Extracted from Political Ponerology – A Science on the nature of evil adjusted for political purposes, by Andrew M. Lobaczewski

Note: It is necessary to give some explanations regarding the connection of this article to p2p theme. This book was written by a recently deceased Polish psychologist working under difficult conditions in the Communist Poland. To my knowledge it the only one scientific research about the deep psychological origins of human evil deeds regarding interpersonal interactions. His research dug deeply into human interactions dynamics, just as they emerge from psychological basis, as such I believe it is of interest to the p2p topic.

______________________________________________________________________________________

Three principal heterogeneous items coincided in order to form our European civilization: Greek philosophy, Roman imperial and legal civilization, and Christianity, consolidated by time and effort of later generations. The culture of cogni-tive/spiritual heritage thus born was internally fuzzy wherever the language of concepts, being overly attached to matter and law, turned out to be too stiff to comprehend aspects of psycho-logical and spiritual life.

Such a state of affairs had negative repercussions upon our ability to comprehend reality, especially that reality which concerns humanity and society. Europeans became unwilling to study reality (subordinating intellect to facts), but rather tended to impose upon nature their subjective ideational schemes, which are extrinsic and not completely coherent. Not until modern times, thanks to great developments in the hard sci-ences, which study facts by their very nature, as well as the apperception of the philosophical heritage of other cultures, could we help clarify our world of concepts and permit its own homogenization.

It is surprising to observe what an autonomous tribe the cul-ture of the ancient Greeks represented. Even in those days, a civilization could hardly develop in isolation, without being affected by older cultures in particular. However, even with that consideration, it seems that Greece was relatively isolated, culturally speaking. This was probably due to the era of decay the archaeologist refer to as the “dark age”, which occurred in those Mediterranean areas between 1200 and 800 B.C., and also to the Achaean tribes’ belligerence.

Among the Greeks, a rich mythological imagination, devel-oped in direct contact with nature and the experiences of life and war, furnished an image of this link with the nature of the country and peoples. These conditions saw the birth of a liter-ary tradition, and later of philosophical reflections searching for generalities, essential contents, and criteria of values. The Greek heritage is fascinating due to its richness and individual-ity, but above all due to its primeval nature. Our civilization, however, would have been better served if the Greeks had made more ample use of the achievements of other civiliza-tions.

Rome was too vital and practical to reflect profoundly upon the Greek thoughts it had appropriated. In this imperial civili-zation, administrative needs and juridical developments im-posed practical priorities. For the Romans, the role of philoso-phy was more didactic, useful for helping to develop the think-ing process which would later be utilized for the discharge of administrative functions and the exercise of political options. The Greek reflective influence softened Roman customs, which had a salutary effect on the development of the empire.

However, in any imperial civilization, the complex prob-lems of human nature are troublesome factors complicating the legal regulations of public affairs and administrative functions. This begets a tendency to dismiss such matters and develop a concept of human personality simplified enough to serve the purposes of law. Roman citizens could achieve their goals and develop their personal attitudes within the framework set by fate and legal principles, which characterized an individual’s situation based on premises having little to do with actual psy-chological properties. The spiritual life of people lacking the rights of citizenship was not an appropriate subject of deeper studies. Thus, cognitive psychology remained barren, a condi-tion which always produces moral recession at both the indi-vidual and public levels.

Christianity had stronger ties with the ancient cultures of the Asiatic continent, including their philosophical and psycho-logical reflections. This was of course a dynamic factor render-ing it more attractive, but it was not the most important one. Observing and understanding the apparent transformations faith caused in human personalities created a psychological school of thought and art on the part of the early believers. This new relationship to another person, i.e. one’s neighbor, charac-terized by understanding, forgiveness, and love, opened the door to a psychological cognition which, often supported by charismatic phenomena, bore abundant fruit during the first three centuries after Christ.

An observer at the time might have expected Christianity to help develop the art of human understanding to a higher level than the older cultures and religions, and to hope that such knowledge would protect future generations from the dangers of speculative thought divorced from that profound psycho-logical reality which can only be comprehended through sin-cere respect for another human being.

History, however, has not confirmed such an expectation. The symptoms of decay in sensitivity and psychological com-prehension, as well as the Roman Imperial tendency to impose extrinsic patterns upon human beings, can be observed as early as 350 A.D. During later eras, Christianity passed through all those difficulties which result from insufficient psychological cognition of reality. Exhaustive studies on the historical rea-sons for suppressing the development of human cognition in our civilization would be an extremely useful endeavor.

First of all, Christianity adapted the Greek heritage of phi-losophical thought and language to its purposes. This made it possible to develop its own philosophy, but the primeval and materialistic traits of that language imposed certain limits which hampered communication between Christianity and other religious cultures for many centuries.

Christ’s message expanded along the seacoast and beaten paths of the Roman empire’s transportation lines, within the imperial civilization, but only through bloody persecutions and ultimate compromises with Rome’s power and law. Rome fi-nally dealt with the threat by appropriating Christianity to its own purposes and, as a result, the Christian Church appropri-ated Roman organizational forms and adapted to existing social institutions. As a result of this unavoidable process of adapta-tion, Christianity inherited Roman habits of legal thinking, including its indifference to human nature and its variety.
Two heterogeneous systems were thus linked together so permanently that later centuries forgot just how strange they actually were to each other. However, time and compromise did not eliminate the internal inconsistencies, and Roman influ-ence divested Christianity of some of its profound primeval psychological knowledge. Christian tribes developing under different cultural conditions created forms so variegated that maintaining unity turned out to be an historical impossibility.

A “Western civilization” thus arose hampered by a serious deficiency in an area which both can and does play a creative role, and which is supposed to protect societies from various kinds of evil. This civilization developed formulations in the area of law, whether national, civil, or finally canon, which were conceived for invented and simplified beings. These for-mulations gave short shrift to the total contents of the human personality and the great psychological differences between individual members of the species Homo sapiens. For many centuries any understanding of certain psychological anomalies found among some individuals was out of the question, even though these anomalies repeatedly caused disasters.

This civilization was insufficiently resistant to evil, which originates beyond the easily accessible areas of human con-sciousness and takes advantage of the enormous gap between formal or legal thought and psychological reality. In a civiliza-tion deficient in psychological cognition, hyperactive individu-als driven by their internal doubts caused by a feelings of being different easily find a ready echo in other people’s insuffi-ciently developed consciousness. Such individuals dream of imposing their power and their different experiential manner upon their environment and their society.Unfortunately, in a psychologically ignorant society, their dreams have a good chance of becoming reality for them and a nightmare for oth-ers.

Psychology
In the 1870s, a tempestuous event occurred: a search for the hidden truth about human nature was initiated as a secular movement based on biological and medical progress, thus its cognition originated in the material sphere. From the very out-set, many researchers had a vision of the great future role of this science for the good of peace and order. However, since it relegated prior knowledge to the spiritual sphere, any such approach to the human personality was necessarily one-sided. People like Ivan Pavlov, C.G. Jung, and others soon noticed this one-sidedness and attempted to reach a synthesis. Pavlov, however, was not allowed to state his convictions in public.

Psychology is the only science wherein the observer and the observed belong to the same species, even to the same person in an act of introspection. It is thus easy for subjective error to steal into the reasoning process of the thinking person’s com-monly used imaginings and individual habits. Error then often bites its own tail in a vicious circle, thus giving rise to prob-lems due to the lack of distance between observer and ob-served, a difficulty unknown in other disciplines.

Some people, such as the behaviorists, attempted to avoid the above error at all costs. In the process, they impoverished the cognitive contents to such an extent that there was very little matter left. However, they produced a very profitable discipline of thought. Progress was very often elaborated by persons simultaneously driven by internal anxieties and search-ing for a method of ordering their own personalities via the road of knowledge and self-knowledge. If these anxieties were caused by a defective upbringing, then overcoming these diffi-culties gave rise to excellent discoveries. However, if the cause for such anxieties rested within human nature, it resulted in a permanent tendency to deform the understanding of psycho-logical phenomena. Within this science, progress is unfortu-nately very contingent upon the individual values and nature of its practitioners. It is also dependent upon the social climate. Wherever a society has become enslaved to others or to the rule of an overly-privileged native class, psychology is the first discipline to suffer from censorship and incursions on the part of an administrative body which starts claiming the last word as to what represents scientific truth.

Thanks to the work of outstanding pathfinders, however, the scientific discipline exists and continues to develop in spite of all these difficulties; it is useful for the life of society. Many researchers fill in the gaps of this science with detailed data which function as a corrective to the subjectivity and vagueness of famous pioneers. The childhood ailments of any new disci-pline persist, including a lack of general order and synthesis, as does the tendency to splinter into individual schools, expound-ing upon certain theoretical and practical achievements, at the cost of limiting themselves in other areas.
At the same time, however, findings of a practical nature are gleaned for the good of people who need help. The direct ob-servations furnished by everyday work of therapists in the field are more instrumental in forming scientific comprehension and developing the language of contemporary psychology than any academic experiments or deliberations undertaken in a labora-tory. After all, life itself provides variegated conditions, whether comfortable or tragic, which subject human individu-als to experiments no scientist in any laboratory would ever undertake. This very volume exists because of studies, in the field, of inhuman experimentation upon entire nations.

Experience teaches a psychologist’s mind how to track an-other person’s life quickly and effectively, discovering the causes that conditioned the development of his personality and behavior. Our minds can thus also reconstruct those factors which influenced him, although he himself may be unaware of them. In doing this, we do not, as a rule, use the natural struc-ture of concepts, often referred to as “common sense” relied upon by public opinion and many individuals. Rather, we use categories which are as objective as we can possibly achieve. Psychologists utilize conceptual language with descriptions of phenomena that are independent of any common imaginings, and this is an indispensable tool of practical activity. In prac-tice, however, it usually turns into clinical slang rather than the distinguished scientific language it would behoove us to foster. An analogy can be drawn between this conceptual language of psychology and mathematical symbols. Very often, a single Greek letter stands for many pages of mathematical operations which is instantly recognized by the mathematician.

Objective language
In the categories of psychological objectivity, cognition and thought are based on the same logical and methodological prin-ciples shown to be the best tool in many other areas of natural-istic studies. Exceptions to these rules have become a tradition for ourselves and for creatures similar to us, but they turn out to engender more error than usefulness. At the same time, how-ever, consistent adherence to these principles, and rejection of additional scientific limitations, lead us toward the wide hori-zon from which it is possible to glimpse supernatural causal-ity. Accepting the existence of such phenomena within the human personality becomes a necessity if our language of psy-chological concepts is to remain an objective structure.

In affirming his own personality, man has the tendency to repress from the field of his consciousness any associations indicating an external causative conditioning of his world view and behavior. Young people in particular want to believe they freely chose their intentions and decisions; at the same time, however, an experienced psychological analyst can track the causative conditions of these choices without much difficulty. Much of this conditioning is hidden within our childhood; the memories may be receding into the distance, but we carry the results of our early experiences around with us throughout our lives.

The better our understanding of the causality of the human personality, the stronger the impression that humanity is a part of nature and society, subject to dependencies we are ever bet-ter able to understand. Overcome by human nostalgia, we then wonder if there is really no room for a scope of freedom, for a Purusha (9). The more progress we make in our art of under- standing human causation, the better we are able to liberate the person who trusts us from the toxic effects of conditioning, which has unnecessarily constricted his freedom of proper comprehension and decision making. We are thus in a position to close ranks with our patient in a search for the best way out of his problems. If we succumb to the temptation of using the natural structure of psychological concepts for this purpose, our advice to him would sound similar to the many non-productive pronouncements he has already heard and that never quite manage to really help him to become free of his problem.
The everyday, ordinary, psychological, societal, and moral world view is a product of man’s developmental process within a society, under the constant influence of innate traits. Among these innate traits are mankind’s phylogenetically determined instinctive foundation, and the upbringing furnished by the family and the environment. No person can develop without being influenced by other people and their personalities, or by the values imbued by his civilization and his moral and relig-ious traditions. That is why his natural world view of humans can be neither sufficiently universal nor completely true. Dif-ferences among individuals and nations are the product of both inherited dispositions and the ontogenesis (10) of personalities.

It is thus significant that the main values of this human world view of nature indicate basic similarities in spite of great divergences in time, race, and civilization. This world view quite obviously derives from the nature of our species and the natural experience of human societies which have achieved a certain necessary level of civilization. Refinements based on literary values or philosophical and moral reflections do show differences, but, generally speaking, they tend to bring together the natural conceptual languages of various civilizations and eras. People with a humanistic education may therefore get the impression that they have achieved wisdom. We shall also continue to respect the wisdom of that “common sense” de-rived from life experience and reflections thereon.

However, a conscientious psychologist must ask the follow-ing questions: Even if the natural world view has been refined, does it mirror reality with sufficient reliability? Or does it only mirror our species’ perception? To what extent can we depend upon it as a basis for decision making in the individual, societal and political spheres of life?
Experience teaches us, first of all, that this natural world view has permanent and characteristic tendencies toward de-formation dictated by our instinctive and emotional features. Secondly, our work exposes us to many phenomena which cannot be understood nor described by natural language alone. An objective scientific language able to analyze the essence of a phenomenon thus becomes an indispensable tool. It has also shown itself to be similarly indispensable for an understanding of the questions presented within this book.

Now, having laid the groundwork, let us attempt a listing of the most important reality-deforming tendencies and other insufficiencies of the natural human world view.
Those emotional features which are a natural component of the human personality are never completely appropriate to the reality being experienced. This results both from our instinct and from our common errors of upbringing. That is why the best tradition of philosophical and religious thought have coun-seled subduing the emotions in order to achieve a more accu-rate view of reality.
The natural world view is also characterized by a similar, emotional, tendency to endow our opinions with moral judg-ment, often so negative as to represent outrage. This appeals to tendencies which are deeply rooted in human nature and socie-tal customs. We easily extrapolate this method of comprehen-sion onto manifestations of improper human behavior, which are, in fact, caused by minor psychological deficiencies. When another individual behaves in a way that we deem to be “bad”, we tend to make a judgment of negative intent rather than seek-ing to understand the psychological conditions that might be driving them, and convincing them that they are, in fact, behav-ing very properly. Thus, any moralizing interpretation of minor psychopathological phenomena is erroneous and merely leads to an exceptional number of unfortunate consequences, which is why we shall repeatedly refer to it.

Another defect of the natural world view is its lack of uni-versality. In every society, a certain percentage of the people has developed a world view a good deal different from that used by the majority. The causes of the aberrations are by no means qualitatively monolithic; we will be discussing them in greater detail in the fourth chapter.

Another essential deficiency of the natural world view is its limited scope of applicability. Euclidean geometry would suf-fice for a technical reconstruction of our world and for a trip to the moon and the closest planets. We only need a geometry whose axioms are less natural if we reach inside of an atom or outside of our solar system. The average person does not en-counter phenomena for which Euclidean geometry would be insufficient. Sometime during his lifetime, virtually every per-son is faced with problems he must deal with. Since a compre-hension of the truly operational factors is beyond the ken of his natural world view, he generally relies on emotion: intuition and the pursuit of happiness. Whenever we meet a person whose individual world view developed under the influence of non-typical conditions, we tend to pass moral judgment upon him in the name of our more typical world view. In short, whenever some unidentified psychopathological factor comes into play, the natural human world view ceases to be applica-ble.

Moving further, we often meet with sensible people en-dowed with a well-developed natural world view as regards psychological, societal, and moral aspects, frequently refined via literary influences, religious deliberations, and philosophi-cal reflections. Such persons have a pronounced tendency to overrate the values of their world view, behaving as though it were an objective basis for judging other people. They do not take into account the fact that such a system of apprehending human matters can also be erroneous, since it is insufficiently objective. Let us call such an attitude the “egotism of the natu-ral world view”. To date, it has been the least pernicious type of egotism, being merely an overestimation of that method of comprehension containing the eternal values of human experi-ence.

Today, however, the world is being jeopardized by a phe-nomenon which cannot be understood nor described by means of such a natural conceptual language; this kind of egotism thus becomes a dangerous factor stifling the possibility of objective counteractive measures. Developing and popularizing the ob-jective psychological world view could thus significantly ex-pand the scope of dealing with evil, via sensible action and pinpointed countermeasures.

The objective psychological language, based on mature phi-losophical criteria, must meet the requirements derived from its theoretical foundations, and meet the needs of individual and macrosocial practice. It should be evaluated fully on the basis of biological realities and constitute an extension of the analo-gous conceptual language elaborated by the older naturalistic sciences, particularly medicine. Its range of applicability should cover all those facts and phenomena conditioned upon cognizable biological factors for which this natural language has proved inadequate. It should, within this framework, allow sufficient understanding of the contents, and varied causes, for the genesis of the above-mentioned deviant world views.

Elaborating such a conceptual language, being far beyond the individual scope of any scientist, is a step-by-step affair; by means of the contribution of many researchers, it matures to the point when it could be organized under philosophical supervi-sion in the light of above-mentioned foundations. Such a task would greatly contribute to the development of all bio-humanistic and social sciences by liberating them from the limitations and erroneous tendencies imposed by the overly great influence of the natural language of psychological imagi-nation, especially when combined with an excessive compo-nent of egotism.

Most of the questions dealt with in this book are beyond the scope of applicability of the natural language. The fifth chapter shall deal with a macrosocial phenomenon which has rendered our traditional scientific language completely deceptive. Un-derstanding these phenomena thus requires consistent separa-tion from the habits of that method of thinking and the use of the most objective system of concepts possible. For this pur-pose, it proves necessary to develop the contents, organize them, and familiarize the readers with them as well.

At the same time, an examination of the phenomena whose nature forced the use of such a system will render a great con-tribution to enriching and perfecting the objective system of concepts.
While working on these matters, the author gradually accus-tomed himself to comprehending reality by means of this very method, a way of thinking which turned out to be both the most appropriate and the most economical in terms of time and ef-fort. It also protects the mind from its own natural egotism and any excessive emotionalism.

In the course of the above-mentioned inquiries, each re-searcher went through his own period of crisis and frustration when it became evident that the concepts he had trusted thus far proved to be inapplicable. Ostensibly, correct hypotheses formulated in the scientifically improved natural conceptual language turned out to be completely unfounded in the light of facts, and of preliminary statistical calculations. At the same time, the elaboration of concepts better suited for investigated reality became extremely complex: after all, the key to the question lies in a scientific area still in the process of develop-ment.

Surviving this period thus required an acceptance of and a respect for a feeling of nescience (11) truly worthy of a philoso-pher. Every science is born in an area uninhabited by popular imaginings that must be overcome and left behind. In this case, however, the procedure had to be exceptionally radical; we had to venture into any area indicated by systematic analysis of the facts we observed and experienced from within a full-blown condition of macrosocial evil, guided by the light of the re-quirements of scientific methodology. This had to be upheld in spite of the difficulties caused by extraordinary outside condi-tions and by our own human personalities.

Very few of the many people who started out on this road were able to arrive at the end, since they withdrew for various reasons connected to this period of frustration. Some of them concentrated on a single question; succumbing to a kind of fascination regarding its scientific value; they delved into de-tailed inquiries. Their achievements may be present in this work, since they understood the general mining of their work. Others gave up in the face of scientific problems, personal difficulties, or the fear of being discovered by the authorities, who are highly vigilant in such matters.

Perusing this book will therefore confront the reader with similar problems, albeit on a much smaller scale. A certain impression of injustice may be conveyed due to the need to leave behind a significant portion of our prior conceptualiza-tions, the feeling that our natural world view is inapplicable, and the expendability of some emotional entanglements. I therefore ask my readers to accept these disturbing feelings in the spirit of the love of knowledge and its redeeming values.

The above explanations were crucial in order to render the language of this work more easily comprehensible to the read-ers. The author has attempted to approach the matters described herein in such a way as to avoid both losing touch with the world of objective concepts and becoming incomprehensible to anyone outside a narrow circle of specialists. We must thus beg the reader to pardon any slips along the tightrope between the two methods of thought. However, the author would not be an experienced psychologist if he could not predict that some readers will reject the scientific data adduced within this work, feeling that they constitute an attack upon the natural wisdom of their life-experience.

(9) Sanskrit. A word literally meaning “man”; but bearing the mystical significance of the “Ideal Man”, the Higher Self within. The term Purusha is often used in the Esoteric philosophy to express the Spirit or the everlasting entita-tive individual of a Universe, a Solar System, or of a man. Purusha comes from the verb-root pri – to fill, to make complete, to bestow. One of the two ultimate realities of Sankhya philosophy. The divine Self, the absolute Reality, pure Consciousness. [Editor’s note.]

(10) . Ontogeny, (also ontogenesis or morphogenesis) describe the origin and development of an organism from the fertilized egg to its mature form. Ontogeny is studied in developmental biology. [Editor’s note.]

(11) Literally, the absence of knowledge. [Editor’s note.]