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Political Ponerology - the Study of Evil

Started by Unbeliever, April 05, 2011, 04:21:48 pm

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Unbeliever

I didn't know where else to put this, so here it is:

Political Ponerology

From the wiki:
QuotePonerology
Ponerology is the name given by Polish psychiatrist Andrzej Łobaczewski to an interdisciplinary study of the causes of periods of social injustice.[1] This discipline makes use of data from psychology, psychopathology, sociology, philosophy, and history to account for such phenomena as aggressive war, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and police states. The original theory and research was conducted by psychologists and psychiatrists working in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary in the years before the institution of Communism such as Kazimierz Dąbrowski and Stefan Blachowski.[2]

Łobaczewski adopted the term from the branch of theology dealing with the study of evil, derived from the Greek word poneros. According to Łobaczewski, all societies vacillate between "happy times," or times of prosperity, during which advanced psychological knowledge of the danger of psychopathological influence in the corridors of power is suppressed, and "unhappy times," during which the intelligentsia and society at large are forced to recover this specialized knowledge in order to ultimately rectify the social order along mentally healthier lines. It is to be noted that "happy times" do not imply morally advanced times, as Łobaczewski makes clear that this "happiness" or prosperity may well be premised on the oppression of a target group.

Łobaczewski defines many specific "characteropathies," which Western psychology would probably term "character disorders," as paving the way for the ultimate rule of "essential psychopaths" in full-fledged "pathocracy." This is what takes place when society is insufficiently guarded against the minority of such abnormal pathologs ever-present in its midst (Łobaczewski asserts that the etiology is almost entirely bio-genetic.) When they infiltrate any institution or state, prevailing moral values are perverted into their opposite, and a coded language not unlike Orwell's "double-think" circulates into the mainstream, using "paralogic" and "paramoralism" in place of genuine logic and morality. There are various identifiable stages of pathocracy described by Łobaczewski. Ultimately, each pathocracy is foredoomed because the root of healthy social morality, according to Łobaczewski, is contained in the congenital instinctive infrastructure in the vast majority of the population. While some in the normal population are more susceptible to pathocratic influence, and become its lackeys, the majority instinctively resist.

"Some say God is living there [in space]. I was looking around very attentively, but I did not see anyone there. I did not detect either angels or gods....I don't believe in God. I believe in man - his strength, his possibilities, his reason."
Gherman Titov, Soviet cosmonaut, in The Seattle Daily Ti