Cycling Through Hysteria

[a.saccus]

Cycling Through Hysteria
Understanding Evil when it comes in the Large Economy Size

It’s getting difficult these days for anyone to ignore the ominous clouds of doom hovering over the human race. No corner of the globe is free from the the deadly pall cast by these clouds, and some locations are already awash in torrential downpours of the shameful Red Rain — innocent human blood. I am sure that evil is all the more terrifying because it seems to comes upon us like a cloud or like fog, constantly shifting, ever seeming to elude our grasp. How can you stop a cloud? What can I do to combat fog, the filmiest of nothings?

The longer one stands under the spell of this cloud of doom, the easier it is to believe that the onslaught of evil is a punishment for some unknown crime, and that perhaps Armageddon is what we need after all, one that wipes all human life off the face of the planet and sets all things right by simply ending all things — and won‘t Jesus save us anyhow? At least with Armageddon we’d be rid of the oppressive burden of feeling guilty for — well, we’re not exactly sure, but it musta been a whopper for us to wind up in the hole we’re in now!

If we ask the print or broadcast media, “Quo Vadis?" they confidently tell us we are on our way to annihilating Terror once and for all, and that we will use whatever force is required mercilessly; which means more and more bombs, more and more dead American children, and don’t pay any attention to all that collateral damage which somehow seems to be moving daily closer to our neighborhood, and mind you, don‘t step on those dead bodies over there — or over there, or there, and there, and there…. We seem to be sleepwalking in a dream to a martial drumbeat, faster and faster, and yet only falling ever deeper into a dream.

If this is “improvement", then what’s it going to be like when things get “bad?"

“Pay no mind", the media tell us. “Things can’t possibly get any worse. Just as soon as we teach those nasty (Palestinians, Iraqis, Shiites, insurgents, suicide bombers, Iranians, Koreans, Venezuelans — your choice of 68 terrific terrorist flavors…)." Our question of “Where are we going?" just leads us in ever more complex circles. Some hearty souls might even suggest that we’re “lost". Others might just say it’s time to toss in the towel.

But then — if you hold your breath for a second and listen very, very attentively — you just might hear someone else say, “When traveling through unknown territory, the wise traveler always finds a guide or consults a map. Anybody got a map? Who’s been here before?"

In 2001, the United States of America, the most powerful nation in the world, suffered an attack of unprecedented proportions. Unprecedented, that is, if you don’t remember 1968 in Nashville and in Los Angeles; or 1964 in the Tonkin Gulf; or 1963 in Dallas; or 1941 at Pearl Harbor; or 1915 somewhere in the North Atlantic, or 1898 in Havana Bay…. The memory cells, once jogged, thus begin to percolate again — and suddenly you realize that this really IS déja vu all over again! And if it is, then there must be somebody, somewhere, who must remember more and know more than you do; and perhaps that someone actually knows where we are now and how to get outa here pronto!

If you’d asked me that question about maps and guides a year ago, I would have had no answer for you; or I would have given you a funny look. Or I might even have said, “In spite of all the horrors of the twentieth century, we don’t seem to have learned diddly squat — Hitler and Stalin, two world wars, dozens of little wars — and it looks like a bad Capra rerun: “Mr. Hitler, Jr. Goes to Washington". Or I might have talked to you about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and how much fun playing harp on the other side of The Pearly Gates will be, patted you on the head, given you a lollipop and sent you home to Mommy.

But you didn’t ask me a year ago. You asked me today.

And no one is more Jiminy Cricket tickled than I am to tell you that YES, there is a map, and someone who’s been over the terrain we’re headed into.

What are the odds, I ask you, WHAT ARE THE ODDS, that just when we need it the most, someone appears who was a student of psychology as all the goose-stepping kicked off in Uebermenschland, and who witnessed it first hand? And then had the pleasure of being in Poland of all places (my grandmother is Polish; I remember her stories of Poland when Austria-Hungary was the occupier), just when the “liberating" Russians came stomping through, un-Hitlering eastern Europe just as they had un-Napoleoned it 132 years earlier — and thus got to watch the Communist variety of totalitarianism at work firsthand as well as the Fascist variety. And then was part of a community of scientists who were able to keep their heads while all the ideological knives were flying through the air. And who dodged a Brzezinsky bullet in the ‘80’s, to actually get the results of his glorious adventure into Laura and Ark’s hands, and thence to us?

When it comes to miracles, I’m afraid I’m rather hard to please; not at all prone to accepting just anything “coincidental" or slightly airy-fairy as a sign that Something Up There Likes Me. I’ve seen how “coincidences" can be manufactured for the bemusement of some, and their enslavement to others; and how, if a two-on-one defense in basketball is so effective, how much more effective is the ploy when it’s expanded to a twenty-five-on-one out on the street; or a thousand-on-one at a World Trade Center.

So it is not without a little catch in my throat and some slight tremor of my hand, that I tell you that — as far as I can tell — Somebody Up There DOES Like Us.

At least like us enough to make sure that we got the map we needed, and the guide, Prof. A. Lobaczewski. His work is entitled, “Political Ponerology: a science on the nature of evil adjusted for political purposes".

The book is a scientific approach to the origin and genesis of macrosocial evil, that is, Evil when it comes in the Large Economy Size. In this book-which-is-a-map, there is a key to that map, the “hysteroidal cycle." (“Hysteroidal" means “resembling hysteria", where “hysteria" is a functional psychic disorder simulating organic disease, as well as an outbreak of conduct exhibiting unmanageable fear or emotional excess in individuals or groups.) It provides a framework upon which you can conveniently hang all the psychological concepts and the structures and workings of pathocracy that Lobaczewski analyzes. From it you can read history better; get a glimpse what the future may hold; and learn what you have to do to at least have a chance of setting the world back on its proper axis.

What follows are brief excerpts centered around six topics discussed in the hysteroidal cycle, from chapters III and IV of “Political Ponerology", along with a few of my comments. I have entitled the six sections thusly:

“Girls Just Wanna Have Fun� — and, of course, us boys too.

Jokers in the Deck.

What could possibly be “bad� about the “good old days?"

Hysteroidal = resembling hysteria.

The Good News About the Bad News.

An Invitation.


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“Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" — and, of course, us boys too.

Ever since human societies and civilizations have been created on our globe, people have longed for happy times full of tranquility and justice, which would have allowed everyone to herd his sheep in peace, search for fertile valleys, plow the earth, dig for treasures, or build houses and palaces. Man desires peace so as to enjoy the benefits accumulated by earlier generations and to proudly observe the growth of future ones he has begotten. Sipping wine or mead in the meantime would be nice. He would like to wander about, becoming familiar with other lands and people, or enjoy the star-studded sky of the south, the colors of nature, and the faces and costumes of women. He would also like to give free rein to his imagination and immortalize his name in works of art, whether sculptured in marble or eternalized in myth and poetry.

Jokers in the deck

As far back as we can see into the mists of time, man has dreamed of a life in which his efforts would make his dreams come true. But there have been obstacles which have prevented that triumphal fulfillment of dreams, obstacles from an unexpected quarter. While some men desired to understand nature’s laws to better utilize the bounty of Nature’s many gifts, others sought the knowledge merely for the power it brought them. And when some men harnessed the natural power of animals, and then wind and water in order to make their dreams come true, other men found their needs curiously unmet. These men were “different" somehow, they needed something more; and so it was perhaps inevitable that when all other sources of natural power had been tapped, these “different" men turned to the last remaining source — their fellow men — and bent the wills of those other men, their brothers, to serve their “different" and peculiar needs. Sometimes they did this by guile and persuasion; but being, in reality, wolves in sheep’s clothing — beasts themselves — they turned upon their no-longer-fellow-humans the force and violence that had once been reserved solely to defend against Nature’s most vicious beasts. “Homo homini lupus est." — Thomas Hobbes (“Man is a wolf to man.")

…every society contains a certain percentage of people carrying psychological deviations caused by various inherited or acquired factors which produce anomalies in perception, thought, and character,… individuals whose dreams of power arise very early. They are discriminated against in some way by society, which uses a moralizing interpretation with regard to their failings and difficulties, although these individuals are rarely guilty of them. Many such people attempt to impart meaning to their deviant lives by means of social hyperactivity. They create their own myths and ideologies of overcompensation and have the tendency to egotistically insinuate to others their own deviant perceptions and the resulting goals and ideas.They would like to change this unfriendly world into something else. Dreams of power also represent overcompensation for the feeling of humiliation,…

Elsewhere these men are identified as psychopaths, and readers of this forum know that they really are “different".

What could possibly be “bad" about the “good old days?"

Hedonism, the philosophy that says the sole purpose of life is to be happy, affects the humanity and the psychopaths in different ways. For the majority of mankind

…Any excess mental effort seems like pointless labor if life’s joys appear to be available for the taking. A clever, liberal, and merry individual is a good sport; a more farsighted person predicting dire results becomes a wet-blanket killjoy.

During good times, people progressively lose sight of the need for profound reflection, introspection, knowledge of others, and an under-standing of life’s complicated laws; …subconscious factors take over a decisive role in life. During “good� times, the search for truth becomes uncomfortable because it reveals inconvenient [morally embarrassing] factors. Such contented periods,…are often rooted in some injustice to other people or nations,… It is better to think about easier and more pleasant things. Such a society considers any perception of uncomfortable truth to be a sign of “ill-breeding".

Unconscious elimination of data which are or appear to be inexpedient gradually turns to habit, then becomes a custom accepted by society at large. Any thought process based on such truncated information cannot possibly give rise to correct conclusions; it further leads to subconscious substitution of inconvenient premises [morally embarrassing premises] by more convenient [less morally embarrassing] ones, thereby approaching the boundaries of phenomena which should be viewed as psychopathological.

Those times which many people later recall as the “good old days" thus provide fertile soil for future tragedy because of the progressive devolution of moral, intellectual, and personality values which give rise to Rasputin-like eras.

Perception of the truth about the real environment, especially an understanding of the human personality and its values, ceases to be a virtue during the so-called “happy" times; thoughtful doubters are decried as meddlers who cannot leave well enough alone. This leads to an impoverishment of psychological knowledge, the capacity of differentiating the properties of human nature and personality, and the ability to mold minds creatively.

And how do “the good old days" affect the second strand of humanity, the one that seeks power over other men?

When communities lose the capacity for psychological reason and moral criticism, the processes of the generation of evil are intensified at every social scale, whether individual or macrosocial, until they revert to “bad" times.

When a few generations’ worth of “good-time" insouciance results in societal deficit regarding psychological skill and moral criticism, this paves the way for pathological plotters, snake-charmers, and even more primitive impostors to act and merge into the processes of the origination of evil. They are essential factors in its synthesis.

During stable times which are ostensibly happy, albeit marked by injury to individuals and nations, doctrinaire people believe they have found a simple solution to fix such a world. Such a historical period is always characterized by an impoverished psychological world-view, a schizoidally impoverished psychological world-view thus does not stand out during such times and is accepted as legal tender. These doctrinaire individuals characteristically manifest a certain contempt with regard to moralists then preaching the need to rediscover lost human values and to develop a richer, more appropriate psychological world-view.

Schizoid characters aim to impose their own conceptual world upon other people or social groups, using relatively controlled pathological egotism and the exceptional tenacity derived from their persistent nature. They are thus eventually able to overpower another individual’s personality, which causes the latter’s behavior to turn desperately illogical. They may also exert a similar influence upon the group of people they have joined. They are psychological loners who feel better in some human organization, wherein they become zealots for some ideology, religious bigots, materialists, or adherents of an ideology with satanic features. If their activities consist of direct contact on a small social scale, their acquaintances easily perceive them to be eccentric, which limits their ponerogenic role. However, if they manage to hide their own personality behind the written word, their influence may poison the minds of society in a wide scale and for a long time.

The cult of power thus supplants those mental values so essential for maintaining law and order by peaceful means. A nation’s enrichment or involution regarding its psychological world-view could be considered an indicator of whether its future will be good or bad.

hysteroidal = resembling hysteria

This cycle of happy, peaceful times favors a narrowing of the world-view and an increase in egotism; societies become subject to progressive hysteria and to that final stage, descriptively known to historians, which finally produces times of despondency and confusion, that have lasted for milennia and continue to do so. The recession of mind and personality which is a feature of ostensibly happy times varies from one nation to another; thus some countries manage to survive the results of such crises with minor losses, whereas others lose nations and empires. Geopolitical factors have also played a decisive role.
The psychological features of such crises doubtless bear the stamp of the time and of the civilization in question, but one common denominator must have been an exacerbation of society’s hysterical condition. This deviation or, better yet, formative deficiency of character, is a perennial sickness of societies, especially the privileged elites. The existence of exaggerated individual cases, especially such characterized as clinical, is an offshoot of the level of social hysteria, quite frequently correlated with some additional causes such as carriers of minor lesions of brain tissue. Quantitatively and qualitatively, these individuals may serve to reveal and evaluate such times….

When perusing scientific or literary descriptions of hysterical phenomena, such as those dating from the last great increase in hysteria in Europe encompassing the quarter-century preceding World War I, a non-specialist may gain the impression that this was endemic of individual cases, particularly among woman. The contagious nature of hysterical states, however, had already been discovered and described by Jean-Martin Charcot.

It is practically impossible for hysteria to manifest itself as a mere individual phenomenon, since it is contagious by means of psychological resonance, identification, and imitation. Each human being has a predisposition for this malformation of the personality, albeit to varying degrees, although it is normally overcome by rearing and self-rearing, which are amenable to correct thinking and emotional self-discipline.

The time-cycle sketched was referred to as hysteroidal because the intensification and diminution of a society’s hysterical condition can be considered its chief measurement. It does not, of course, constitute the only quality subject to change within the framework of certain periodicity. The present chapter shall deal with the phenomenon which can emanate from the phase of maximal intensification of hysteria.

Such a sequence does not appear to result from any relatively constant laws of history; quite the contrary, some additional circumstances and factors must participate in this period of a society’s general spiritual crisis and cause its reason and social structure to degenerate in such a way as to bring about the spontaneous generation of this worst disease of society. Let us call this phenomenon “pathocracy"; this is not the first time it has emerged during the history of our planet.

The Good News About the Bad News

Bad times are not merely the result of hedonistic regression to the past; they have a historical purpose to fulfill. Suffering, effort, and mental activity during times of imminent bitterness lead to a progressive, generally heightened, regeneration of lost values, which results in human progress. Unfortunately, we still lack a sufficiently exhaustive philosophical grasp of this interdependence of causality and teleology regarding occurrences.

When bad times arrive and people are overwhelmed by an excess of evil, they must gather all their physical and mental strength to fight for existence and protect human reason. The search for some way out of the difficulties and dangers rekindles long-buried powers of discretion. Such people have the initial tendency to rely on force in order to counteract the threat; they may, for instance, become “trigger-happy" or dependent upon armies. Slowly and laboriously, however, they discover the advantages conferred by mental effort; improved understanding of the psychological situation in particular, better differentiation of human characters and personalities, and, finally, comprehension of one’s adversaries. During such times, virtues which former generations relegated to literary motifs regain their real and useful substance and become prized for their value. A wise person capable of furnishing sound advice is highly respected.

Difficult and laborious times give rise to values which finally conquer evil and produce better times. The succinct and accurate analysis of phenomena, made possible thanks to the conquest of the expendable emotions and egotism characterizing self-satisfied people, opens the door to causative behavior, particularly in the areas of philosophical, psychological, and moral reflection; this tips the scale to the advantage of goodness. If these values were totally incorporated into humankind’s cultural heritage, they could sufficiently protect nations from the next era of errors and distortions.

An Invitation

In order to overcome something whose origin is shrouded in the mists of time immemorial, we often feel we must battle the ever-turning windmills of history. However, the end goal of such effort must be the possibility that an objective understanding of human nature and its eternal weaknesses, plus the resulting transformation of societal psychology, may enable us effectively to counteract or prevent the destructive and tragic results sometime in the not too distant future.

Our times are exceptional, and suffering now gives rise to better comprehension than it did centuries ago. This understanding and knowledge fit better into the total picture, since they are based on objective data. Such a view therefore becomes realistic, and people and problems mature in action. Such action should not be limited to theoretical contemplations, but rather, acquire organization and form.

In order to facilitate this, let us consider the selected questions and the draft of a new scientific discipline which would study evil, discovering its factors of genesis, insufficiently understood properties, and weak spots, thereby outlining new possibilities to counteract the origin of human suffering.