Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes

tions and are prepared to undertake difficulty and risk in order

to obtain honest knowledge so as to serve the sick and needy.

The initial motivation of this latter group is thus not political in

character, since it derives from their good will and professional

decency. Their consciousness of the political causes of the

limitations and the political meaning of this battle is raised

later, in conjunction with experience and professional maturity,

especially if their experience and skills must be used in order to

save persecuted people.

In the meantime, however, the necessary scientific data and

papers must be obtained somehow, taking difficulties and other

people’s lack of understanding into account. Students and be-

ginning specialists not yet aware of what was removed from

the educational curricula attempt to gain access to the scientific

data stolen from them. Science starts to be degraded at a worri-

some rate once such awareness is missing.

~~~

We need to understand the nature of the macrosocial phe-

nomenon as well as that basic relationship and controversy

between the pathological system and those areas of science

which describe psychological and psychopathological phenom-

ena. Otherwise, we cannot become fully conscious of the rea-

sons for such a government’s long published behavior.

A normal person’s actions and reactions, his ideas and

moral criteria, all too often strike abnormal individuals as ab-

normal. For if a person with some psychological deviations

considers himself normal, which is of course significantly eas-

ier if he possesses authority, then he would consider a normal

person different and therefore abnormal, whether in reality or

as a result of conversive thinking. That explains why such peo-

POLITICAL PONEROLOGY

265

ple’s government shall always have the tendency to treat any

dissidents as “mentally abnormal”.

Operations such as driving a normal person into psycho-

logical illness and the use of psychiatric institutions for this

purpose take place in many countries in which such institutions

exist. Contemporary legislation binding upon normal man’s

countries is not based upon an adequate understanding of the

psychology of such behavior, and thus does not constitute a

sufficient preventive measure against it.

Within the categories of a normal psychological world

view, the motivations for such behavior were variously under-

stood and described: personal and family accounts, property

matters, intent to discredit a witness’ testimony, and even po-

litical motivations. Such defamatory suggestions are used par-

ticularly often by individuals who are themselves not entirely

normal, whose behavior has driven someone to a nervous

breakdown or to violent protest. Among hysterics, such behav-

ior tends to be a projection onto other people of one’s own self-

critical associations. A normal person strikes a psychopath as a

naive, smart-alecky believer in barely comprehensible theories;

calling him “crazy” is not all that far away.

Therefore, when we set up a sufficient number of examples

of this kind or collect sufficient experience in this area, another

more essential motivational level for such behavior becomes

apparent. What happens as a rule is that the idea of driving

someone into mental illness issues from minds with various

aberrations and psychological defects. Only rarely does the

component of pathological factors take part in the ponerogene-

sis of such behavior from outside its agents. Well thought out

and carefully framed legislation should therefore require testing

of individuals whose suggestions that someone else is psycho-

logically abnormal are too insistent or too doubtfully founded.

On the other hand, any system in which the abuse of psy-

chiatry for allegedly political reasons has become a common

phenomenon should be examined in the light of similar psycho-

logical criteria extrapolated onto the macrosocial scale. Any

person rebelling internally against a governmental system,

which shall always strike him as foreign and difficult to under-

stand, and who is unable to hide this well enough, shall thus

266

PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHIATRY

easily be designated by the representatives of said government

as “mentally abnormal”, someone who should submit to psy-

chiatric treatment. A scientifically and morally degenerate psy-

chiatrist becomes a tool easily used for this purpose. Thus is

born the sole method of terror and human torture unfamiliar

even to the secret police of Czar Alexander II.

The abuse of psychiatry for purposes we already know thus