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

customs and principles of decency are a foreign convention

invented and imposed by someone else, (“probably by priests”)

silly, onerous, sometimes even ridiculous. At the same time,

however, they easily perceive the deficiencies and weaknesses

of our natural language of psychological and moral concepts in

a manner somewhat reminiscent of the attitude of a contempo-

rary psychologist—except in caricature.

The average intelligence of the psychopath, especially if

measured via commonly used tests, is somewhat lower than

that of normal people, albeit similarly variegated. Despite the

wide variety of intelligence and interests, this group does not

contain examples of the highest intelligence, nor do we find

technical or craftsmanship talents among them. The most gifted

members of this kind may thus achieve accomplishments in

those sciences which do not require a correct humanistic world

view or practical skills. (Academic decency is another matter,

however.) Whenever we attempt to construct special tests to

measure “life wisdom” or “socio-moral imagination”, even if

the difficulties of psychometric evaluation are taken into ac-

count, individuals of this type indicate a deficit disproportion-

ate to their personal IQ.

In spite of their deficiencies in normal psychological and

moral knowledge, they develop and then have at their disposal

a knowledge of their own, something lacked by people with a

natural world view. They learn to recognize each other in a

crowd as early as childhood, and they develop an awareness of

the existence of other individuals similar to them. They also

53 What’s missing in psychopaths are the qualities that people depend on for

living in social harmony. [Editor’s note.]

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PONEROLOGY

become conscious of being different from the world of those

other people surrounding them. They view us from a certain

distance, like a para-specific variety. Natural human reactions -

which often fail to elicit interest to normal people because they

are considered self-evident - strike the psychopath as strange

and, interesting, and even comical. They therefore observe us,

deriving conclusions, forming their different world of concepts.

They become experts in our weaknesses and sometimes effect

heartless experiments. The suffering and injustice they cause

inspire no guilt within them, since such reactions from others

are simply a result of their being different and apply only to

“those other” people they perceive to be not quite conspecific.

Neither a normal person nor our natural world view can fully

conceive nor properly evaluate the existence of this world of

different concepts.

A researcher into such phenomena can glimpse the deviant

knowledge of the psychopath through long-term studies of the

personalities of such people, using it with some difficulty, like

a foreign language. As we shall see below, such practical skill

becomes rather widespread in nations afflicted by that macro-

social pathological phenomenon wherein this anomaly plays

the inspiring role.

A normal person can learn to speak their conceptual lan-

guage even somewhat proficiently, but the psychopath is never

able to incorporate the world view of a normal person, although

they often try to do so all their lives. The product of their ef-

forts is only a role and a mask behind which they hide their

deviant reality.

Another myth and role they often play, albeit containing a

grain of truth in relation to the “special psychological knowl-

edge” that the psychopath acquires regarding normal people,

would be the psychopaths’ brilliant mind or psychological gen-

ius; some of them actually believe in this and attempt to insinu-

ate this belief to others.

In speaking of the mask of psychological normality worn by

such individuals (and by similar deviants to a lesser extent), we

should mention the book The Mask of Sanity; by Hervey

Cleckley, who made this very phenomenon the crux of his

reflections. A fragment:

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129

Let us remember that his typical behavior defeats what ap-

pear to be his own aims. Is it not he himself who is most

deeply deceived by his apparent normality? Although he de-

liberately cheats others and is quite conscious of his lies, he

appears unable to distinguish adequately between his own

pseudointentions, pseudoremorse, pseudolove, etc., and the

genuine responses of a normal person. His monumental lack

of insight indicates how little he appreciates the nature of his

disorder. When others fail to accept immediately his “word of

honor as a gentleman”, his amazement, I believe, is often

genuine. His subjective experience is so bleached of deep