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

life, could, in the long run, cause public opinion to accept the

essential knowledge about human nature and the development

of the human personality, which will enable the harmful proc-

esses to be controlled. Some forms of international cooperation

and supervision will be needed for this.

The development of human personality and its capacity for

proper thinking and accurate comprehension of reality entails a

certain amount of risk and demands overcoming comfortable

laziness and applying the efforts of special scientific work un-

der conditions quite different from those under which we have

been raised.

Under such conditions, an egotistic personality, accustomed

to a comfortably narrow environment, superficial thinking, and

uncontrolled emotionalism, will experience very favorable

changes, which cannot be induced by anything else. Specially

POLITICAL PONEROLOGY

95

altered conditions will cause such a personality to begin disin-

tegrating, thus giving rise to intellectual and cognitive efforts

and moral reflection.

One example of such a program of experience is the Ameri-

can Peace Corps. Young people travel to many poor develop-

ing countries in order to live and work there, often under primi-

tive conditions. They learn to understand other nations and

customs, and their egotism decreases. Their world view devel-

ops and becomes more realistic. They thus lose the characteris-

tic defects of the modern American character.

In order to overcome something whose origin is shrouded in

the mists of time immemorial, we often feel we must battle the

ever-turning windmills of history. However, the end goal of

such effort is the possibility that an objective understanding of

human nature and its eternal weaknesses, plus the resulting

transformation of societal psychology, may enable us effec-

tively to counteract or prevent the destructive and tragic results

sometime in the not too distant future.

Our times are exceptional, and suffering now gives rise to

better comprehension than it did centuries ago. This under-

standing and knowledge fit better into the total picture, since

they are based on objective data. Such a view therefore be-

comes realistic, and people and problems mature in action.

Such action should not be limited to theoretical contemplations,

but rather, acquire organization and form.

In order to facilitate this, let us consider the selected ques-

tions and the draft of a new scientific discipline which would

study evil, discovering its factors of genesis, insufficiently

understood properties, and weak spots, thereby outlining new

possibilities to counteract the origin of human suffering.

CHAPTER V

PATHOCRACY

The Genesis of the Phenomenon

The time-cycle sketched in Chapter III was referred to as

hysteroidal because the intensification or diminution of a soci-

ety’s hysterical condition can be considered its chief measure-

ment. It does not, of course, constitute the only quality subject

to change within the framework of certain periodicity. The

present chapter shall deal with the phenomenon which can

emerge from the phase of maximal intensification of hysteria.

Such a sequence does not appear to result from any relatively

constant laws of history; quite the contrary, some additional

circumstances and factors must participate in such a period of a

society’s general spiritual crisis and cause its reason and social

structure to degenerate in such a way as to bring about the

spontaneous generation of this worst disease of society. Let us

call this societal disease phenomenon “pathocracy”; this is not

the first time it has emerged during the history of our planet.

It appears that this phenomenon, whose causes also appear

to be potentially present in every society, has its own character-

istic process of genesis, only partially conditioned by, and hid-

den within, the maximal hysterical intensity of the above-

described cycle. As a result, unhappy times become exception-

ally cruel and enduring and their causes impossible to under-

stand within the categories of natural human concepts. Let us

therefore bring this process of the origin of pathocracy closer,

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PATHOCRACY

methodically isolating it from other phenomena we can recog-

nize as being conditional or even accompanying it.

A psychologically normal, highly intelligent person called

to high office normally experiences doubts as to whether he

can meet the demands expected of him and seeks the assistance

of others whose opinions he values. At the same time, he feels

nostalgia for his old life, freer and less burdensome, to which

he would like to return after fulfilling his social obligations.

Every society worldwide contains individuals whose dreams

of power arise very early as we have already discussed. They

are generally discriminated against in some way by society,