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

stinct is our first tutor, whom we carry inside all our lives.

Proper child-rearing is thus not limited to teaching a young

person to control the overly violent reactions of his instinctual

emotionalism; it also ought to teach him to appreciate the wis-

dom of nature contained and speaking through his instinctive

endowment

This substratum contains millions of years’ worth of bio-

psychological development that was the product of species’ life

conditions, so it neither is nor can be a perfect creation. Our

well known weaknesses of human nature and errors in the natu-

ral perception and comprehension of reality have thus been

conditioned on that phylogenetic level for millennia.15

15 Konrad Lorenz: Evolution and Modification of Behavior (1965); On Ag-

gression (1966); Studies in Animal and Human Behavior, Volume I (1970);

Studies in Animal and Human Behavior, Volume II (1971); Behind the Mirror

POLITICAL PONEROLOGY

61

The common substratum of psychology has made it possi-

ble for peoples throughout the centuries and civilizations to

create concepts regarding human, social, and moral matters

which share significant similarities. Inter-epochal and interra-

cial variations in this area are less striking than those differen-

tiating persons whose instinctual human substratum is normal

from those who are carriers of an instinctual bio-psychological

defect, though they are members of the same race and civiliza-

tion. It shall behoove us to return to this latter question repeat-

edly, since it has taken on a crucial importance for the prob-

lems dealt with in this book.

Man has lived in groups throughout his prehistory, so our

species’ instinctual substratum was shaped in this tie, thus con-

ditioning our emotions as regards the mining of existence. The

need for an appropriate internal structure of commonality, and

a striving to achieve a worthy role within that structure, are

encoded at this very level. In the final analysis, our self-

preservation instinct is rivaled by another feeling: the good of

society demands that we make sacrifices, sometimes even the

supreme sacrifice. At the same time, however, it is worth point-

ing out that if we love a man, we love his human instinct above

all.

Our zeal to control anyone harmful to ourselves or our

group is so primal in its near-reflex necessity as to leave no

doubt that it is also encoded at the instinctual level. Our in-

stinct, however, does not differentiate between behavior moti-

vated by simple human failure and behavior performed by indi-

viduals with pathological aberrations. Quite the contrary: we

(1973); The Natural Science of the Human Species: An Introduction to Com-

parative Behavioral Research - The Russian Manuscript (1944-1948)(1995).

Lorenz joined the Nazi Party in 1938 and accepted a university chair under

the Nazi regime. His publications during that time led in later years to allega-

tions that his scientific work had been contaminated by Nazi sympathies.

When accepting the Nobel Prize, he apologized for a 1940 publication that

included Nazi views of science, saying that “many highly decent scientists

hoped, like I did, for a short time for good from National Socialism, and

many quickly turned away from it with the same horror as I.” It seems highly

likely that Lorenz’s ideas about an inherited basis for behavior patterns were

congenial to the Nazi authorities, but there is no evidence to suggest that his

experimental work was either inspired or distorted by Nazi ideas. [Editor’s

note.]

62

SOME INDESPENSIBLE CONCEPTS

instinctively tend to judge the latter more severely, harkening

to nature’s striving to eliminate biologically or psychologically

defective individuals. Our tendency to such evil generating

error is thus conditioned at the instinctual level.

It is also at this level that differences begin to occur be-

tween normal individuals, influencing the formation of their

characters, world views, and attitudes. The primary differences

are in the bio-psychical dynamism of this substratum; differ-

ences of content are secondary. For some people the sthenic16

instinct supersedes psychology; for others, it easily relinquishes