Andrew Lobaczewski - Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes Страница 21

scribed it within the indispensable scope, adaptation, and selec-

tion of data, so as to enable clarification of the problems to be

discussed later in the book. Perhaps the future will make it

possible to elaborate a general theoretical work.

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

May the reader please imagine a very large hall in an old

Gothic university building. Many of us gathered there early in

our studies in order to listen to the lectures of outstanding phi-

losophers and scientists. We were herded back there – under

threat - the year before graduation in order to listen to the in-

doctrination lectures which recently had been introduced.

Someone nobody knew appeared behind the lectern and in-

formed us that he would now be the professor. His speech was

fluent, but there was nothing scientific about it: he failed to

distinguish between scientific and ordinary concepts and

treated borderline imaginings as though it were wisdom that

could not be doubted. For ninety minutes each week, he

flooded us with naive, presumptuous paralogistics and a patho-

logical view of human reality. We were treated with contempt

and poorly controlled hatred. Since fun-poking could entail

dreadful consequences, we had to listen attentively and with

the utmost gravity.

The grapevine soon discovered this person’s origins. He had

come from a Cracow suburb and attended high school, al-

though no one knew if he had graduated. Anyway, this was the

first time he had crossed university portals, and as a professor,

at that!

“You can’t convince anyone this way!” we whispered to

each other. “It’s actually propaganda directed against them-

34

INTRODUCTION

selves.” But after such mind-torture, it took a long time for

someone to break the silence.

We studied ourselves, since we felt something strange had

taken over our minds and something valuable was leaking

away irretrievably. The world of psychological reality and

moral values seemed suspended as if in a chilly fog. Our hu-

man feeling and student solidarity lost their meaning, as did

patriotism and our old established criteria. So we asked each

other, “are you going through this too”? Each of us experienced

this worry about his own personality and future in his own

way. Some of us answered the questions with silence. The

depth of these experiences turned out to be different for each

individual.

We thus wondered how to protect ourselves from the results

of this “indoctrination”. Teresa D. made the first suggestion:

Let’s spend a weekend in the mountains. It worked. Pleasant

company, a bit of joking, then exhaustion followed by deep

sleep in a shelter, and our human personalities returned, albeit

with a certain remnant. Time also proved to create a kind of

psychological immunity, although not with everyone. Analyz-

ing the psychopathic characteristics of the “professor’s” per-

sonality proved another excellent way of protecting one’s own

psychological hygiene.

You can just imagine our worry, disappointment, and sur-

prise when some colleagues we knew well suddenly began to

change their world view; their thought-patterns furthermore

reminded us of the “professor’s” chatter. Their feelings, which

had just recently been friendly, became noticeably cooler, al-

though not yet hostile. Benevolent or critical student arguments

bounced right of them. They gave the impression of possessing

some secret knowledge; we were only their former colleagues,

still believing what those “professors of old” had taught us. We

had to be careful of what we said to them. These former col-

leagues soon joined the Party.

Who were they, what social groups did they come from,

what kind of students and people were they? How and why did

they change so much in less than a year? Why did neither I nor

a majority of my fellow students succumb to this phenomenon

and process? Many such questions fluttered through our heads

POLITICAL PONEROLOGY

35

then. It was in those times, from those questions, observations

and attitudes that the idea was born that this phenomenon could

be objectively studied and understood; an idea whose greater

meaning crystallized with time.

Many of us newly graduated psychologists participated in

the initial observations and reflections, but most crumbled

away in the face of material or academic problems. Only a few

of that group remained; so the author of this book may be the

last of the Mohicans.

It was relatively easy to determine the environments and

origins of the people who succumbed to this process, which I

then called “transpersonification”. They came from all social

groups, including aristocratic and fervently religious families,

and caused a break in our student solidarity to the order of

some 6 %. The remaining majority suffered varying degrees of

personality disintegration which gave rise to individual search-

ing for the values necessary to find ourselves again; the results

were varied and sometimes creative.

Even then, we had no doubts as to the pathological nature of

this “transpersonification” process, which ran similar but not

identical in all cases. The duration of the results of this phe-

nomenon also varied. Some of these people later became zeal-

ots. Others later took advantage of various circumstances to

withdraw and re-establish their lost links to the society of nor-

mal people. They were replaced. The only constant value of the

new social system was the magic number of 6 %.

We tried to evaluate the talent level of those colleagues who

had succumbed to this personality-transformation process, and

reached the conclusion that, on average, it was slightly lower

than the average of the student population. Their lesser resis-

tance obviously resided in other bio-psychological features

which were most probably qualitatively heterogeneous.

I found that I had to study subjects bordering on psychology

and psychopathology in order to answer the questions arising

from our observations; scientific neglect in these areas proved

an obstacle difficult to overcome. At the same time, someone

guided by special knowledge apparently vacated the libraries of

anything we could have found on the topic; books were in-

dexed, but not physically present.

36

INTRODUCTION

Analyzing these occurrences now in hindsight, we could say

that the “professor” was dangling bait over our heads, based on

specific psychological knowledge. He knew in advance that he

would fish out amenable individuals, and even how to do it, but

the limited numbers disappointed him. The transpersonification

process generally took hold only when an individual’s instinc-

tive substratum was marked by pallor or certain deficits. To a

lesser extent, it also worked among people who manifested

other deficiencies in which the state provoked within them was

partially impermanent, being largely the result of psychopatho-

logical induction.

This knowledge about the existence of susceptible individu-

als and how to work on them will continue being a tool for

world conquest as long as it remains the secret of such “profes-

sors”. When it becomes skillfully popularized science, it will

help nations to develop immunity. But none of us knew this at

the time.

Nevertheless, we must admit that in demonstrating the

properties of this process to us in such a way as to force us into

in-depth experience, the professor helped us understand the

nature of the phenomenon in a larger scope than many a true

scientific researcher participating in this work in other less

direct ways.

~~~

As a youth, I read a book about a naturalist wandering

through the Amazon-basin wilderness. At some moment a

small animal fell from a tree onto the nape of his neck, clawing

his skin painfully and sucking his blood. The biologist cau-

tiously removed it -- without anger, since that was its form of

feeding -- and proceeded to study it carefully. This story stub-

bornly stuck in my mind during those very difficult times when

a vampire fell onto our necks, sucking the blood of an unhappy

nation.

Maintaining the attitude of a naturalist, while attempting to

track the nature of macrosocial phenomenon in spite of all ad-

versity, insures a certain intellectual distance and better psy-

chological hygiene in the face of horrors that might otherwise

be difficult to contemplate. Such an attitude also slightly in-

creases the feeling of safety and furnishes an insight that this

POLITICAL PONEROLOGY

37

very method may help find a certain creative solution. This

requires strict control of the natural, moralizing reflexes of

revulsion, and other painful emotions that the phenomenon

provokes in any normal person when it deprives him of his joy

of life and personal safety, ruining his own future and that of

his nation. Scientific curiosity therefore becomes a loyal ally

during such times.

~~~

Hopefully, my readers will forgive me for recounting here a

youthful reminiscence that will lead us directly into the subject.

My uncle, a very lonely man, would visit our house periodi-

cally. He had survived the great Soviet Revolution in the

depths of Russia, where he had been shipped out by the Czarist

police. For over a year he wandered from Siberia to Poland.

Whenever he met with an armed group during his travels, he

quickly tried to determine which ideology they represented,

white or red, and thereupon skillfully pretended to profess it.

Had his ruse been unsuccessful, he would have had his head

blown off as a suspected enemy sympathizer. It was safest to

have a gun and belong to a gang. So he would wander and war

alongside either group, usually only until he found an opportu-

nity to desert westward toward his native Poland, a country

which had just regained its freedom.

When he finally reached his beloved homeland again, he

managed to finish his long-interrupted law studies, to become a

decent person, and to achieve a responsible position. However,

he was never able to liberate himself from his nightmarish

memories. Women were frightened by his stories of the bad old

days and thought it would make no sense to bring a new life

into an uncertain future. Thus, he never started a family. Per-

haps he would have been unable to relate to his loved ones

properly.

This uncle of mine would recapture his past by telling the

children in my family stories about what he had seen, experi-

enced and taken part in; our young imaginations were unable to

come to terms with any of it. Nightmarish terror shuddered in

our bones. We would think of questions: why did people lose

all their humanity, what was the reason for all this? Some sort

38

INTRODUCTION

of apprehensive premonition choked its way into our young

minds; unfortunately, it was to come true in the future.

~~~

If a collection were to be made of all those books which de-

scribe the horrors of wars, the cruelties of revolutions, and the

bloody deeds of political leaders and their systems, many read-

ers would avoid such a library. Ancient works would be placed

alongside books by contemporary historians and reporters. The

documentary treatises on German extermination and concentra-

tion camps, and of the extermination of the Jewish Nation,

furnish approximate statistical data and describe the well-

organized “labor” of the destruction of human life, using a

properly calm language, and providing a concrete basis for the

acknowledgement of the nature of evil.

The autobiography of Rudolf Hoess, the commander of

camps in Oswiecim ( Auschwitz) and Brzezinka ( Birkenau), is a

classic example of how an intelligent psychopathic individual

with a deficit of human emotion thinks and feels.

Foremost among these would be books written by witnesses

to criminal insanity such as Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at

Noon, from prewar Soviet life; Smoke over Birkenau the per-

sonal memories of Severina Szmaglewska5 from the Oswiecim

German concentration camp for women; The Other World, the

Soviet memoires of Gustav Herling-Grudzinski6; and the Solz-

henitsyn volumes turgid with human suffering.

The collection would include works on the philosophy of

history discussing the social and moral aspects of the genesis of

evil, but they would also use the half-mysterious laws of his-

tory to partly justify the blood-stained solutions. However, an

5 Szmaglewska, Seweryna, 1916-92, writer; 1942-45 prisoner in Nazi con-

centration camps; wrote Dymy nad Birkenau (Smoke over Birkenau, 1945);

witness at Nuremberg Trial; stories and novels mainly concerned with war

and occupation: Zapowiada sie piekny dzien (Looks Like a Beautiful Day,

1960), Niewinni w Norymberdze (The Innocent at Nuremberg, 1972); novels

for young people; anthology of memoirs 1939-45: Wiezienna krata (Prison

Bars, 1964). [Editor’s note.]

6 Herling-Grudzinski, Gustav: Polish writer who after WWII lived in Napoli,

Italy. Married the daughter of well known Italian philosopher Benedetto

Croce. He wrote an account of his time in a Soviet gulag: A World Apart.