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

of humanity. The other 90-some percent of human beings are

not psychopaths.

But that 90-some percent of normal people know that some-

thing is wrong! They just can’t quite identify it; can’t quite put

their finger on it; and because they can’t, they tend to think that

there is nothing they can do about it, or maybe it is just God

punishing people.

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EDITOR’S PREFACE

What is actually the case is that when that 90-some percent

of human beings fall into a certain state, as !obaczewski will

describe, the psychopaths, like a virulent pathogen in a body,

strike at the weaknesses, and the entire society is plunged into

conditions that always and inevitably lead to horror and tragedy

on a very large scale.

The movie, The Matrix, touched a deep chord in society be-

cause it exemplified this mechanistic trap in which so many

people find their lives enmeshed, and from which they are un-

able to extricate themselves because they believe that everyone

around them who “looks human” is, in fact, just like them -

emotionally, spiritually, and otherwise.

To give an example of how psychopaths can directly affect

society at large: the “legal argument” as explicated by Robert

Canup in his work on the Socially Adept Psychopath. The legal

argument seems to be at the foundation of our society. We

believe that the legal argument is an advanced system of jus-

tice. This is a very cunning trick that has been foisted on nor-

mal people by psychopaths in order to have an advantage over

them. Just think about it for a moment: the legal argument

amounts to little more than the one who is the slickest at using

the structure for convincing a group of people of something, is

the one who is believed. Because this “legal argument” system

has been slowly installed as part of our culture, when it invades

our personal lives, we normally do not recognize it immedi-

ately. But here’s how it works.

Human beings have been accustomed to assume that other

human beings are - at the very least - trying to “do right” and

“be good” and fair and honest. And so, very often, we do not

take the time to use due diligence in order to determine if a

person who has entered our life is, in fact, a “good person”.

When a conflict ensues, we automatically fall into the legal

argument assumption that in any conflict, one side is partly

right one way, and the other is partly right the other, and that

we can form opinions about which side is mostly right or

wrong. Because of our exposure to the “legal argument” norms,

when any dispute arises, we automatically think that the truth

will lie somewhere between two extremes. In this case, applica-

POLITICAL PONEROLOGY

21

tion of a little mathematical logic to the problem of the legal

argument might be helpful.

Let us assume that in a dispute, one side is innocent, honest,

and tells the truth. It is obvious that lying does an innocent

person no good; what lie can he tell? If he is innocent, the only

lie he can tell is to falsely confess “I did it”. But lying is noth-

ing but good for the liar. He can declare that “I didn’t do it”,

and accuse another of doing it, all the while the innocent per-

son he has accused is saying “I didn’t do it” and is actually

telling the truth.

The truth, when twisted by good liars, can always make an

innocent person look bad, especially if the innocent person is

honest and admits his mistakes.

The basic assumption that the truth lies between the testi-

mony of the two sides always shifts the advantage to the lying

side and away from the side telling the truth. Under most cir-

cumstances, this shift put together with the fact that the truth is

going to also be twisted in such a way as to bring detriment to

the innocent person, results in the advantage always resting in

the hands of liars - psychopaths. Even the simple act of giving

testimony under oath is a useless farce. If a person is a liar,

swearing an oath means nothing to that person. However,

swearing an oath acts strongly on a serious, truthful witness.

Again, the advantage is placed on the side of the liar.

It has often been noted that psychopaths have a distinct ad-

vantage over human beings with conscience and feelings be-

cause the psychopath does not have conscience and feelings.

What seems to be so is that conscience and feelings are related

to the abstract concepts of “future” and “others”. It is “spatio-

temporal”. We can feel fear, sympathy, empathy, sadness, and

so on because we can imagine in an abstract way, the future

based on our own experiences in the past, or even just “con-

cepts of experiences” in myriad variations. We can “see our-

selves” in them even though they are “out there” and this

evokes feelings in us. We can’t do something hurtful because