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

those citizens who were able to feather their nest into a rela-

tively comfortable modus vivendi. Outside, other societies start

to feel the pathological quality of the phenomenon quite dis-

tinctly. Such a state of affairs cannot last long. One must then

be prepared for ever more rapid changes, and also behave with

great circumspection.

Pathocracy is a disease of great social movements followed

by entire societies, nations, and empires. In the course of hu-

man history, it has affected social, political, and religious

movements, as well as the accompanying ideologies, character-

istic for the time and the ethnological conditions, and turned

them into caricatures of themselves. This occurs as a result of

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PATHOCRACY

the activities of similar etiological factors in this phenomenon,

namely the participation of pathological agents in a pathody-

namically similar process. That explains why all the pathocra-

cies of the world are and have been so similar in their essential

properties. Contemporaneous ones easily find a common lan-

guage, even if the ideologies nourishing them and protecting

their pathological contents from exposure differ widely.

Identifying these phenomena through history and properly

qualifying them according to their true nature and contents, not

according to the ideology in question, which succumbed to the

characteristic process of caricaturization, is a job for historians.

However, it must be understood that the primary ideology was

undoubtedly socially dynamic and contained creative elements,

otherwise it would have been incapable of nurturing and pro-

tecting the pathocratic phenomenon from recognition and criti-

cism for very long. It would also have been incapable of fur-

nishing the pathological caricature with the tools for imple-

menting its expansionist goals on the outside.

Defining the moment at which a movement has been trans-

formed into something we can call a pathocracy as a result of

the ponerogenic process is a matter of convention. The process

is temporally cumulative and reaches a point of no return at

some particular moment. Eventually, however, internal con-

frontation with the adherents of the original ideology occurs,

thus finally affixing the seal of the pathocratic character of the

phenomenon. Naziism most certainly passed this point of no

return, but was prevented from all-out confrontation with the

adherents of the original ideology because the Allied armies

smashed its entire military might.

Pathocracy and Its Ideology

It should be noted that a great ideology with mesmerizing

values can also easily deprive people of the capacity for self-

critical control over their behavior. The adherents of such ideas

tend to lose sight of the fact that the means used, not just the

end, will be decisive for the result of their activities. Whenever

they reach for overly radical methods of action, still convinced

that they are serving their idea, they are not aware that their

goal has already changed. The principle “the end justifies the

POLITICAL PONEROLOGY

201

means” opens the door to a different kind of person for whom a

great idea is useful for purposes of liberating themselves from

the uncomfortable pressure of normal human custom. Every

great ideology thus contains danger, especially for small minds.

Therefore, every great social movement and its ideology can

become a host upon which some pathocracy initiates its para-

sitic life.

The ideology in question may have been marked by deficits

in truth and moral criteria from the very outset, or by the ef-

fects of activities by pathological factors. The original, very

high-minded idea, may also have succumbed to early contami-

nation characteristic of a particular time and social circum-

stance. If such an ideology is infiltrated by foreign, local cul-

tural material which, being heterogeneous, destroys the original

coherent structure of the idea, the actual value may become so

enfeebled that it loses some of its attractiveness for reasonable

people. Once weakened, however, the sociological structure

can succumb to further degeneration, including the activation

of pathological factors, until it has become transformed into its

caricature: the name is the same, but the contents are different.

Differentiating the essence of the pathological phenomenon

from its contemporary ideological host is thus a basic and nec-

essary task, both for scientific-theoretical purposes and for

finding practical solutions for the problems derived from the

existence of the above-mentioned macrosocial phenomena.

If, in order to designate a pathological phenomenon, we ac-

cept the name furnished by the ideology of a social movement

which succumbed to degenerative processes, we lose any abil-