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

“Nowhere is this state of affairs more advanced than in America. And the

global reach of American culture threatens to trivialise life and turn it into

entertainment. This was [a] terrifying [...] spectre for Strauss. […]

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PATHOCRACY

on the part of the union’s more reasonable members, but it also

earns the respect of some its more extreme revolutionaries.

They thus find protection among those people who earlier

played a role in the movement’s ponerization, and repay the

favor with compliments or by making things easier for them.

Thus they climb up the organizational ladder, gain influence,

and almost involuntarily bend the contents of the entire group

to their own way of experiencing reality and to the goals de-

rived from their deviant nature. A mysterious disease is already

raging inside the union. The adherents of the original ideology

feel ever more constricted by powers they do not understand;

they start fighting with demons and making mistakes.

If such a movement triumphs by revolutionary means and in

the name of freedom, the welfare of the people, and social jus-

tice, this only brings about further transformation of a govern-

mental system thus created into a macrosocial pathological

phenomenon. Within this system, the common man is blamed

for not having been born a psychopath, and is considered good

for nothing except hard work, fighting and dying to protect a

system of government he can neither sufficiently comprehend

nor ever consider to be his own.

An ever-strengthening network of psychopathic and related

individuals gradually starts to dominate, overshadowing the

others. Characteropathic individuals who played an essential

“[Strauss was] convinced that liberal economics would turn life into enter-

tainment and destroy politics.[...] [Strauss] thought that man's humanity

depended on his willingness to rush naked into battle and headlong to his

death. Only perpetual war can overturn the modern project, with its emphasis

on self-preservation and ‘creature comforts.’ Life can be politicised once

more, and man’s humanity can be restored.

“This terrifying vision fits perfectly well with the desire for honour and glory

that the neo-conservative gentlemen covet. It also fits very well with the

religious sensibilities of gentlemen. The combination of religion and nation-

alism is the elixir that Strauss advocates as the way to turn natural, relaxed,

hedonistic men into devout nationalists willing to fight and die for their God

and country.

“I never imagined when I wrote my first book on Strauss that the unscrupu-

lous elite that he elevates would ever come so close to political power, nor

that the ominous tyranny of the wise would ever come so close to being

realised in the political life of a great nation like the United States. But fear is

the greatest ally of tyranny.” (Shadia Drury, professor of political theory at

the University of Regina in Saskatchewan). [Editor’s note.]

POLITICAL PONEROLOGY

193

role in ponerizing the movement and preparing for revolution,

are also eliminated. Adherents of the revolutionary ideology

are unscrupulously “pushed into a counter-revolutionary posi-

tion”. They are now condemned for “moral” reasons in the

name of new criteria whose paramoralistic essence they are not

in a position to comprehend. Violent negative selection of the

original group now ensues. The inspirational role of essential

psychopathy is now also consolidated; it remains characteristic

for the entire future of this macrosocial pathological phenome-

non.

In spite of these transformations, the pathological block of

the revolutionary movement remains a minority, a fact which

cannot be changed by propaganda pronouncements about the

moral majority adhering to the new, more glorious version of

the ideology. The rejected majority and the very forces which

naively created such power to begin with, start mobilizing

against the block of psychopaths who have taken over. Ruth-

less confrontation with these forces is seen by the psychopathic

block as the only way to safeguard the long-term survival of

the pathological authority. We must thus consider the bloody

triumph of a pathological minority over the movement’s major-

ity to be a transitional phase during which the new contents of

the phenomenon coagulate.

The entire life of a society thus affected then becomes sub-

ordinated to deviant thought-criteria and permeated by their

specific experiential mode, especially the one described in the

section on essential psychopathy. At this point, using the name

of the original ideology to designate this phenomenon is mean-

ingless and becomes an error rendering its comprehension

more difficult.