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

sometimes left behind by an inflammation of the parotid glands

(the mumps). This disease entails brain reactions in some cases,

leaving behind a discreet but permanent bleaching of feelings

and a slight decrease in general mental skills. Similar results

are sometimes left behind after diphtheria. As a result, such

people easily succumb to the suggestions and manipulations of

a more clever individuals.

When drawn into a felonious group, these constitutionally

weakened individuals become faint-critical helpers and execu-

tors of the leader’s intentions, tools in the hands of more

treacherous, usually psychopathic, leaders. Once arrested, they

submit to their leaders’ insinuated explanations that the higher

(paramoral) group ideal demands that they become scapegoats,

taking the majority of blame upon themselves. In court, the

same leaders who initiated the delinquencies mercilessly dump

all the blame onto their less crafty colleagues. Sometimes a

judge actually accepts the insinuations.

Individuals with the above-mentioned post-mumps and

post-diphtheria traits constitute less than 1.0 % of the popula-

tion as a whole, but their share reaches 1/4 of juvenile delin-

quent groups. This represents an inspissation75 of the order of

30-fold, requiring no further methods of statistical analysis.

When studying the contents of ponerogenic unions skillfully

enough, we often meet with an inspissation of other psycho-

logical anomalies which also speak for themselves.

~~~

Two basic types of the above-mentioned unions should be

differentiated: Primary ponerogenic and secondary ponero-

75 To thicken by either evaporation or absorption of fluid. Diminished fluid-

ity, increased thickness. A concentration. [Editor’s note.]

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PONEROLOGY

genic. Let us describe as primarily ponerogenic a union whose

abnormal members were active from the very beginning, play-

ing the role of crystallizing catalysts as early as the process of

creation of the group occurred. We shall call secondarily

ponerogenic a union which was founded in the name of some

idea with an independent social meaning, generally

comprehensible within the categories of the natural world view,

but which later succumbed to a certain moral degeneration.

This in turn opened the door to infection and activation of the

pathological factors within, and later to a ponerization of the

group as a whole, or often of its fraction.

From the very outset, a primarily ponerogenic union is a

foreign body within the organism of society, its character col-

liding with the moral values held or respected by the majority.

The activities of such groups provoke opposition and disgust

and are considered immoral; as a rule, therefore, such groups

do not spread large, nor do they metastasize into numerous

unions; they finally lose their battle with society.

In order to have a chance to develop into a large ponero-

genic association, however, it suffices that some human orga-

nization, characterized by social or political goals and an ideol-

ogy with some creative value, be accepted by a larger number

of normal people before it succumbs to a process of ponero-

genic malignancy. The primary tradition and ideological values

of such a society may then, for a long time, protect a union

which has succumbed to the ponerization process from the

awareness of society, especially its less critical components.

When the ponerogenic process touches such a human organiza-

tion, which originally emerged and acted in the name of politi-

cal or social goals, and whose causes were conditioned in his-

tory and the social situation, the original group’s primary val-

ues will nourish and protect such a union, in spite of the fact

that those primary values succumb to characteristic degenera-

tion, the practical function becoming completely different from

the primary one, because the names and symbols are retained.

This is where the weaknesses of individual and social “com-

mon sense” are revealed.76

76 Just because a group operates under the banner of “communism” or “so-

cialism” or “democracy” or “conservatism” or “republicanism”, doesn’t mean

POLITICAL PONEROLOGY

161

This is reminiscent of a situation psychopathologists know

well: a person who enjoyed trust and respect in their circles

starts behaving with preposterous arrogance and hurting others,

allegedly in the name of his already known, decent and ac-

cepted convictions, which have – in the meantime - deterio-

rated due to some psychological process rendering them primi-

tive but emotionally dynamic. However, his old acquaintances

– having known him for long as the person he was - do not

believe the injured parties who complain about his new, or