While I am sure that POLITICAL PONEROLOGY is an excellent book, it is predated by Hannah Arendt's THE ORIGIN OF TOTALITARIANISM and THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TOTALITARIANISM by Mattias Desmet.
I appreciate the title of your own book: it brings back fond memories of Mel Brooks' SPRINGTIME FOR HITLER.
Speaking of Dr. Reich, his Orgone Box may see a revival. With the advent of 5G, I'm seeing lots of Orgone Accumulators on the Internet. Good news! They are pretty little tabletop gizmos and they have prevented me from catching cancer. Yippee!
Political Ponerology is ponderously written and hard to understand. I did a summary in the Banker's chapter of Cassandra's Memo, free download here: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/t2feeen29q
Terrific overview. We don’t have to look far to find the garden variety psychopaths amongst our midst. The ones that didn’t make it to the higher echelon of society: the lady in your dance class, the teacher at the middle school, the uncle who comes over for Thanksgiving and always starts shit. They’re everywhere. Political Ponerology was one of the inspirations for my latest article Psychopathia if anyone cares to take a gander. I posit the unpopular opinion about needing psychopaths in our society: https://open.substack.com/pub/visceraladventure/p/psychopathia?r=xi283&utm_medium=ios
Please remind me to refrain from reading your responses with coffee in my mouth…”the uncle who comes over for Thanksgiving and always starts shit.” Too funny! I know exactly what you are talking about! Thanks for the laugh!
Thank you for wonderful research and dissemination of so many important subjects. I always walk away with a new set of knowledge and knowledge in some subjects I would not have otherwise known or had occasion to learn. I do well to make ends meet and while I believe your stack definitely deserves a subscription the best I can do is to give you my sincere thanks for making it freely available. ♥️
"As you will see, we are lucky to have this book. It took three separate written attempts to get it to us.":
I don't understand. The 3rd edition is sold on Amazon. I have the 1st Kindle edition; I don't know the differences other than that the cover has changed.
OK, I see. I may have been reading just after I woke up.
These are all the published version. I vaguely seem to remember seeing an earlier pre-publication version with a peculiar preface, possibly 15 or 20 years ago, possibly the surviving manuscript itself. I did not keep a copy.
The book and accompanying group discussions, years ago, proved quite helpful for understanding the events of the past several years as they unfolded.
Various psychology-like individuals tend to make up complex models of how bad things happen. They give these creations more or less sophisticated names, thus truly inventing (embodying) new monsters. Then, big schools of thoughts are being founded to teach these complex theories and to further classify and subclassify this and that. The most recent invention of this type was the Desmet’s concept of “mass formation psychosis”, welcomed by some fame-hungry entrepreneurs and ridiculed by some well-established psychologists.
It’s all a lot of words and of little practical value other than “ah, now I know” stuff. Why does it happen?
There are simple catalogs of behaviors and personal traits which are not welcome by the community. In the old traditions, they are enumerated as religious precepts. The Ten Commandments are probably the most known of these catalogs. None of these old traditions saw any need to spin more theories and invent complex terminology.
Similar simple catalogs exist and are developed in small communities to meet their particular needs, like the code of ethics in business settings. Simple, clear, no fancy theories, understandable to anyone who can read.
We don’t need anything else. Actually, the more such mental aerobatics is supported and applauded, the easier is to invent loopholes and exceptions and immunities - and to perpetrate things which are unheard of in communities guided by simple rules. “Gain of function” is a good example here. It’s a fairy tale ornamented with loads of money, offering a lot of high-paid pseudo jobs (lawyers, researchers, scientists, marketing, media contacts and more), all based upon the complex concept undermining the simple rule: “Thou shall not interfere with what you do not understand.” Mixed up with copyright, patents, public funds, outsourcing and other complex mental aerobatics, the resulting chain of violations of the basic, natural (in atheistic, or scientific view) or God-given (in theistic view) order of things is only a departure point for more useless theories.
Before the printing press and before the concept of royalties, nobody would ever fantasized such theories. Life is too simple for that. We only need simple sets of basic rules to follow so that this life is good for everyone involved.
You might be interested in the work of David A. Hughes as well. I have been trying to make sense of what I saw in “research”. I wish I had asked more questions at that time. His work explains some of it.
While I am sure that POLITICAL PONEROLOGY is an excellent book, it is predated by Hannah Arendt's THE ORIGIN OF TOTALITARIANISM and THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TOTALITARIANISM by Mattias Desmet.
I appreciate the title of your own book: it brings back fond memories of Mel Brooks' SPRINGTIME FOR HITLER.
Also predated by Wilhelm Reich's The Mass Psychology of Fascism, 1933.
Speaking of Dr. Reich, his Orgone Box may see a revival. With the advent of 5G, I'm seeing lots of Orgone Accumulators on the Internet. Good news! They are pretty little tabletop gizmos and they have prevented me from catching cancer. Yippee!
He wrote this before his Bion experiments where he discovered radiation emitted from decomposing matter.
Thanks, Tami. I love to learn things on Substack.
Political Ponerology is ponderously written and hard to understand. I did a summary in the Banker's chapter of Cassandra's Memo, free download here: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/t2feeen29q
Here are a couple of posts I did about this, including an interview with a psychopath expert https://robertyoho.substack.com/p/149-testing-for-psychopathsthe-stuff?utm_source=publication-search and https://robertyoho.substack.com/p/162-my-interview-with-a-psychopath?utm_source=publication-search
Terrific overview. We don’t have to look far to find the garden variety psychopaths amongst our midst. The ones that didn’t make it to the higher echelon of society: the lady in your dance class, the teacher at the middle school, the uncle who comes over for Thanksgiving and always starts shit. They’re everywhere. Political Ponerology was one of the inspirations for my latest article Psychopathia if anyone cares to take a gander. I posit the unpopular opinion about needing psychopaths in our society: https://open.substack.com/pub/visceraladventure/p/psychopathia?r=xi283&utm_medium=ios
Please remind me to refrain from reading your responses with coffee in my mouth…”the uncle who comes over for Thanksgiving and always starts shit.” Too funny! I know exactly what you are talking about! Thanks for the laugh!
😝
Thank you for wonderful research and dissemination of so many important subjects. I always walk away with a new set of knowledge and knowledge in some subjects I would not have otherwise known or had occasion to learn. I do well to make ends meet and while I believe your stack definitely deserves a subscription the best I can do is to give you my sincere thanks for making it freely available. ♥️
There is an excellent substack devoted to this urgent topic!
https://ponerology.substack.com/
Also please check out Patrick Wood's superb research on TECHNOCRACY which is the evil of Ponerology by another name: https://patrickwood.substack.com/
This is very important work. Thank you for sharing this!
"As you will see, we are lucky to have this book. It took three separate written attempts to get it to us.":
I don't understand. The 3rd edition is sold on Amazon. I have the 1st Kindle edition; I don't know the differences other than that the cover has changed.
The first two drafts were destroyed, when he came to the US he wrote a third draft which is what we have today.
OK, I see. I may have been reading just after I woke up.
These are all the published version. I vaguely seem to remember seeing an earlier pre-publication version with a peculiar preface, possibly 15 or 20 years ago, possibly the surviving manuscript itself. I did not keep a copy.
The book and accompanying group discussions, years ago, proved quite helpful for understanding the events of the past several years as they unfolded.
Thank you, I will read Lobaczewski’s book since it seems to address the times we live in.
Thanks so much for this particular stack!!
I bought this book last year, and have made several attempts to get through it.
However it is very heavy reading, and not at all designed for skimmers like myself, lol.
Your stack helps a great deal!
It’s all mental aerobatics.
Various psychology-like individuals tend to make up complex models of how bad things happen. They give these creations more or less sophisticated names, thus truly inventing (embodying) new monsters. Then, big schools of thoughts are being founded to teach these complex theories and to further classify and subclassify this and that. The most recent invention of this type was the Desmet’s concept of “mass formation psychosis”, welcomed by some fame-hungry entrepreneurs and ridiculed by some well-established psychologists.
It’s all a lot of words and of little practical value other than “ah, now I know” stuff. Why does it happen?
There are simple catalogs of behaviors and personal traits which are not welcome by the community. In the old traditions, they are enumerated as religious precepts. The Ten Commandments are probably the most known of these catalogs. None of these old traditions saw any need to spin more theories and invent complex terminology.
Similar simple catalogs exist and are developed in small communities to meet their particular needs, like the code of ethics in business settings. Simple, clear, no fancy theories, understandable to anyone who can read.
We don’t need anything else. Actually, the more such mental aerobatics is supported and applauded, the easier is to invent loopholes and exceptions and immunities - and to perpetrate things which are unheard of in communities guided by simple rules. “Gain of function” is a good example here. It’s a fairy tale ornamented with loads of money, offering a lot of high-paid pseudo jobs (lawyers, researchers, scientists, marketing, media contacts and more), all based upon the complex concept undermining the simple rule: “Thou shall not interfere with what you do not understand.” Mixed up with copyright, patents, public funds, outsourcing and other complex mental aerobatics, the resulting chain of violations of the basic, natural (in atheistic, or scientific view) or God-given (in theistic view) order of things is only a departure point for more useless theories.
Before the printing press and before the concept of royalties, nobody would ever fantasized such theories. Life is too simple for that. We only need simple sets of basic rules to follow so that this life is good for everyone involved.
Anyone in Western Australia who was awake during the McGowan years clocked this right away.
Thank you...word of the day! 😀
I have seen this first hand in government.
You might be interested in the work of David A. Hughes as well. I have been trying to make sense of what I saw in “research”. I wish I had asked more questions at that time. His work explains some of it.
Thanks Elizabeth. Yes, I am interested in Hughes's work.
In case you missed this one.
https://unbekoming.substack.com/p/killing-granny
I did miss that one. Thank you.
Interesting....
Here are a few of the posts I have done on this subject:
https://robertyoho.substack.com/p/the-global-predators-plan-to-eat?utm_source=publication-search
https://robertyoho.substack.com/p/162-my-interview-with-a-psychopath?utm_source=publication-search
https://robertyoho.substack.com/p/149-testing-for-psychopathsthe-stuff?utm_source=publication-search