The second chapter sketched the human instinctive substratum’s role in our personality development, the formation of the natural world-view, and societal links and structures. We also indicated that our social, psychological, and moral concepts, as well as our natural forms of reaction, are not adequate for every situation with which life confronts us. We generally wind up hurting someone if we engage our natural concepts and reactive archetypes in situations which seem to be appropriate to our imaginings, although they are in fact essentially different. As a rule, such different situations allowing para-appropriate reactions occur because some pathological factor difficult to understand has entered the picture. The practical value of our natural world-view generally ends where psychopathology begins.
Familiarity with this common weakness of human nature and the normal person’s “naïveté” is part of the specific knowledge we find in many psychopathic individuals, as well some characteropaths.
Spellbinders of various schools attempt to provoke such para-appropriate reactions from other people in the name of their specific goals, or in the service of their reigning ideologies. That hard-to-understand pathological factor is then located within the spellbinder himself.
Egotism: We call egotism the attitude, subconsciously conditioned as a rule, to which we attribute excessive value to our instinctive reflex, early acquired imaginings and habits, and individual world-view. Egotism fosters the domination of subconscious life and makes it difficult to accept disintegrative states, which hampers a personality’s normal evolution. This in turn favors the appearance of the above-mentioned para-appropriate reactions. An egotist measures other people by his own yardstick, treating his concepts and experiential manner as objective criteria. He would like to force other people to feel and think very much the same way he does.
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The kind of excessive egotism which hampers the development of human values and leads to misjudgment and terrorization of others well deserves the title “king of human faults”. Difficulties, disputes, serious problems, and neurotic reactions sprout up around such an egotist like mushrooms after a rainfall.
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We can differentiate between primary and secondary egotism. The former comes from a more natural process, namely the child’s natural egotism and egotizing child-rearing errors. The secondary one occurs when a formerly better de-egotized personality regresses to this state, which leads to an artificial attitude characterized by greater aggression and social noxiousness. Excessive egotism is a constant property of the hysterical personality, whether their hysteria be primary or secondary.
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If we analyze development of excessively egotistical personalities, we find some non-pathological causes, such as having been raised in a constricted and overly routine environment or by persons less intelligent than the child. However, the main reason is contamination, through psychological induction, by excessively egotistical or hysterical persons who developed this characteristic under the influence of various pathological causes. ...
Many people with various hereditary deviations and acquired defects develop pathological egotism. For such people, forcing others in their environment, whole social groups, and, if possible, entire nations to feel and think like themselves becomes an internal necessity, a ruling concept.
Some game a normal person would not take seriously becomes an often lifelong goal for them, the object of effort, sacrifices, and cunning psychological strategy.
Pathological egotism derives from repressing from one’s field of consciousness any objectionable, self-critical associations referring to one’s own nature or normality.
Dramatic question such as “who is abnormal here, me or this world of people who feel and think differently?” are answered in the world’s disfavor. Such egotism is always linked to a dissimulative attitude, with a Cleckley mask or some other pathological quality being hidden from consciousness, both one’s own and that of other people. The greatest intensity of such egotism can be found in the prefrontal characteropathy described above.
The importance of the contribution of this kind of egotism to the genesis of evil thus hardly needs elaboration. It is a primarily societal resource, egotizing or traumatizing others, which in turn causes further difficulties.
Pathological egotism is a constant component of variegated states wherein someone who appears to be normal (although he is in fact not quite so) is driven by motivations or battles for goals a normal person considers unrealistic or unlikely. The average person asks: “What could he expect to gain by that?”. Environmental opinion, however, interprets such a situation in accordance with “common sense” and is prone to accept a “more likely” version of occurrences. Such interpretation often results in human tragedy. We should thus always remember that the principle of law cui prodest becomes illusory whenever some pathological factor enters the picture.
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If we analyze the reasons why some people frequently overuse such emotionally-loaded interpretations, often indignantly rejecting a more correct interpretation, we shall of course also discover pathological factors acting within them. Intensification of this tendency in such cases is caused by repressing from the field of consciousness any self-critical concepts concerning their own behavior and its internal reasons. The influence of such people causes this tendency to intensify in others.
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Paramoralisms: The conviction that moral values exist and that some actions violate moral rules is so common and ancient a phenomenon that it seems to have some substratum at man’s instinctive endowment level (although it is certainly not totally adequate for moral truth), and that it does not only represent centuries’ worth of experience, culture, religion, and socialization. Thus, any insinuation closed in moral slogans is always suggestive, even if the “moral” criteria used are just an “ad hoc” invention. Any act can thus be proved to be immoral or morally proper by means of such paramoralisms through active suggestion, and people whose minds will succumb to such reasoning can always be found.
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The conversive features in the genesis of paramoralisms seem to prove they are derived from mostly subconscious rejection (and repression from the field of consciousness) of something completely different, which we call the voice of conscience. ... various pathological factors participate in the tendency to use paramoralisms. ... this tendency intensifies in egotists and hysterics, and its causes are similar. Like all conversive phenomena, the tendency to use paramoralisms is psychologically contagious.
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Reversive blockade: Emphatically insisting upon something which is the opposite of the truth blocks the average person’s mind from perceiving the truth. In accordance with the dictates of healthy common sense, he starts searching for meaning in the “golden mean” between the truth and its opposite, winding up with some satisfactory counterfeit. People who think like this do not realize that this was precisely the intent of the person who subjected them to this method. If such a statement is the opposite of a moral truth, at the same time, it simultaneously represents an extreme paramoralism, and bears its peculiar suggestiveness.
We rarely see this method being used by normal people; even if raised by the people who abused it, they usually only indicate its results in the shape of characteristic difficulties in apprehending reality properly.
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Information selection and substitution: ... Unconscious psychological processes outstrip conscious reasoning, both in time and in scope, which makes many psychological phenomena possible: including those generally described as conversive, such as subconscious blocking out of conclusions, the selection, and, also, substitution of seemingly uncomfortable premises.
We speak of blocking out conclusions if the inferential process was proper in principle and has almost arrived at a conclusion and final comprehension within the act of internal projection, but becomes stymied by a preceding directive from the subconscious, which considered it inexpedient or disturbing. This is primitive prevention of personality disintegration, which may seem advantageous; however, it also prevents all the advantages which could be derived from consciously elaborated conclusion and reintegration.
A conclusion thus rejected remains in our subconscious and in a more unconscious way causes the next blocking and selection of this kind. This can be totally harmful, progressively enslaving a person to his own subconscious, and is often accompanied by a feeling of tension and bitterness.
We speak of selection of premises whenever the feedback goes deeper into the resulting reasoning and from its database thus deletes and represses into the subconscious just that piece of information which was responsible for arriving at the uncomfortable conclusion. Our subconscious then permits further logical reasoning, except that the outcome will be erroneous in direct proportion to the actual significance of the repressed data. An ever-greater number of such repressed information is collected in our subconscious memory. Finally, a kind of habit seems to take over: similar material is treated the same way even if reasoning would have reached an outcome quite advantageous to the person.
The most complex process of this type is substitution of premises thus eliminated by other data, ensuring an ostensibly more comfortable conclusion. Our associative ability rapidly elaborates a new item to replace the removed one, but it is one leading to a comfortable conclusion. This operation takes the most time, and it is unlikely to be exclusively subconscious. Such substitutions are often effected collectively, in certain groups of people, through the use of verbal communication. That is why they best qualify for the moralizing epithet “hypocrisy” than either of the above-mentioned processes.
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Our subconscious may carry the roots of human genius within, but its operation is not perfect; sometimes it is reminiscent of a blind computer, especially whenever we allow it to be cluttered with anxiously rejected material. This explains why conscious monitoring, even at the price of courageously accepting disintegrative states, is likewise necessary to our nature, not to mention our individual and social good.
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Those people who use conversive operations too often for the purpose of finding convenient conclusions, or constructing some cunning paralogistic or paramoralistic statements, in time undertake such behavior for ever more trivial reasons, losing the capacity for conscious control over their thought process. ...
SPELLBINDERS
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, 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.
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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.
