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

The answer will depend largely on just what your desires

happen to be, because people are not all the same. Even the

profoundly unscrupulous are not all the same. Some people -

whether they have a conscience or not - favor the ease of iner-

tia, while others are filled with dreams and wild ambitions.

Some human beings are brilliant and talented, some are dull-

witted, and most, conscience or not, are somewhere in be-

tween. There are violent people and nonviolent ones, indi-

viduals who are motivated by blood lust and those who have

no such appetites. [...]

Provided you are not forcibly stopped, you can do any-

thing at all.

If you are born at the right time, with some access to fam-

ily fortune, and you have a special talent for whipping up

other people's hatred and sense of deprivation, you can arrange

to kill large numbers of unsuspecting people. With enough

money, you can accomplish this from far away, and you can

sit back safely and watch in satisfaction. [...]

Crazy and frightening - and real, in about 4 percent of the

population....

The prevalence rate for anorexic eating disorders is esti-

mated a 3.43 percent, deemed to be nearly epidemic, and yet

this figure is a fraction lower than the rate for antisocial per-

sonality. The high-profile disorders classed as schizophrenia

occur in only about 1 percent of [the population] - a mere

quarter of the rate of antisocial personality - and the Centers

for Disease Control and Prevention say that the rate of colon

cancer in the United States, considered “alarmingly high,” is

14

EDITOR’S PREFACE

about 40 per 100,000 - one hundred times lower than the rate

of antisocial personality.

The high incidence of sociopathy in human society has a

profound effect on the rest of us who must live on this planet,

too, even those of us who have not been clinically trauma-

tized. The individuals who constitute this 4 percent drain our

relationships, our bank accounts, our accomplishments, our

self-esteem, our very peace on earth.

Yet surprisingly, many people know nothing about this

disorder, or if they do, they think only in terms of violent psy-

chopathy - murderers, serial killers, mass murderers - people

who have conspicuously broken the law many times over, and

who, if caught, will be imprisoned, maybe even put to death

by our legal system.

We are not commonly aware of, nor do we usually iden-

tify, the larger number of nonviolent sociopaths among us,

people who often are not blatant lawbreakers, and against

whom our formal legal system provides little defense.

Most of us would not imagine any correspondence be-

tween conceiving an ethnic genocide and, say, guiltlessly ly-

ing to one's boss about a coworker. But the psychological cor-

respondence is not only there; it is chilling. Simple and pro-

found, the link is the absence of the inner mechanism that

beats up on us, emotionally speaking, when we make a choice

we view as immoral, unethical, neglectful, or selfish.

Most of us feel mildly guilty if we eat the last piece of

cake in the kitchen, let alone what we would feel if we inten-

tionally and methodically set about to hurt another person.

Those who have no conscience at all are a group unto

themselves, whether they be homicidal tyrants or merely ruth-

less social snipers.

The presence or absence of conscience is a deep human

division, arguably more significant than intelligence, race, or

even gender.

What differentiates a sociopath who lives off the labors of

others from one who occasionally robs convenience stores, or

from one who is a contemporary robber baron - or what makes

the difference betwen an ordinary bully and a sociopathic

POLITICAL PONEROLOGY

15

murderer - is nothing more than social status, drive, intellect,

blood lust, or simple opportunity.

What distinguishes all of these people from the rest of us is

an utterly empty hole in the psyche, where there should be the

most evolved of all humanizing functions.2

We did not have the advantage of Dr. Stout’s book at the

beginning of our research project. We did, of course, have

Robert Hare and Hervey Cleckley and Guggenbuhl-Craig and

others. But they were only approaching the subject of the pos-

sibly large numbers of psychopaths that live among us who

never get caught breaking laws, who don’t murder – or if they

do, they don’t get caught – and who still do untold damage to

the lives of family, acquaintances, and strangers.

Most mental health experts, for a very long time, have oper-

ated on the premise that psychopaths come from impoverished

backgrounds and have experienced abuse of one sort or another

in childhood, so it is easy to spot them, or at least, they cer-

tainly don’t move in society except as interlopers. This idea

seems to be coming under some serious revision lately. As

!obaczewski points out in this book, there is some confusion

between Psychopathy and Antisocial Personality Disorder and

Sociopathy. As Robert Hare points out, yes, there are many