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

indicated that our social, psychological, and moral concepts, as

well as our natural forms of reaction, are not adequate for every

situation with which life confronts us. We generally wind up

hurting someone if we act according to our natural concepts

and reactive archetypes in situations which seem to be appro-

priate to our imaginings, although they are in fact essentially

different. As a rule, such different situations allowing para-

appropriate reactions occur because some pathological factor

difficult to understand has entered the picture. Thus, the practi-

cal value of our natural world view generally ends where psy-

chopathology begins.

Familiarity with this common weakness of human nature

and the normal person’s “naïveté” is part of the specific knowl-

edge we find in many psychopathic individuals, as well some

characteropaths. Spellbinders of various schools attempt to

provoke such para-appropriate reactions from other people in

the name of their specific goals, or in the service of their reign-

ing ideologies. That hard-to-understand pathological factor is

located within the spellbinder himself.

~~~

Egotism: We call egotism the attitude, subconsciously con-

ditioned as a rule, to which we attribute excessive value to our

instinctive reflexes, early acquired imaginings and habits, and

individual world view. Egotism hampers a personality’s normal

evolution because it fosters the domination of subconscious life

and makes it difficult to accept disintegrative states which can

146

PONEROLOGY

be very helpful for growth and development. This egotism and

rejection of disintegration70 in turn favors the appearance of

para-appropriate reactions as described above. An egotist

measures other people by his own yardstick, treating his con-

cepts and experiential manner as objective criteria. He would

like to force other people to feel and think very much the same

way he does. Egotist nations have the subconscious goal of

teaching or forcing other nations to think in their own catego-

ries, which makes them incapable of understanding other peo-

ple and nations or becoming familiar with the values of their

cultures.

Proper rearing and self-rearing thus always aims at de-

egotizing a young person or adult, thereby opening the door for

his mind and character to develop. Practicing psychologists

nevertheless commonly believe that a certain measure of ego-

tism is useful as a factor stabilizing the personality, protecting

it from overly facile neurotic disintegration, and thereby mak-

ing it possible to overcome life’s difficulties. However rather

exceptional people exist whose personality is very well inte-

grated even though they are almost totally devoid of egotism;

this allows them to understand others very easily.

The kind of excessive egotism which hampers the develop-

ment of human values and leads to misjudgment and terrorizing

of others well deserves the title “king of human faults”. Diffi-

culties, disputes, serious problems, and neurotic reactions

sprout up in everyone around such an egotist like mushrooms

after a rainfall. Egotist nations start wasting money and effort

in order to achieve goals derived from their erroneous reason-

ing and overly emotional reactions. Their inability to acknowl-

edge other nations’ values and dissimilarities, derived from

other cultural traditions, leads to conflict and war.

70 See footnote p. 128. Kazimierz Dabrowski developed the theory of Positive

Disintegration which posits that individuals with strong developmental poten-

tial tend to experience frequent and intense crises (positive disintegrations)

that create opportunities for the development of an autonomous, self-crafted

personality. Dabrowski observed that gifted and creative populations tend to

exhibit increased levels of developmental potential and thus may be predis-

posed to experience the process of positive disintegration. ( A Brief Overview

Dabrowski's Theory of Positive Disintegration by William Tillier

Calgary, Alberta, Canada) [Editor’s note.]

POLITICAL PONEROLOGY

147

We can differentiate between primary and secondary ego-

tism. The former comes from a more natural process, namely

the child’s natural egotism and child-rearing errors that tend to

perpetuate this childish egotism. The secondary one occurs

when a personality that has overcome his childish egotism

regresses to this state under stress, which leads to an artificial

attitude characterized by greater aggression and social nox-

iousness. Excessive egotism is a constant property of the hys-

terical personality71, whether their hysteria be primary or sec-