? If he is innocent, the only
lie he can tell is to falsely confess “I did it”. But lying is noth-
ing but good for the liar. He can declare that “I didn’t do it”,
and accuse another of doing it, all the while the innocent per-
son he has accused is saying “I didn’t do it” and is actually
telling the truth.
The truth, when twisted by good liars, can always make an
innocent person look bad, especially if the innocent person is
honest and admits his mistakes.
The basic assumption that the truth lies between the testi-
mony of the two sides always shifts the advantage to the lying
side and away from the side telling the truth. Under most cir-
cumstances, this shift put together with the fact that the truth is
going to also be twisted in such a way as to bring detriment to
the innocent person, results in the advantage always resting in
the hands of liars - psychopaths. Even the simple act of giving
testimony under oath is a useless farce. If a person is a liar,
swearing an oath means nothing to that person. However,
swearing an oath acts strongly on a serious, truthful witness.
Again, the advantage is placed on the side of the liar.
It has often been noted that psychopaths have a distinct ad-
vantage over human beings with conscience and feelings be-
cause the psychopath does not have conscience and feelings.
What seems to be so is that conscience and feelings are related
to the abstract concepts of “future” and “others”. It is “spatio-
temporal”. We can feel fear, sympathy, empathy, sadness, and
so on because we can imagine in an abstract way, the future
based on our own experiences in the past, or even just “con-
cepts of experiences” in myriad variations. We can “see our-
selves” in them even though they are “out there” and this
evokes feelings in us. We can’t do something hurtful because
we can imagine it being done to us and how it would feel. In
other words, we can not only identify with others spatially - so
to say - but also temporally - in time.
The psychopath does not seem to have this capacity.
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EDITOR’S PREFACE
They are unable to “imagine” in the sense of being able to
really connect to images in a direct “self connecting to another
self” sort of way.
Oh, indeed, they can imitate feelings, but the only real feel-
ings they seem to have - the thing that drives them and causes
them to act out different dramas for the effect - is a sort of
“predatorial hunger” for what they want. That is to say, they
“feel” need/want as love, and not having their needs/wants met
is described by them as “not being loved”. What is more, this
“need/want” perspective posits that only the “hunger” of the
psychopath is valid, and anything, and everything “out there”,
outside of the psychopath, is not real except insofar as it has the
capability of being assimilated to the psychopath as a sort of
“food”. “Can it be used or can it provide something?” is the
only issue about which the psychopath seems to be concerned.
All else - all activity - is subsumed to this drive.
In short, the psychopath is a predator. If we think about the
interactions of predators with their prey in the animal kingdom,
we can come to some idea of what is behind the “mask of san-
ity” of the psychopath. Just as an animal predator will adopt all
kinds of stealthy functions in order to stalk their prey, cut them
out of the herd, get close to them, and reduce their resistance,
so does the psychopath construct all kinds of elaborate camou-
flage composed of words and appearances - lies and manipula-
tions - in order to “assimilate” their prey.
This leads us to an important question: what does the psy-
chopath really get from their victims? It’s easy to see what they
are after when they lie and manipulate for money or material
