ponerology

And that also ties into a much larger implication of psychopathy for society as a whole.

As Andrew Lubaczewski explored in his really amazing book, Political Ponerology, entire societies and civilizations can become what he called ponerized, meaning the pathological ways of thinking and behaving become normalized and adopted even by people who are not psychopaths themselves.

And this happens because the world is largely ruled by psychopaths and positions of power and has been for a very long time.

And I don't necessarily mean the people you see on the news or vote for, but most often the ones pulling the strings behind the scenes.

provided you are not forcibly stopped you can do anything at all if you are born at the right time with some access to family fortune and you have a special talent for whipping up others hatred and sense of deprivation you can arrange to kill large numbers of unsuspecting people with enough money you can accomplish this from far away and you can sit back safely and watch in satisfaction crazy and frightening and real and in about four percent of the population so i noticed too because you said six percent four percent i just want to comment on that yeah the reality is is we actually don't know how many percentages people of our psychopaths because largely large amounts of them will go undiagnosed and i would also argue as we're going to go in later female psychopathy which doesn't manifest as overt violence is probably the most undiagnosed category of psychopathy

Exactly.

And then, like I mentioned, there's an older book, 4% from Lobachevsky's Political Ponerology.

The number 6% comes up.

And we're going to get back in the game when we start to see how the game is played.

So there's a wonderful book called Political Ponerology, which I just came from Poland, and it was written by a Polish guy who was a young man during Hitler.

you know, was in college when Stalin came in.

And, you know, so he had to live through first Hitler and then, you know, the Soviets.

Just in terms of rhetoric, uh, or rhetorical styles of what they construct and how people think and get stuck.

Now, um- I'll come back to Dan in a second because I wanna go back in time to an essay I wrote actually in twenty twenty, where I had been reading political ponerology, I had been reading dialectics, I had been reading a lot of things trying to understand what in the world's going on, trying to get my head around this woke thing that I was exposing and diagnosing, this critical race theory, mostly at the time that I was reading, the radical feminism that I had dipped into earlier in gender studies for the grievance studies affair.

Trying to get my head around all this.

And, um, I wrote this article that was called something like Psychopathy and the Origins of Totalitarianism, and, um, that was of course largely predicated off of this peculiar book, uh, called Political Ponerology, which is by a Polish, uh, now late Polish psychologist or psychiatrist or something of that kind.

Ponerology is logos, logy at the end, study of, and poneros is the Greek word for evil.

So he's basically trying to explain how evil works in the world and in society.

It's a difficult language.

Um, but we're gonna call him that.

And you've only got the coldest of all cold monsters, the state.

And people become disillusioned and they turn to spellbinders, which is the author of Political Ponerology talks about.

Trump is a spellbinder.

That is what Weber would call charismatic authority, charismatic leaders.

And then, of course, there's the book by...

Andrew Lobozowski, Political Ponerology, as well, which deals with the nature of evil.

And I think yours would be sort of like a great closure of the trilogy, Psychopathic Authoritarianism.

And so tell us about the book, why you decided to put it together.

And that's a trick.

It's, you know, if you look at this book called Political Ponerology, I think his name is – I forget his first name, but anyway, I wrote the foreword for this book, Political Ponerology, a very good book.

He talks about this in terms of what he calls conversive blockades.

They put up blockades by saying the opposite of the truth or the inversion or the exact inversion of who's doing it and propagate that, making it impossible for people to reach the conclusion that the group doing the promoting of this propaganda is actually the one guilty of what they're charging others with.