Paranoid character disorders: It is characteristic of paranoid behavior for people to be capable of relatively correct reasoning and discussion as long as the conversation involves minor differences of opinion. This stops abruptly when the partner’s arguments begin to undermine their overvalued ideas, crush their long-held stereotypes of reasoning, or force them to accept a conclusion they had subconsciously rejected before. Such a stimulus unleashes upon the partner a torrent of pseudo-logical, largely paramoralistic, often insulting utterances which always contain some degree of suggestion.
Utterances like these inspire aversion among cultivated and logical people, but they enslave less critical minds, e.g. people with other kinds of psychological deficiencies, who were earlier the objects of the egotistical influence of individuals with character disorders, and in particular a large part of the young.
A proletarian may perceive this to be a kind of victory over higher-class people and thus take the paranoid person’s side. However, this is not the normal reaction among the common people, where perception of psychological reality occurs no less often than among intellectuals.
In sum then, the response of accepting paranoid argumentation is qualitatively more frequent in reverse proportion to the civilization level of the community in question, although it never approaches the majority.
Nevertheless, paranoid individuals become aware of their enslaving influence through experience and attempt to take advantage thereof in a pathologically egotistic manner.
We know today that the psychological mechanism of paranoid phenomena is twofold: one is caused by damage to the brain tissue, the other is functional or behavioral. Within the above-mentioned process of rehabilitation, any brain-tissue lesion causes a certain degree of loosening of accurate thinking and, as a consequence, of the personality structure.
Most typical are those cases caused by an aggression in the diencephalon by various pathological factors, resulting in its permanently decreased tonal ability, and similarly of the tonus of inhibition in the brain cortex. Particularly during sleepless nights, runaway thoughts give rise to a paranoid changed view of human reality, as well as to ideas which can be either gently naive or violently revolutionary. Let us call this kind paranoid characteropathy.
In persons free of brain-tissue lesions, such phenomena most frequently occur as a result of being reared by people with paranoid characteropathia, along with the psychological terror of their childhood. Such psychological material is then assimilated creating the rigid stereotypes of abnormal experiencing. This makes it difficult for thought and world-view to develop normally, and the terror-blocked contents become transformed into permanent, functional, congestive centers. [...]
In order to comprehend ponerogenic paths, especially those acting in a wider social context, let us observe the roles and personalities of individuals we shall call “spellbinders”, who are highly active in this area in spite of their statistically negligible number.
They are generally the carriers of various pathological factors, some characteropathies, and some inherited anomalies. Individuals with malformations of their personalities frequently play similar roles, although the social scale remains small (family or neighborhood) and does not cross certain boundaries of decency.
Spellbinders are characterized by pathological egotism. Such a person is forced by some internal causes to make an early choice between two possibilities: the first is forcing other people to think and experience things in a manner similar to his own; the second is a feeling of being lonely and different, a pathological misfit in social life. Sometimes the choice is either snake-charming or suicide.
Triumphant repression of self-critical or unpleasant concepts from the field of consciousness gradually gives rise to the above-mentioned phenomena of conversion thinking, or paralogistics, paramoralisms, and the use of reversion blockades. They wind up streaming so profusely that they flood the average person’s mind.
Everything becomes subordinated to their over-compensatory conviction that they are exceptional, sometimes even messianic.
An ideology emerges, true in part, whose value is supposedly superior.
However, if we analyze the exact functions of such an ideology in the spellbinder’s personality, we perceive that it is a means of self-charming, useful for repressing those tormenting self-critical associations into the subconscious.
This ideology’s instrumental role in influencing other people also serves the spellbinder’s needs.
When they extrapolate their earlier experiences and thus believe they will always find converts to the ideology they propound, these spell-binders are not wrong. They only feel shock (or even paramoral indignation) when it turns out that their influence extends to a limited minority, whereas most people’s attitude to their activities remains critical, pained and disturbed.
The spellbinder is thus confronted with a choice: either withdraw back into his void or strengthen his position by improving the effectiveness of his activities.
The spellbinder places on a high moral plane anyone who has succumbed to his influence and incorporated the experiential method he imposes. He showers such people with attention and property, if possible.
Critics are met with “moral” outrage. It can even be proclaimed that the compliant minority is in fact the moral majority (Bolsheviks), since it professes the best ideology and honors a leader whose qualities are above average.
Such activity is always necessarily characterized by the inability to foresee its final results, something obvious from the psychological point of view, because its substratum contains pathological phenomena, and both spellbinding and self-charming make it impossible to perceive reality accurately enough to foresee results logically.
However, spellbinders nurture great optimism and harbor visions of future triumphs similar to those they enjoyed over their own crippled souls.
It is also possible for optimism to be a pathological symptom.
In a healthy society, the activities of spellbinders meet with criticism effective enough to stifle them quickly. However, when they are preceded by conditions operating destructively upon common sense and social order; such as social injustice, cultural backwardness, or intellectually limited rulers sometimes manifesting pathological traits, spellbinders’ activities have led entire societies into large-scale human tragedy.
Such an individual fishes an environment or society for people amenable to his influence, deepening their psychological weaknesses until they finally join together in a ponerogenic union.
On the other hand, people who have maintained their healthy critical faculties intact, based upon their own common sense and moral criteria, attempt to counteract the spellbinders’ activities and their results.
In the resulting polarization of social attitudes, each side justifies itself by means of moral categories. That is why such commonsense resistance is always accompanied by some feeling of helplessness and deficiency of criteria.
The awareness that a spellbinder is always a pathological individual should protect us from the known results of a moralizing interpretation of pathological phenomena, ensuring us an objective criteria for more effective action. Explaining what kind of pathological substratum is hidden behind a given instance of spellbinding activities should enable a modern solution to such situations.
It is a characteristic phenomenon that a high giftedness quotient, especially such measured by means of typical IQ tests, causes a man to be more immune to spellbinding activities only to a moderate degree. Actual differences in the formation of human attitudes under the influence of such activities should be attributed to other properties of human nature. The most decisive factor in assuming a critical attitude is good basic intelligence, which conditions our perception of psychological reality. We can also observe how a spellbinder’s activities “husk out” amenable individuals with an astonishing regularity. [...]
Frontal characteropathy: The frontal areas of the cerebral cortex (10A and B acc. to the Brodmann division) are virtually present in no creature except man; they are composed of the phylogenetically youngest nervous tissue. Their cyto-architecture is similar to the much older visual projection areas on the opposite pole of the brain. This suggests some functional similarity. The author has found a relatively easy way to test this psychological function, which enables us to grasp a certain number of imaginary elements in our field of consciousness and subject them to internal contemplation.
The capacity of this act of internal projection varies greatly from one person to another, manifesting a statistical correlation with similar variegation in the anatomical extent of such areas. The correlation between this capacity and general intelligence is much lower. As described by researchers (Luria et al.), the functions of these areas, thought-process acceleration and coordination, seem to result from this basic function.
Damage to this area occurred rather frequently: at or near birth, especially for premature infants, and later in life as a result of various causes. [...]
Brain cortex damage in these areas selectively impairs the above mentioned function without impairing memory, associative capacity, or, in particular, such instinct-based feelings and functions as, for instance, the ability to intuit a psychological situation. The general intelligence of an individual is thus not greatly reduced. Children with such a defect are almost normal students; difficulties emerge suddenly in upper grades and affect principally these parts of the curriculum which place burden on the above function.
The pathological character of such people, generally containing a component of hysteria, develops through the years. The non-damaged psychological functions become overdeveloped to compensate, which means that instinctive and affective reactions predominate.
Relatively vital people become belligerent, risk-happy, and brutal in both word and deed. Persons with an innate talent for intuiting psychological situations tend to take advantage of this gift in an egotistical and ruthless fashion. In the thought process of such people, a short cut way develops which bypasses the handicapped function, thus leading from associations directly to words, deeds, and decisions which are not subject to any dissuasion. Such individuals interpret their talent for intuiting situations and making split-second oversimplified decisions as a sign of their superiority compared to normal people, who need to think for long time, experiencing self-doubt and conflicting motivations. [.b]
The fate of such creatures does not deserve to be pondered long.
Such “Stalinistic characters” traumatize and actively spellbind others, and their influence finds it exceptionally easy to bypass the controls of common sense. A large proportion of people tend to credit such individuals with special powers, thereby succumbing to their egotistic beliefs.
If a parent manifests such a defect, no matter how minimal, all the children in the family evidence anomalies in personality development. [...]
Comparative considerations also led the author to conclude that Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, also known as Stalin, should be included in the list of this particular ponerogenic characteropathy, which developed against the backdrop of perinatal damage to his brain’s prefrontal fields. Literature and news about him abounds in indications: brutal, charismatic, snake-charming; issuing of irrevocable decisions; inhuman ruthlessness, pathologic revengefulness directed at anyone who got in his way; and egotistical belief in his own genius on the part of a person whose mind was in fact average. This state explains as well his psychological dependence on a psychopath like Beria . Some photographs reveal the typical deformation of his forehead which appears in people who suffered very early damage to the areas mentioned above. [...]
One phenomenon all ponerogenic groups and associations have in common is the fact that their members lose (or have already lost) the capacity to perceive pathological individuals as such, interpreting their behavior in a fascinated, heroic, or melodramatic way. The opinions, ideas, and judgments of people carrying various psychological deficits are endowed with an importance at least equal to that of outstanding individuals among normal people.
The atrophy of natural critical faculties with respect to pathological individuals becomes an opening to their activities, and, at the same time, a criterion for recognizing the association in concern as ponerogenic. Let us call this the first criterion of ponerogenesis.
Another phenomenon all ponerogenic associations have in common is their statistically high concentration of individuals with various psychological anomalies. [...]
In order to have a chance to develop into a large ponerogenic association, however, it suffices that some human organization, characterized by social or political goals and an ideology with some creative value, be accepted by a larger number of normal people before it succumbs to a process of ponerogenic malignancy. The primary tradition and ideological values may then for a long time protect a union which has succumbed to ponerization process from the healthy common sense of society, especially its less critical components.
When the ponerogenic process touches such a human organization, which emerged and acted in the name of political or social goals whose causes were conditioned in history and the social situation, the original group’s primary values will nourish and protect such a union, in spite of the fact that those primary values succumb to characteristic degeneration, the practical function becoming completely different from the primary one, because the names and symbols are retained. [...]
Within each ponerogenic union, a psychological structure is created which can be considered a counterpart or caricature of the normal structure of society or a societal organization. Individuals with various psychological aberrations complement each other’s talents and characteristics. This structure is subjected to diachronic modification with regard to changes in the character of the association as whole. The earlier phase of the union’s activity is usually dominated by characteropathic, particularly paranoid, individuals, who often play an inspirational or spellbinding role in the ponerization process. At this point in time, the union still indicates certain romantic features and is not yet characterized by excessively brutal behavior. Soon, however, the more normal members are pushed into fringe functions and are excluded from organizational secrets; some of them thereupon leave such a union.
Individuals with inherited deviations then progressively take over the inspirational and leadership positions. The role of essential psychopaths gradually grows, although they like to remain ostensibly in the shadows (e.g. directing small groups), setting the pace gray-eminence style. In ponerogenic unions on the largest social scales, the leadership role is generally played by a different kind of individual, one more easily digestible and representative. Examples include frontal characteropathy, or some more discreet complex of lesser taints.
A spellbinder at first simultaneously plays the leader in a ponerogenic group. Later there appears another kind of “leadership talent”, a more vital individual who often joined the organization later, once it has already succumbed to ponerization. The spellbinding individual, being weaker, is forced to come to terms with being shunted into the shadows and recognizing the new leader’s “genius”, unless he accepts the threat of total failure. Roles are parceled out. The spellbinder needs support from the primitive but decisive leader, who in turn needs the spellbinder to uphold the association’s ideology, so essential in maintaining the proper attitude on the part of those members of the rank and file who betray a tendency to criticism and doubt of the moral variety. The spellbinder must repackage the ideology, appropriately, sliding new contents under old titles, so that it can continue fulfilling its propaganda function under ever-changing conditions. He has also to uphold the leader’s mystique inside and outside the association. Complete trust cannot exist between the two, however, since the leader secretly has contempt for the spellbinder and his ideology, whereas the spellbinder despises the leader for being such a coarse individual. The showdown is always probable; whoever is weaker becomes the loser.
The structure of such a union undergoes further variegation and specialization. A chasm opens between the more normal masses and the elite initiates, who are, as a rule, more pathological. This later subgroup becomes ever more dominated by hereditary pathological factors, the former by the after-effects of various diseases affecting the brain, less typically psychopathic individuals, and people whose malformed personalities were caused by early deprivation or brutal child-rearing methods on the part of pathological individuals. There is less and less room for normal people in the group. The leaders’ secrets and intentions are kept hidden from the union’s proletariat; the products of the spellbinders’ work must suffice for this segment. [...]
We have sketched the properties of unions in which the ponerogenic process has transformed their original content into a pathological counter-part thereof and modified its structure and its later changes in a manner sufficiently wide-scale to encompass the greatest possible scope of this kind of phenomena, from the smallest to the largest social scale. The general rules governing those phenomena appear to be at least analogous, independent of the quantitative, social, and historical scale of such a phenomenon. [...]
It is a common phenomenon for a ponerogenic association or group to contain a particular ideology which always justifies its activities and furnishes certain propaganda motives. Even a small-time gang of hoodlums has its own melodramatic ideology and pathological romanticism. Human nature demands that vile matters be haloed by an over-compensatory mystique in order to silence one’s conscience and to deceive consciousness and critical faculties, whether one’s own or those of others.
If such an ponerogenic union could be stripped of its ideology, nothing would remain except psychological and moral pathology, naked and unattractive. Such stripping would of course provoke “moral outrage”, and not only among the members of the union; even normal people, who condemn this kind of union along with its ideologies, would feel hurt, deprived of something constituting part of their own romanticism, their way of perceiving reality. Perhaps even some of the readers of this book will resent the author’s stripping evil so unceremoniously of all its literary motifs. The job of effecting such a “strip-tease” may thus turn out to be much more difficult and dangerous than expected. [...]
An ideology of a secondarily ponerogenic association is formed by gradual adaptation of the primary ideology to functions and goals other than the original formative ones. A certain kind of layering or schizophrenia of ideology takes place during the ponerization process. The outer layer closest to the original content is used for the group’s propaganda purposes, especially regarding the outside world, although it can in part also be used inside with regard to disbelieving lower-echelon members. The second layer presents the elite with no problems of comprehension: it is more hermetic, generally composed by slipping a different meaning into the same names. Since identical names signify different contents depending on the layer in question, understanding this “doubletalk” requires simultaneous fluency in both languages. [...]
The ideology of unions affected by such degeneration has certain constant factors regardless of their quality, quantity, or scope of action: namely, the motivations of a wronged group, radical righting of the wrong, and the higher value of the individuals who have joined the organization. These motivations facilitate sublimation of the feeling of being wronged and different, caused by one’s own psychological failings, and appear to liberate the individual from the need to abide by uncomfortable moral principles.
In the world full of real injustice and human humiliation, making it conducive to the formation of an ideology containing the above elements, a union of its converts may easily succumb to degradation.
At this time those people with a tendency to accept the better version of the ideology shall also long tend to justify such ideological duality. The ideology of the proletariat, which aimed at revolutionary restructuring of the world, was already contaminated by a schizoid deficit in the form of an understanding of, and trust for, human nature; small wonder, then, that it easily succumbed to a process of typical degeneration in order to nourish and disguise a macro-social phenomenon whose basic essence is completely different. [...]
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. [...]
For future reference, let us remember: ideologies do not need spellbinders. Spellbinders need ideologies in order to subject them to their own deviant goals. [...]
Thus, if we intend to understand the secondary ponerization process and the contents of human associations which succumb to it, our consciousness should separate that original ideology from its counterpart, or even caricature, created by the ponerogenic process. Abstracting from any ideology, we must, by analogy, understand the essence of the process itself, which has its own etiological causes which are potentially present in every society, as well as characteristic developmental patho-dynamics. [...]
Observation of the ponerization processes of various human unions throughout history easily leads to the conclusion that the initial step is a moral warping of the group’s ideational contents. The contamination of ideology can be analyzed by means of its infiltration by more earthly foreign contents, thereby depriving it of healthy support in trust for and understanding of human nature. This opens the way for invasion by pathological factors and the ponerogenic role of their carriers. [...]
Any human group affected by the process described herein is characterized by its increasing regression as regards natural common sense and the ability to perceive psychological reality. Someone treating this in traditional categories could consider it an instance of “turning into half-wittedness” or the growing of intellectual deficiencies and moral failings.
A ponerological analysis of this process, however, indicates that pressure is applied upon the more normal part of the association by pathological factors in the person of their carriers.
Thus, whenever we observe some group member being treated with no critical distance, although he betrays one of the psychological anomalies familiar to us, and his opinions being treated as at least equal to those of normal people, although they are based on a characteristically different view of human matters, we must derive the conclusion that this human group is affected by ponerogenic process. We shall treat this in accordance with the above described first criterion of ponerology, which retains its validity regardless of the qualitative and quantitative features of such a union. [...]
Observing the appropriate state corresponding to the first ponerological criterion requires skillful psychology and specific factual knowledge; the second, more stable phase can be perceived both by a person of average reason and by public opinion in most societies. [...]
The first researchers attracted by the idea of objectively understanding this phenomenon initially failed to perceive the role of characteropathic personalities in the genesis of pathocracy. However, when we attempt to reconstruct the early phase of said genesis, we must acknowledge that characteropaths played a significant role in this process. We already know from the preceding chapter how their defective experiential and thought patterns take hold in human minds, insidiously destroying their way of reasoning and their ability to utilize their healthy common sense. This role has also proved essential because their activities as fanatical leaders or spellbinders in various ideologies open the door to psychopathic individuals and the view of the world they want to impose.
In the ponerogenic process of the pathocratic phenomenon, characteropathic individuals adopt ideologies created by doctrinaire, often schizoidal people, recast them into an active propaganda form, and disseminate it with pathological egotism and paranoid intolerance for any philosophies which may differ from their own. They also inspire further transformation of this ideology into its pathological counterpart. Something which had a doctrinaire character and circulated in numerically limited groups is now activated at societal level, thanks to their spellbinding possibilities. [...]
In any society in this world, psychopathic individuals and some of the other deviants create a ponerogenically active network of common collusions, partially estranged from the community of normal people. Some inspirational role of the essential psychopathy in this network also appears to be a common phenomenon. They are aware of being different as they obtain their life-experience and become familiar with different ways of fighting for their goals.
Their world is forever divided into “us and them”; their little world with its own laws and customs and that other foreign world full of presumptuous ideas and customs in light of which they are condemned morally. Their sense of honor bids them to cheat and revile that other human world and its values. In contradiction to the customs of normal people, they feel non-fulfillment of their promises or signatures is customary behavior.
They also learn how their personalities can have traumatizing effects on the personalities of those normal people, and how to take advantage of this root of terror for purposes of reaching their goals. This dichotomy of worlds is permanent and does not disappear even if they succeed in realizing their youthful dream of gaining power over the society of normal people. This proves that the separation is biologically conditioned.
In such people a dream emerges like some youthful Utopia of a “happy” world and a social system which would not reject them or force them to submit to laws and customs whose meaning is incomprehensible to them. They dream of a world in which their simple and radical way of experiencing and perceiving reality would dominate, where they would of course be assured safety and prosperity. Those “others”, different, but also more technically skillful, should be put to work to achieve this goal. “We”, after all, will create a new government, one of justice.
They are prepared to fight and to suffer for the sake of such a brave new world, and also, of course, to inflict suffering upon others. Such vision justifies killing people, whose suffering does not move them to compassion because “they” are not quite conspecific. They do not realize that they will consequently meet with opposition which can last for generations.
Subordinating a normal person to psychologically abnormal individuals has a deforming effect on his personality: it engenders trauma and neurosis. This is accomplished in a manner which generally evades sufficient conscious controls. Such a situation then deprives the person of his natural rights: to practice his own mental hygiene, develop a sufficiently autonomous personality, and utilize his common sense. In the light of natural law, it thus constitutes a kind of illegality--which can appear in any social scale--although it is not mentioned in any code of law.
We have already discussed the nature of some pathological personalities, e.g. frontal characteropathy. Essential psychopathy has exceptionally intense effects in this manner. Something mysterious gnaws into the personality of an individual at the mercy of such a person and is then fought like a demon. His emotions become chilled, his sense of psychological reality is stifled. This leads to de-criterialization of thought and a feeling of helplessness, culminating in depressive reactions which can be so severe that psychiatrists sometimes misdiagnose them as a manic-depressive psychosis. Many people evidently also rebel much earlier and start searching for some way of liberating themselves from such an influence.
Many other life-situations involve less mysterious results of many other psychological anomalies upon normal people (which are always unpleasant and destructive) and their carriers’ unscrupulous drive to dominate and take advantage of others. Governed by unpleasant experiences and feelings, as well as natural egoism, societies thus have good reason to reject such people, helping to push them into marginal positions in social life, including poverty and criminality.
It is unfortunately almost the rule that such behavior is amenable to moralizing justification in our natural world-view categories. Most members of society feel entitled to protect their own persons and property and enact legislation for that purpose. Being based on natural perception of phenomena, and on emotional motivations instead of an objective understanding of the problems, such laws are in no position to safeguard the kind of order and safety we would like; those others perceive them as a force which needs to be battled.
Such a social structure dominated by normal people and their conceptual world easily appears a “system of force and oppression” to individuals with various psychological deviations. Psychopaths reach such a conclusion as a rule.
If a good deal of injustice does in fact exist in a given society, pathological feelings of unfairness and suggestive statements can resonate among those who have truly been treated unfairly. Revolutionary doctrines may then find approval among both groups, although their motivations will actually be quite different.
