Book Review: Political Ponerology

By David Josef Volodzko

This article is by journalist and recent TRIGGERnometry guest, David Josef Volodzko. You can read David’s own Substack here.

---

As the West wakes to the threat of woke ideology, the warnings of former KGB informant Yuri Bezmenov are finally getting the attention they deserve. But as I made clear in an essay for these pages on how Marxism subverted America, we ignored his bleak prophecy far too long and now the damage is already done.

Reflecting on who else is being ignored at our peril, one name stands out—that of the Polish psychiatrist Andrzej Łobaczewski.

In his book Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes, Łobaczewski (loo-bah-CHEV-ski) argues that certain pathologies, particularly psychopathy, can become socially contagious, infiltrating institutions of democracy and reshaping entire societies.

During World War II, Łobaczewski served in the Polish Home Army before studying psychiatry at Jagiellonian University, where he was able to pursue his research free from Soviet influence. He later developed the concept of ponerology, or the “study of evil,” arguing that societies tend to swing between times of plenty, when elites suppress inconvenient truths, and times of want, when society reckons with those suppressed truths.

Consider Claudine Gay, Harvard’s disgraced former president. Despite plagiarizing her doctoral thesis about getting more black candidates elected and spending her tenure as Art and Sciences dean focused on DEI and anti-racism, the first thing she did after former Obama official Penny Pritzker selected her as the university’s first black president was to target black scholars for being insufficiently woke, including the renowned economist Roland Fryer over his research showing that police do not shoot more blacks than whites.

This is the privileged class suppressing an inconvenient truth. But already it feels we have entered a new era—a woke reckoning, if you will—and as Łobaczewski explains, in periods of reckoning, the intelligentsia and broader society have an opportunity to confront reality and recover their moral values.

As Konstantin Kisin has argued, we currently find ourselves in a crisis of meaning, seeking to recover those values, and trying to regain some degree of political sanity in the process.

During times of reckoning, we witness the collapse of the societal “hysteria” that was fostered by the privileged classes, a hysteria that typically allows pathological individuals to gain influence.

Łobaczewski writes, “A pathocracy must constantly attack and weaken normal institutions, from the judiciary to education, to ensure that normal people remain disoriented and powerless.”

He argued that cycles of societal “hysteria” lead to the normalization of pathological behaviors, enabling “spellbinders” and psychopaths to rise to power, often by using ideological masks.

This process culminates in what Łobaczewski calls a pathocracy—a government turned against its own people, where virtue signaling matters more than the actual welfare of the citizenry. Think of DEI bureaucracies, which have transformed universities from places of open inquiry into ideological branding corrals. Or the degradation of entire cities such as Oakland and San Francisco.

“An objective observer might wish to compare this state,” he writes, “to one in which the inmates of an asylum take over the running of the institution.”

Łobaczewski believed pathocracies self-destruct due to incompetence. But he also believed that, as insanity grips society, many conform but many others quietly lean away while a small minority pushes back. When that minority finally tips the balance, the silent majority often joins in, creating opportunities for rapid and sweeping recovery.

Łobaczewski describes how pathological leaders exploit existing social tensions to expand their power. Over time, they “ponerize” entire groups, transforming healthy social structures into ones that perpetuate cruelty, oppression, and moral inversion—all while using the language of compassion and empathy.

He writes, “The influence of a small pathological minority can grow significantly when it manages to install itself within positions of authority, as their psychological traits facilitate deception, manipulation, and the suppression of dissent."

This perhaps explains why surveys show a supermajority of Palestinians support the psychopathic violence of Hamas. Because when the privileged elites running your society are Hamas, it’s no surprise when your society begins to echo Hamas values.

At its heart, Political Ponerology seeks to answer the question: How does evil become normalized within societies such as Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia? Łobaczewski argues that psychopathy—typically about 1% of the population—can gain disproportionate influence when such people infiltrate positions of power.

These pathological individuals, often charismatic and manipulative, exploit existing social tensions and weaknesses (anti-white sentiment among blacks, antisemitic sentiment among Palestinians) to propagate their distorted worldview.

This explains the modern rise of evil chic and the pattern among woke leftists of cheering on the likes of Hamas, Hezbollah, the psychopathic dictator Vladimir Lenin, or the murderer Luigi Mangione.

In these cases, pathological leaders exploited fear (such as the fear of being called racist), economic instability, and collective grievances (over perceived systemic racism, systemic sexism, war in Gaza) to reshape societal norms. Crucially, Łobaczewski emphasizes that this process is rarely recognized by the majority, who unwittingly become complicit by adopting the language, values, and behaviors of the pathological minority because, again, all this is communicated in the language of compassion—and most folks want to be good people.

But while Łobaczewski focuses on psychopathy as a primary driver of societal pathology, his framework invites application to other psychological conditions.

One that comes to mind is narcissism. The DSM-V lists nine criteria for diagnosing narcissism, including a sense of superiority, taking advantage of others to achieve your own ends, and a belief that you deserve special treatment. Today, this manifests in movements that elevate perceived victimhood to a state of moral virtue.

Of course, this is not restricted to the left. On the reactionary right, societal narcissism manifests as hyper-nationalism, conspiracy theories, and a nostalgia for a romanticized past. Pathological leaders on both sides exploit collective grievances to consolidate power.

Łobaczewski’s ponerology provides a framework for understanding our world, but will we heed the message in time? The question isn’t whether the woke hysteria will end—it’s already ending—but how much we’ll lose before the reckoning arrives.