So a month ago, I gave away my copy of Political Ponerology, and while the recipient was worthy of the gift, it left my little reference library a book short, so I ordered another copy for myself. It arrived in the mail a few days ago and I found myself casually flipping through it. -Then reading it again with gusto!
Wow! It had been a few years since I last went through it, and boy, it’s a book which ages well with time! I highly recomend folks here give it another read if it has been a while. When it first came out, many of the scenarios and patterns it described were, back then, largely theoretical I now realize. However, in the context of today’s hysterical “Culture War” environment, Lobaczewski's work carries immediate and pertinent information which draws a picture in one's mind in sharp relief. I found myself underlining in pencil whole sections on practically every page. (I think having read through it and its dense prose once already served to soften up my intake filters!)
Anyway...
There was one passage which caught me with particular force which I will reproduce here.
In Chapter IV, Lobaczewski lists and evaluates the different flavors of characteropathies, and he describes one particular variation...
Two thoughts here...
1. The veritable tsunami of anti-depressant drugs prescribed to the population over the last twenty years might have had a similar impact on emotional cognition as the drugs described above through Lobaczewski's pre-WWII observations, and if so we may perhaps discern some new understanding as to why this wave of medication was so universally injected into human culture. (Thinking from a 4D programming perspective.)
2. Nearly twenty years ago, back when I was studying the popular use of MDMA (Ecstasy) among the youth at the time (i.e., "Rave Culture"), I happened upon a sobering discovery; the damage caused to brain cells through regular use of the drug bore a stark resemblance to the damage caused by Polio. (Note the quoted section above regarding the same). -I'd managed to hunt down and compare slides of various healthy and damaged brain cells as seen under magnification. Evident in both polio affliction and MDMA use was that neurons responsible for mood and vital nerve regulation died in large numbers, and after the disease and toxins had passed, the remaining surviving neurons grew extra nodes and thus were able to make up for the shortfall. (The way this knowledge came to the attention of the medical community was due to a condition which came to prominence in the late 1990's and early 2000's popularly called, "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome". In old age, in people suffering this particular form of the condition, when those surviving and altered neurons began to die from natural aging, numbers of the required brain cell dropped below some critical threshold and the result was that afflicted people would feel enormously exhausted all the time, of being barely able to lift their limbs; the paralysis experienced during their childhood bout with polio returned in a new form. The condition was mysterious for a long time until the link was made to the polio epidemics of the last century.)
Anyway, it strikes me that perhaps the more recent wave of popular MDMA use/abuse among youth, (which continues to this day to a degree among the love-in dance party hippie types), might have had a similar emotionally-dampening effect as described by Lobaczewski, resulting in a whole segment of the population being more likely to experience a collective state of naivete and an inability to comprehend the crux of a matter. This would seem to line up with the category of people most commonly associated with radical leftism.
While this is just a casual theory on my part, and while certainly not the likely sole cause of the current situation, anti-depressant and MDMA type drug use might have had a role to play in the somewhat mysterious culture-wide condition of, “Millenial Madness” which so-called "helicopter parenting" might not alone be able to account for. -As well as the weird condition where no matter how reasonable and measured and logical he is, figures like Jordan Peterson are completely unable to sway a significant number of not just hard-core activist types, but so many casual leftists as well. Such people may, in a very real way, simply not have the grey matter required. It may have been flushed down the toilet in their urine along with the digested dregs of their metabolized fluoride-based mood medications and party drugs.
Anyway...
That was the thought I wanted to share.
Beyond that, I would recommend again that folks give Andrew Lobaczewski’s Political Ponerology a second reading in this dark and dangerous time of re-awakening Marxist thinking, de-platforming of out-group personalities, mass cognitive dissonance and general madness. It contains a veritable mountain of useful insight! -Not the least being that dealing with ponerized people effectively may not entail appealing to reason and other normal methods rational people would naturally attempt, as such may simply be impossible due to very real brain damage. Rather perhaps a doctrine of strategic enclosure and treating afflicted people as though they are dangerous machines which can be measured and moved around and manipulated with extreme caution would be advised.
Sorry. -Not the most up-beat thoughts for a Sunday morning, but there it is.
Wow! It had been a few years since I last went through it, and boy, it’s a book which ages well with time! I highly recomend folks here give it another read if it has been a while. When it first came out, many of the scenarios and patterns it described were, back then, largely theoretical I now realize. However, in the context of today’s hysterical “Culture War” environment, Lobaczewski's work carries immediate and pertinent information which draws a picture in one's mind in sharp relief. I found myself underlining in pencil whole sections on practically every page. (I think having read through it and its dense prose once already served to soften up my intake filters!)
Anyway...
There was one passage which caught me with particular force which I will reproduce here.
In Chapter IV, Lobaczewski lists and evaluates the different flavors of characteropathies, and he describes one particular variation...
Drug-induced characteropathies: During the last few decades, medicine has begun using a series of drugs with serious side effects: they attack the nervous system, leaving permanent damage behind. These generally discreet handicaps sometimes give rise to personality changes which are often very harmful socially. Streptomycin proved a very dangerous drug; as a result, some countries have limited its use, whereas others have taken it off the list of drugs whose use is permitted.
The cytostatic drugs used in treating neopalstic diseases often attack the phylogenetically oldest brain tissue, the primary carrier of our instinctive substratum and basic feelings. Persons treated with such drugs progressively tend to lose their emotional color and their ability to intuit a psychological situation. They retain their intellectual functions but become praise-craving egocentrics, easily ruled by people who know how to take advantage of this. They become indifferent to other people’s feelings and the harm they are inflicting upon them; any criticism of their own person or behavior is repaid with a vengeance. Such a change of character in a person who until recently enjoyed respect on the part of his environment or community, which perseveres in human minds, becomes a pathological phenomenon causing often tragic results.
[...]
Finally, polio attacks the brain, more often the higher part of the anterior horns, which was affected by the process. People with leg paresis rarely manifest these effects, but those with paresis of the neck and/or shoulders must count themselves lucky if they do not. In addition to affective pallor, persons manifesting these effects usually evidence naivete and an inability to comprehend the crux of a matter.
[...]
Character anomalies developing as a result of brain-tissue damage behave like insidious ponerogenic factors. As a result of the above-described features, especially the above-mentioned naivete and an inability to comprehend the crux of a matter, their influence easily anchors in human minds, traumatizing our psyches, impoverishing and deforming our thoughts and feelings, and limiting individuals’ and societies’ ability to use common sense and to read a psychological or moral situation accurately. This opens the door to the influence of other pathological characters who most frequently carry some inherited psychological deviations; they then push the characteropathic individuals into the shadows and proceed with their ponerogenic work. That is why various types of characteropathy participate during the initial periods of the genesis of evil, both on the macrosocial sacale and on the individual scale of human families.
Two thoughts here...
1. The veritable tsunami of anti-depressant drugs prescribed to the population over the last twenty years might have had a similar impact on emotional cognition as the drugs described above through Lobaczewski's pre-WWII observations, and if so we may perhaps discern some new understanding as to why this wave of medication was so universally injected into human culture. (Thinking from a 4D programming perspective.)
2. Nearly twenty years ago, back when I was studying the popular use of MDMA (Ecstasy) among the youth at the time (i.e., "Rave Culture"), I happened upon a sobering discovery; the damage caused to brain cells through regular use of the drug bore a stark resemblance to the damage caused by Polio. (Note the quoted section above regarding the same). -I'd managed to hunt down and compare slides of various healthy and damaged brain cells as seen under magnification. Evident in both polio affliction and MDMA use was that neurons responsible for mood and vital nerve regulation died in large numbers, and after the disease and toxins had passed, the remaining surviving neurons grew extra nodes and thus were able to make up for the shortfall. (The way this knowledge came to the attention of the medical community was due to a condition which came to prominence in the late 1990's and early 2000's popularly called, "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome". In old age, in people suffering this particular form of the condition, when those surviving and altered neurons began to die from natural aging, numbers of the required brain cell dropped below some critical threshold and the result was that afflicted people would feel enormously exhausted all the time, of being barely able to lift their limbs; the paralysis experienced during their childhood bout with polio returned in a new form. The condition was mysterious for a long time until the link was made to the polio epidemics of the last century.)
Anyway, it strikes me that perhaps the more recent wave of popular MDMA use/abuse among youth, (which continues to this day to a degree among the love-in dance party hippie types), might have had a similar emotionally-dampening effect as described by Lobaczewski, resulting in a whole segment of the population being more likely to experience a collective state of naivete and an inability to comprehend the crux of a matter. This would seem to line up with the category of people most commonly associated with radical leftism.
While this is just a casual theory on my part, and while certainly not the likely sole cause of the current situation, anti-depressant and MDMA type drug use might have had a role to play in the somewhat mysterious culture-wide condition of, “Millenial Madness” which so-called "helicopter parenting" might not alone be able to account for. -As well as the weird condition where no matter how reasonable and measured and logical he is, figures like Jordan Peterson are completely unable to sway a significant number of not just hard-core activist types, but so many casual leftists as well. Such people may, in a very real way, simply not have the grey matter required. It may have been flushed down the toilet in their urine along with the digested dregs of their metabolized fluoride-based mood medications and party drugs.
Anyway...
That was the thought I wanted to share.
Beyond that, I would recommend again that folks give Andrew Lobaczewski’s Political Ponerology a second reading in this dark and dangerous time of re-awakening Marxist thinking, de-platforming of out-group personalities, mass cognitive dissonance and general madness. It contains a veritable mountain of useful insight! -Not the least being that dealing with ponerized people effectively may not entail appealing to reason and other normal methods rational people would naturally attempt, as such may simply be impossible due to very real brain damage. Rather perhaps a doctrine of strategic enclosure and treating afflicted people as though they are dangerous machines which can be measured and moved around and manipulated with extreme caution would be advised.
Sorry. -Not the most up-beat thoughts for a Sunday morning, but there it is.
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