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

Many people suffer an inevitable shock and react with op-

position, protest, and disintegration of their human personality

when informed of such a state of affairs, namely that they have

been under the spellbinding and traumatizing influence of a

macrosocial pathological phenomenon, regardless of whether

they were followers or opponents thereof. Many people are

awakened to anxious protest by the fact that the ideology they

either condemned or somehow accepted, but considered a guid-

ing factor, is now being treated as something secondary in im-

portance.

The noisiest protests will come from those who consider

themselves fair because they condemned this macrosocial phe-

nomenon with literary talent and raised voices, utilizing the

name derived from its most current ideology, as well as making

excessive use of moralizing interpretations with regard to

pathological phenomena. Forcing them to an apperception of a

correct understanding of the pathocracy will be quite a Sisy-

phean labor, since they would have to become conscious of the

fact that their efforts largely served goals which were the oppo-

site of their intentions. Especially if they engaged in such ac-

tivities professionally, it is more practical to avoid liberating

their aggressions; one could even consider such generally eld-

erly people too old for therapy.

Transforming the world view of people living in countries

with normal man’s systems proves a more troublesome task,

since they are much more egotistically attached to the imagin-

ings suggested to them since childhood, making it more diffi-

cult for them to reconcile themselves with the fact that there are

matters which their natural conceptual system cannot assimi-

286

THERAPY OF THE WORLD

late. They also lack the specific experience available to people

who have lived under pathocratic rule for years. We must

therefore expect resistance and attack on the part of people

protecting their livelihoods and positions as well as defending

their personalities from a vexatious disintegration. Refraining

from such estrangement, we have to count on the accordant

reactions of the majority.

The acceptance of such psychotherapy will be different in

countries where societies of normal people have already been

created, offering solid resistance to pathocratic rule. Many

years of experience, practical familiarity with the phenomenon,

and psychological immunization there long ago produced fer-

tile ground for sowing the seeds of objective truth and natural-

istic comprehension. An explanation of the essence of macro-

social phenomenon will be treated like delayed psychotherapy

which should regrettably have been served much earlier (that

would have enabled the patient to avoid many errors) but is

nevertheless useful because it provides order and relaxation

and permits subsequent reasoned action. Such data, accepted

via a rather painful process there, will be associated with the

experience already possessed. There will be no egoistically or

egotistically inspired protests in that world. The value of an

objective view will be appreciated much more rapidly, since it

ensures a basis for reasoned activity. Soon thereafter, the feel-

ing of realism in apprehending the surrounding world, followed

by a sense of humor, would begin to compensate these people

for the experience they have survived, namely the disintegra-

tion of their human personalities caused by such therapy.

This disintegration of the prior world view structure will

create a temporary feeling of an unpleasant void. Therapists

well know the consequent responsibility of filling this void as

quickly as possible with material more credible and trustworthy

than the contents which were disabused, thus helping to avoid

primitive methods of personality reintegration. In practice, it is

best to minimize patient anxiety by making advance promises

that appropriately objectified material will be furnished in the

form of truthful data. This promise must then be kept, partially

anticipating the appearance of disintegrative states. I have suc-

POLITICAL PONEROLOGY

287

cessfully tested this technique on individual patients and would

advise its implementation on a mass scale as safe and effective.

For the people who have already developed natural psycho-

logical immunity, their increased resistance to the pathocracy’s

destructive influence upon their personalities, gained due to a

consciousness of pathocracy’s essence, may be of lesser sig-

nificance, but still not without value, since it leads to an ame-

liorated immunization quality at a less burdensome cost in

terms of nervous tension. However, for those hesitant people

who constitute the part of well-adjusted members of the new

middle class, immunizing activities furnished by an awareness