In previous posts I have commented on some of the psychological dynamics of Trump and the political dynamics of his followers. In this post I like to explore the rather dark territory of their interaction in rather clinical terminology necessary to get a sane and objective grip on this otherwise very disturbing phenomenon. I will execute this with the help of a relatively unknown inter-disciplinary research program named ‘political ponerology’ which addresses pathological processes on a social and political scale.
Previously I addressed the logic of how libertarian conservatives following politicians like Ron and Rand Paul could have become authoritarian conservatives following someone like Trump.[1] This had to do with the increased intolerance of some conservatives, which one researcher saw as the product of one’s innate authoritarian tendencies amplified by one’s threat perception, with the important caveat that perceived threats could be both real and imagined. This formula — Intolerance = Authoritarian Disposition x Threat Perception — came out very handy in explaining this shift in conservative preferences.
The logic seems to be that when libertarians perceive grave threats (like real socioeconomic downturns and/or imagined conspiracies) to their social and political world (which concept might also be a mix of real and imagined components), this threat perception might then trigger intolerance towards ‘others’ depending on how big their innate authoritarian dispositions are.
Secondly I addressed the idea that, because Trump displays such self-aggrandizing and cruel behavior to others, the US electorate is entitled to a professional assessment of his mental health even though that might involve breaking the Goldwater Rule forbidding professional psychologists, psychiatrists and psychotherapists to make diagnostic statements on public figures.[2] This is important because familiarity with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or just engaging serious psychological websites will lead directly to the idea that it is highly probable that Trump suffers from one kind or another of narcissism, either just a curable malignant narcissistic character trait or even irreversible Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).
What I had not addressed is the question of how a narcissistic leader and an intolerant following might interact and amplify each other leading to possibly catastrophic results. What I had in mind was something of an inter-disciplinary, macro-social framework combining psychology, sociology, history and political science. When I read Norbert Elias’ great The Civilizational Process I thought to have found such a framework as he addressed the process by which a civilization generates personality structures with increased impulse control and capacity to empathize, and also generates correlative political structures monopolizing violence and pacifying parts of society.[3]
Elias sees this process going in spurts and counter-spurts and it looked very probable that Trump and his followers were displaying a collective regressive behavior characteristic of a civilizational counter-spurt as they arguably deliberately reject both outer and inner impulse-control mechanisms and start railing against elites, regulations, taxes, political correctness, feminism, environmentalism and outsiders, and instead start to extol nationalism, militarism, authoritarianism, political violence, repressive security measures and censorship. Except for some scattered comments, Elias did not look into the mechanism itself by which a regressive political movement gains power and infects the rest of society with its deviations.
To get a more filled out picture of this mechanism one has to dig into a relatively small research program surreptitiously started by the Polish psychologist Andrew Lobaczewski and friends while they studied psychology when Poland was ruled by a repressive Communist regime.[4] With their understanding of psychopathology and first-hand observations of the regime and their agents they had plenty of empirical material to work with.
These studies culminated in a manuscript which got lost twice, but after careful reconstruction was published in Polish in 1984 with an English translation in 1998. The English title is Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes. This is a very serious, bit depressing, but also very enlightening study which is now promoted by a group of academics and should get more exposure and funding as it addresses the process by which organizations, political parties and whole countries can get infested and hijacked by the pathological behavior of only a few individuals.
The key terminology is composed of concepts formed with root words like patho-, i.e. severe psychological deviance, and ponero-, i.e. manifest evil which can become politically organized and lead to oppressive regimes, the study of which Lacobzewski named ‘political ponerology’.
In a very abbreviated form the study highlights how certain organizations become ‘ponerogenic associations’, i.e. organizations either started or taken over by charateropathic or psychopathic individuals in which normal persons become increasingly marginalized or become spellbound by its leadership and lose the capacity to recognize its deviant behavior. Once a ponerogenic organization becomes an influential political entity–enabled by the natural ignorance and weakness of otherwise normal people in the rest of the population–there is the chance that it will infect a country’s elite, something which Lobaczewski calls ‘hysterization’ or ‘macropathy’. Once an elite, or faction, comes to power it becomes that country’s ‘pathocracy’.
One of the key concepts is what Lobazewski names the ‘First Criterion of Ponerogenesis’:
“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 fascinated, heroic, or melodramatic ways”.[6]
A commentator paraphrased this quote as follows:
“When a group has succumbed to pathological influence its members soon lose the ability to distinguish normal human behavior from pathological. This atrophy of critical faculties in relation to such individuals becomes an opening to their activities. It can also be used to identify potentially dangerous groups”.[7]
Lobaczewski presents a fine-grained analysis of this process of how otherwise normal people get into the habit of ignoring morally inconvenient facts in their society which leads to the impossibility of drawing valid conclusions. To compensate for that lack of veracity people become more confused, emotional, irrational and egotistical, and start perceiving non-existent conspiracies and dangers. Then, when the deviation from reality has grown quite extensive, people will become susceptible for manipulation by con-men and psychologically deviant individuals.
Lobaczewski discerns patterns and cycles in Europe and the US and his translators and commentators have extended his analyses to the Bush II administration. Lobaczewski thinks–writing in the 1980s–that the US is actually suffering from ‘macropathy’ possibly leading to a ‘pathocracy’ and should maybe be cut up in 13 pieces because smaller countries, like in Europe, have a better chance to detect and manage macropathic tendencies.[5] He thinks Europe had its ‘hysterical’ cycle from 1890 till the start of World War I at which point widespread war and revolution took over and many countries fell for Communist or Fascist pathocracies. After World War II western Europe was getting much better, having learned some bitter lessons. Lobaczewski projected quite positive developments in Europe into the beginning of the 20th century, which might be confirmed by the many quality of life statistics in most European social democratic countries. The editor of the book, in her running comments of the text in her footnotes, thinks that it was especially the neoconservative Bush II administration which harbored political psychopaths like Bush himself, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rove (with Rice and Powell as spellbound demi-normal persons). There is no mention of Kennedy, Carter, Clinton or other Democrats.
My sense is that the ponerological categories developed by Lobaczewski are eminently applicable to Trump and his followers and that the liberal Democrats, especially Sanders, represent a typical European slant towards a more humane and sane social democracy, though many corporate Democrats are quite beholden to the US power elite and the policies developed by its long-term policy think tank the Council on Foreign Relations, such that I expect Clinton to endorse an adjusted version of the TPP.
Many commentators think that Trump is not merely an unfortunate deviation of otherwise lofty Republican principles, but is the logical outcome of decades of build-up resentments against taxes, regulations, immigrants, minorities, feminists, scientists, etc. In that sense a Trump administration would be the continuation and intensification of the Bush II neoconservative pathocracy. The encouraging development this time is that the more decent people in the GOP are becoming aware of the dangerously deviant nature of Trump. Many prominent Republicans are finally distancing themselves from Trump, because of his predatory sexual attitudes and dangerous pronouncements about the democratic process itself. They see he is really unhinged and dangerous and they have just enough decency and critical faculty to more or less say ‘enough is enough’. Fortunately the American electorate tends towards rejection of Trump too and will throw the election to Clinton, probably in a landslide [not!].
If these ponerological categories apply then the US really has a very serious problem, especially if the left-over Trump followers coalesce into a genuine, but very deplorable, Amero-fascist movement. The big question will be if this movement will become a hard or soft Fascist movement, and if normal, decent people will detect this phenomenon and will be able to manage it in a wise manner. Lobaczewski’s research program of political ponerology will help.
Naperville, 21 Oct 2016
Initially posted on facebook
[1]. Schuller, Govert. “On Trump: Intolerance and Authoritarianism“. Alpheus. 20 Feb 2017.
[2]. Schuller, Govert. “On Trump: Diagnosing 301.81 and the Goldwater Rule“. Alpheus. 21 Feb 2017.
[3]. Schuller, Govert. “On Trump: Elias, Civilization and Trump“. Alpheus. 24 Feb 2017.
[4]. Lobaczewski, Andrew. Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes. Red Pill Press, 2006 [1998].
[5]. Lobaczewski, 57.
[6]. Lobaczewski, 158.
[7]. “The Genesis of Evil“. Political ponerology web Site.
