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

book, ignoring the essential support of moral values. A pone-

rologist’s attitude underscores primarily the naturalistic aspects

of phenomena; nevertheless, this does not mean that the tradi-

tional ones have diminished in value. Efforts aimed at endow-

ing the life of nations with the necessary moral order should

therefore constitute a second wing, working in parallel and

rationally supported by naturalistic principles.

Contemporary societies were pushed into a state of moral

recession during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu-

ries; leading them back out is the general duty of this genera-

tion and should remain an overall backdrop to activity as a

whole. The basic position should be the intent to fulfill the

commandment of loving one’s neighbor, including even those

who have committed substantial evil, and even if this love indi-

cates taking proplylactic action to protect others from that evil.

A great therapeutic endeavor can only be affected once we do

this with the honest control of moral consciousness, moderation

of words and thoughtfulness of action. At that point, ponerol-

ogy will prove its practical usefulness in fulfilling this task.

People and values mature in action. Thus, a synthesis of tradi-

tional moral teachings and this new naturalistic approach can

only occur with reasoned behavior.

Truth is a Healer

It would be difficult to summarize here the statements of the

many famous authors on the subject of the psychotherapeutic

role of making a person aware of what has crowded his sub-

conscious, stifled within by constant painful effort, because he

feared to look an unpleasant truth in the eye, lacked the objec-

tive data to derive correct conclusions, or was too proud to

permit the awareness that he had behaved in a preposterous

fashion. In addition to being quite well understood by special-

ists, these matters have also become common knowledge to an

adequate degree.

282

THERAPY OF THE WORLD

In any method or technique of analytical psychotherapy, or

autonomous psychotherapy, as T. Szasz119 called it, the guiding

operational motivation is exposing to the light of consciousness

whatever material has been suppressed by means of subcon-

scious selection of data, or given up in the face of intellectual

problems. This is accompanied by a disillusionment of substi-

tutions and rationalizations, whose creation is usually in pro-

portion to the amount of repressed material.

In many cases, it turns out that the material fearfully elimi-

nated from the field of consciousness, and frequently substi-

tuted by ostensibly more comfortable associations, would never

have had such dangerous results if we had initially mustered

the courage to perceive it consciously. We would then have

been in the position to find an independent and often creative

way out of the situation.

In some cases, however, especially when dealing with phe-

nomena which are hard to understand within the categories of

our natural world view, leading the patient out of his problems

demands furnishing him with crucial objective data, usually

from the areas of biology, psychology, and psychopathology,

and indicating specific dependencies which he was unable to

comprehend before. Instructional activity begins to dominate in

psychotherapeutic work at this point. After all, the patient

needs this additional data in order to reconstruct his disinte-

grated personality and form a new world view more appropri-

ate to reality. Only then can we go on to the more traditional

methods. If our activities are to be for the benefit of the people

who remained under the influence of pathocratic system, this

last pattern of behavior is the most appropriate; the objective

data furnished to the patients must derive from an understand-

ing of the nature of the phenomenon.

As already adduced, the author has been able to observe the

workings of such a process of making someone consciously

aware of the essence and properties of the macrosocial phe-

nomenon, on the basis of individual patients rendered neurotic

by the influence of pathocratic social conditions. In countries

119 Thomas Szasz, an American psychiatrist who has argued since the 1950s

that compulsory psychiatry is incompatible with a free society. [Editor’s

note.]

POLITICAL PONEROLOGY

283

ruled by such governments, almost every normal person carries

within him some neurotic response of varying intensity. After

all, neurosis is human nature’s normal response to being sub-

jugated to a pathological system.

In spite of the anxiety which such courageous psychothera-

peutic operations necessarily engendered on both sides, my

patients quickly assimilated the objective data they were fur-