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

and poorly controlled hatred. Since fun-poking could entail

dreadful consequences, we had to listen attentively and with

the utmost gravity.

The grapevine soon discovered this person’s origins. He had

come from a Cracow suburb and attended high school, al-

though no one knew if he had graduated. Anyway, this was the

first time he had crossed university portals, and as a professor,

at that!

“You can’t convince anyone this way!” we whispered to

each other. “It’s actually propaganda directed against them-

34

INTRODUCTION

selves.” But after such mind-torture, it took a long time for

someone to break the silence.

We studied ourselves, since we felt something strange had

taken over our minds and something valuable was leaking

away irretrievably. The world of psychological reality and

moral values seemed suspended as if in a chilly fog. Our hu-

man feeling and student solidarity lost their meaning, as did

patriotism and our old established criteria. So we asked each

other, “are you going through this too”? Each of us experienced

this worry about his own personality and future in his own

way. Some of us answered the questions with silence. The

depth of these experiences turned out to be different for each

individual.

We thus wondered how to protect ourselves from the results

of this “indoctrination”. Teresa D. made the first suggestion:

Let’s spend a weekend in the mountains. It worked. Pleasant

company, a bit of joking, then exhaustion followed by deep

sleep in a shelter, and our human personalities returned, albeit

with a certain remnant. Time also proved to create a kind of

psychological immunity, although not with everyone. Analyz-

ing the psychopathic characteristics of the “professor’s” per-

sonality proved another excellent way of protecting one’s own

psychological hygiene.

You can just imagine our worry, disappointment, and sur-

prise when some colleagues we knew well suddenly began to

change their world view; their thought-patterns furthermore

reminded us of the “professor’s” chatter. Their feelings, which

had just recently been friendly, became noticeably cooler, al-

though not yet hostile. Benevolent or critical student arguments

bounced right of them. They gave the impression of possessing

some secret knowledge; we were only their former colleagues,

still believing what those “professors of old” had taught us. We

had to be careful of what we said to them. These former col-

leagues soon joined the Party.

Who were they, what social groups did they come from,

what kind of students and people were they? How and why did

they change so much in less than a year? Why did neither I nor

a majority of my fellow students succumb to this phenomenon

and process? Many such questions fluttered through our heads

POLITICAL PONEROLOGY

35

then. It was in those times, from those questions, observations

and attitudes that the idea was born that this phenomenon could

be objectively studied and understood; an idea whose greater

meaning crystallized with time.

Many of us newly graduated psychologists participated in

the initial observations and reflections, but most crumbled

away in the face of material or academic problems. Only a few

of that group remained; so the author of this book may be the

last of the Mohicans.

It was relatively easy to determine the environments and

origins of the people who succumbed to this process, which I

then called “transpersonification”. They came from all social

groups, including aristocratic and fervently religious families,

and caused a break in our student solidarity to the order of

some 6 %. The remaining majority suffered varying degrees of

personality disintegration which gave rise to individual search-

ing for the values necessary to find ourselves again; the results

were varied and sometimes creative.

Even then, we had no doubts as to the pathological nature of

this “transpersonification” process, which ran similar but not

identical in all cases. The duration of the results of this phe-

nomenon also varied. Some of these people later became zeal-

ots. Others later took advantage of various circumstances to

withdraw and re-establish their lost links to the society of nor-

mal people. They were replaced. The only constant value of the

new social system was the magic number of 6 %.

We tried to evaluate the talent level of those colleagues who

had succumbed to this personality-transformation process, and

reached the conclusion that, on average, it was slightly lower

than the average of the student population. Their lesser resis-

tance obviously resided in other bio-psychological features

which were most probably qualitatively heterogeneous.