A book about psychopathy and politics entitled Political Ponerology: A science on the nature of evil as adapted for political purposes is soon to be published. The author, Andrew M. Lobaczewski, is a Polish psychologist. Now 84, he was part of a secret research project in Eastern Europe under communist rule collecting data from his clinical work.
He noticed a high correlation between acts we would classify as "evil" and pathologies that were able to be clinically diagnosed in the perpetrators.
One of the points that Lobaczewski makes is that psychopaths are aware of their difference from normal people. They have a certain special knowledge that comes from their study of us, and they are experts in manipulation. Moreover, the smarter ones work together to orient social movements and whole societies when they come to power in the direction of pathological values.
Different pathological types play different roles at different moments in the development of a social movement, until, at the end, the essential psychopaths have taken over control. Lobaczewski looks at how these different types work together. His analysis suggests that the dominant ideology that brings the pathocracy to power is less important than the pathological underpinnings, which is why fascism, communism, and, more and more, democracies, share the same dynamic.
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