The psychopaths in power

[Plus audio version]

“Imagine – if you can – not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of strangers, friends or even family members.

“Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, hurtful, or immoral action you had taken.

“And pretend that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools.

“Now add to this strange fantasy the ability to conceal from other people that your psychological makeup is radically different from theirs.

“Since everyone simply assumes that conscience is universal among human beings, hiding the fact that you are conscious-free is nearly effortless.

“You are not held back from any of your desires by guilt or shame, and you are never confronted by others for your cold-bloodedness.

“The ice water in your veins is so bizarre, so completely outside of their personal experience, that they seldom even guess at your condition.

“In other words, you are completely free of internal restraints, and your unhampered liberty to do just as you please, with no pangs of conscience, is conveniently invisible to the world.

“You can do anything at all, and still your strange advantage over the majority of people, who are kept in line by their consciences, will most likely remain undiscovered”. [1]

This passage comes from a book by Martha Stout entitled The Sociopath Next Door, although it could just as well describe The Psychopaths in Power.

I came across it in a book heartily recommended to me by a reader from New York whom I recently met up with while he was visiting Europe.

The title sounded familiar to me and when I got home I found it sitting, as yet unread, in a bookcase.

It had in fact been passed to me by a like-minded Englishman in Portugal some 12 or 13 years ago, who had astutely considered that it might interest me.

I put to one side at the time, as it was a bit outside the areas I was then researching, and it waited patiently, much of the time in a cardboard box, until the moment was ripe for me to digest its contents.

So, with many thanks to both those gentlemen, I will now take a look at Political Ponerology: A science on the nature of evil adjusted for political purposes by Andrew M. Lobaczewski.

The background to the book’s publication by Red Pill Press in 2006 is a story in its own right.

The publishers received a letter from Lobaczewski announcing: “I am a very aged clinical psychologist. Forty years ago I took part in a secret investigation of the real nature and psychopathology of the macro-social phenomenon called ‘Communism’”. [2]

The research, which he carried out with older scientists now deceased, had to be secret because it was taking place in Poland, which was then under the jackboot of the Soviet empire.

The communist system’s functioning was in many ways close to that of the current globalist system, except that it was further advanced on the path to totalitarianism along which we are currently being herded.

So it was that after Lobaczewski had finished his original manuscript, working during the early hours of the morning before going to work, he was warned of an “official search” of his home and just managed to dispose of it in a central-heating furnace before the Thought Police turned up.

He adds: “I sent the second draft to a Church dignitary at the Vatican by means of an American tourist and was absolutely unable to obtain any kind of information about the fate of the parcel once it was left with him”. [3]

Lobaczewski was eventually able to make his way to the USA, full of hope that the “freedom” of the West would allow the publication of his work on ponerology – the term was created by two Greek philologists/monks from poneros, the Greek for evil. [4]

By 1985, he had finished the third version of the manuscript and it had been translated into English.

But, he relates: “All the Red nodes and networks in New York were mobilized to organize a counteraction against the information in this book being made publicly and widely available.

“It was terrible to learn that the overt system of suppression I had so recently escaped was just as prevalent, though more covert, in the United States”. [5]

Red Pill Press explain the involvement in this process of a well-known Polish-born “anti-communist” deep state agent. [6]

“Zbigniew Brzezinski, while singing words of praise for the manuscript and saying he would see it published in fact did his best, successfully, to see the book did not get into print”. [7]

Twenty years after this vast disappointment, an ageing Lobaczewski retyped the “already fading” manuscript on to a computer and made his final, successful, bid to get his message across to the world. [8]

Another 20 years on, the subject of the book is more relevant than ever, after the literal genocide carried out by Zionist monsters in Gaza, with the collaboration of their puppet global “leaders”.

New resonance is thus given to editor Laura Knight-Jadczyk’s 2006 preface in which she writes: “For as long as human hearts have pumped hot blood through their too fragile bodies and glowed with the inexpressible sweetness of life and yearning for all that is good and loving, the sneering, stalking, drooling and scheming beast of unconscious evil has licked its lips in anticipation of its next feast of terror and suffering”. [9]

“This book is not just about macrosocial evil, it is also about everyday evil, because, in a very real sense, the two are inseparable.

“The long-term accumulation of everyday evil always and inevitably leads to Grand Systemic Evil that destroys more innocent people than any other phenomenon on this planet”. [10]

And Lobaczewski himself makes it clear that his use of the term “evil” is not metaphorical, insisting that “it is possible to glimpse supernatural causality“. [11]

He remarks on how relatively little has been said in our culture about the nature and causes of evil, suggesting that perhaps whatever people said about this in the past “was expunged and hidden by those very forces they sought to expose”. [12]

He says that evil is like “a disease” [13] afflicting an individual’s mind.

“People with various psychological deviations have always existed in every society on earth. Their way of life is always some form of predation upon society’s economic creativity, since their own creative capabilities are generally substandard”. [14]

In the words of Dr Stout, whose analysis began this article: “What distinguishes all of these people from the rest of us is an utterly empty hole in the psyche, where there should be the most evolved of all humanizing functions”. [15]

Adds Knight-Jadczyk: “It seems to be that the psychopath enjoys making others suffer. Just as normal humans enjoy seeing other people happy, or doing things that make other people smile, the psychopath enjoys the exact opposite”. [16]

Describing a category he calls “essential psychopaths”, Lobaczewski explains: “They become experts in our weaknesses and sometimes effect heartless experiments.

“The suffering and injustice they cause inspire no guilt within them, since such reactions from others are simply a result of their being different and apply only to ‘those other’ people they perceive to be not quite conspecific”. [17]

Lobaczewski says these psychopaths, mistaking their callous skills in manipulation for superior intelligence, often create the myth that they have a “brilliant mind or psychological genius”. [18]

He adds: “Some of them actually believe in this and attempt to insinuate this belief to others”. [19]

Coldness, mendacity and lack of self-awareness combine to chilling effect in the character of the psychopath, as set out in a quotation from Hervey Cleckley’s book The Mask of Sanity.

He writes: “Although he deliberately cheats others and is quite conscious of his lies, he appears unable to distinguish adequately between his own pseudointentions, pseudoremorse, pseudolove, etc, and the genuine responses of a normal person.

“His monumental lack of insight indicates how little he appreciates the nature of his disorder.

“When others fail to accept immediately his ‘word of honor as a gentleman’, his amazement, I believe, is often genuine.

“His subjective experience is so bleached of deep emotion that he is invincibly ignorant of what life means to others”. [20]

In the words of one team of researchers who studied psychopaths: “They are arrogant, manipulative, cynical, exhibitionistic, sensation-seeking, Machiavellian, vindictive, and out for their own gain.

“With respect to their patterns of social exchange, they attribute love and status to themselves, seeing themselves as highly worthy and important, but prescribe neither love nor status to others, seeing them as unworthy and insignificant”. [21]

As such, they represent the opposite of neurotic patients who suffer from excessive and often misplaced guilt and shame. [22]

Lobaczewski writes: “One of the most disturbing things about psychopaths that normal people must deal with is the fact that they very early learn how their personalities can have traumatizing effects on the personalities of those normal people, and how to take advantage of this root of terror for purposes of reaching their goals.

“This dichotomy of worlds is permanent and does not disappear even if they succeed in realizing their youthful dream of gaining power over the society of normal people.

“This strongly suggests that the separation is biologically conditioned”. [23]

Lobaczewski warns that this “small but active minority, who cannot be considered normal” may be statistically small in numbers but the severity of their difference “is such that it can affect hundreds, thousands, even millions of other human beings in negative ways”. [24]

People with severe mental illness can be difficult for others to cope with on a personal basis, but when they get together in groups to seek power over the rest of us they represent a serious danger to society.

Lobaczewski explains that the result can be a “pathocracy” in which “a certain hereditary anomaly isolated as ‘essential psychopathy’ is catalytically and causatively essential for the genesis and survival of large scale social evil”. [25]

“Psychopathic individuals and some of the other deviant types create a ponerogenically active network of common collusions, particularly estranged from the community of normal people…

“Their world is forever divided into ‘us and them’; their little world with its own laws and customs and that other foreign world of normal people that they see as full of presumptuous ideas and customs by which they are condemned morally.

“Their sense of honor bids them to cheat and revile that other human world and its values at every opportunity”. [26]

He uses the term “ponerogenic association” to describe a network of psychopaths.

“We could list various names ascribed to such organizations by linguistic tradition: gangs, criminal mobs, mafias, cliques, and coteries, which cunningly avoid collision with the law while seeking to gain their own advantage.

“Such unions frequently aspire to political power in order to impose their expedient legislation upon societies in the name of a suitably prepared ideology, deriving advantages in the form of disproportionate prosperity and the satisfaction of their craving for power”. [27]

“When a ponerogenic process encompasses a society’s entire ruling class, or nation, or when opposition from normal people is stifled – as a result of the mass character of the phenomenon, or by using spellbinding means and physical compulsion, including censorship – we are dealing with a macrosocial ponerologic phenomenon”. [28]

Since such people make a point of hiding their sickness in order to advance their interests, they need an apparent cause behind which to unite and advance.

Lobaczewski says: “They are psychological loners who then begin to feel better in some human organization, wherein they become zealots for some ideology, religious bigots, materialists, or adherents of an ideology with satanic features”. [29]

“Such people easily interpenetrate the social structure with a ramified network of mutual pathological conspiracies poorly connected to the main social structure.

“These people and their networks participate in the genesis of that evil which spares no nation”. [30]

The most obvious area in which this evil flourishes is in the world of money. “Psychopaths love the business world”, notes Knight-Jadczyk in her preface. [31]

And she quotes Ken Magid and Carole A. McKelvey who remark: “Our society is fast becoming more materialistic, and success at any cost is the credo of many businessmen.

“The typical psychopath thrives in this kind of environment and is seen as a business ‘hero’”. [32]

The psychopathic pursuit of profit is dressed up as some kind of good cause by presenting it as providing much-needed “economic growth”, “prosperity” or “progress” – an essential goal of any society which must always supersede old-fashioned and non-productive values aimed at living honourable and healthy lives in sharing and loving communities.

In general, because psychopaths are gifted with low cunning, rather than with high intelligence or creativity, [33] their favoured method is to identify an existing set of beliefs and then turn it round into a vehicle for their own power.

Lobaczewski, like his fellow Christian Jacques Ellul, [34] sees a corruption of the Church as having paved the way for this phenomenon.

“It appears obvious that religious systems have also succumbed to ponerogenic processes” [35] he says, pointing to the way in which a faith originally based on a message of peace was spread “through bloody persecutions and ultimate compromises with Rome’s power and law”. [36]

He says that “Christianity inherited Roman habits of legal thinking, including its indifference to human nature and its variety” and that this influence “divested Christianity of some of its profound primeval psychological knowledge”.

“This civilization was insufficiently resistant to evil“. [37]

Political ideologies present the clearest instances of psychopathic manipulation.

Says Lobaczewski: “When the ponerogenic process touches such a human organization, which originally emerged and acted in the name of political or social goals, and whose causes were conditioned in history and the social situation, the original group’s primary values will nourish and protect such a union, in spite of the fact that those primary values succumb to characteristic degeneration, the practical functions becoming completely different from the primary one, because the names and symbols are retained”. [38]

“The ideology of any social movement, even if it is sacred truth, can yield to the ponerization process”. [39]

Gradually, the more normal members of a group are pushed out, to be replaced by psychopathic types.

“People are observed and tested to eliminate those characterized by excessive mental independence or psychological normality”. [40]

Key to the political deceit is the use of a double language, writes Lobaczewski.

“The outer layer closest to the original content is used for the group’s propaganda purposes, especially regarding the outside world, although it can in part also be used inside with regard to disbelieving lower-echelon members.

“The second layer presents the elite with no problems of comprehension: it is more hermetic, generally composed by slipping a different meaning into the same names.

“Since identical names signify different contents depending on the layer in question, understanding this ‘doubletalk’ requires simultaneous fluency in both languages”. [41]

At this stage, he says, “using the ideological name of the movement in order to understand its essence becomes a keystone of mistakes” [42] and it is important to understand that “the ideological cloak (or some other ideology which cloaked similar phenomena in the past) does not constitute its essence”. [43]

The manipulation carried out by the psychopath-controlled movement also targets people’s perceptions of right and wrong – in its inverted language of lies “anything which threatens pathocratic rule becomes deeply immoral” [44] and dissident defenders of decency are labelled “mentally abnormal”. [45]

The cumulative effect of all this brainwashing is that much of the population becomes almost incapable of understanding the true situation, explains Lobaczewski.

“Many people suffer an inevitable shock and react with opposition, protest and disintegration of their human personality when informed of such a state of affairs, namely that they have been under the spellbinding and traumatizing influence of a macrosocial pathological phenomenon”. [46]

The psychopaths’ attempts to establish total control are so extreme because they know full well what they are doing and feel “permanently threatened by the ‘others’, i.e. by the majority of normal people”. [47]

“Such a threat must be battled by means of any and all psychological and political cunning implemented with a lack of scruples with regard to those other ‘inferior-quality’ people that can be shocking in its depravity”. [48]

The idea of normal people regaining control of their societies is a nightmare scenario for the evil ruling caste, says Lobaczewski.

“Thus the biological, psychological, moral, and economic destruction of the majority of normal people becomes, for the pathocrats, a ‘biological’ necessity“. [49]

The deliberate staging of wars forms part of these efforts, he argues.

They pick a fight “with an obstinate, well-armed foe who would devastate and debilitate the human power thrown at him, namely the very power jeopardizing pathocrats’ rule: the sons of normal man sent out to fight for an illusionary ‘noble cause’.

“Once safely dead, the soldiers will then be decreed heroes to be revered in paeans, useful for raising a new generation faithful to the pathocracy and ever willing to go to their deaths to protect it”. [50]

We can all no doubt think of some examples of how political movements have been taken over and used in the way that Lobaczewski describes.

Adolf Hitler’s “National Socialist” movement in Germany took authentic anger at that country’s treatment at the hands of the WWI Allies and the rule of the global banking system – along with associated völkisch ideals of cultural self-determination – and turned all of that into a fanatical industrial-militarist death cult which would utterly destroy Germany and its culture by means of a second world war.

As I explained in a book review earlier this year, we now know that this was the work of ZIM, the zio-satanic imperialist mafia. [51]

The environmental movement has, in recent years, been turned away from love of nature and hatred of industrialism to become a tool for enforcing the system’s authoritarian agenda on supposedly “green” and “ethical” grounds.

In the USA we have seen how the growing anger of ordinary people at the loss of their quality of life and their freedom was harnessed to bring to power a president who has revealed himself to be a blatant puppet of the murderous Zionist entity which has used America for its own purposes.

But the instance of ideological capture with which Lobaczewski was most familiar was the “communism” which dominated the Poland in which he grew up.

He refers to the “indoctrination lectures” introduced at his university when he was a young man, [52] a methodology which rhymes strangely with recent news that 600 “training sessions on antisemitism” are to be given by Zionists in UK universities. [53]

He also writes of the difficulties in carrying out his dissident studies during “the wave of post-Stalin repression and secret arrests of researchers in the early sixties”. [54]

He describes the “communist” regime as “a full-blown condition of macrosocial evil”. [55]

And he specifically mentions the role of the work of Karl Marx in aiding evil psychopathic control, [56] confirming what I wrote earlier this year in ‘Karl Marx and the throb of evil’. [57]

Lobaczewski also ventures into territory that has led to what the editors describe as “subtle attempts to discredit this most important of works”. [58]

He writes, for instance, regarding schizoid types: “Low emotional pressure enables them to develop proper speculative reasoning, which is useful in non-humanistic spheres of activity, but because of their one-sidedness, they tend to consider themselves intellectually superior to ‘ordinary’ people.

“The quantitative frequency of this anomaly varies among races and nations: low among Blacks, the highest among Jews. Estimates of this frequency range from negligible up to 3%”. [59]

That last figure is important because it makes it clear that the vast majority of Jewish people are, of course, not deviant or psychopathic.

Lobaczewksi stresses: “The nineteenth century, especially in its latter half, appears to have been a time of exceptional activity on the part of schizoidal individuals, often but not always of Jewish descent.

“After all, we have to remember that 97% of all Jews do not manifest this anomaly and that it also appears among all European nations, albeit to a markedly lesser extent.

“Our inheritance from this period includes world-images, scientific traditions, and legal concepts flavored with the shoddy ingredients of a schizoidal apprehension of reality”. [60]

It is important to make a clear distinction between Jewish people per se and the little group of psychopaths, today going under the name of Zionists, whose self-defence involves pretending that an attack on their mafia is an attack on all Jewish people – and who must therefore rub their hands with delight every time that someone condemns “the Jews” rather than the specific perpetrators.

But at the same time, we cannot allow the fear of being labelled “anti-semitic” to distract us from the reality of the zio-satanic imperialist mafia and its nefarious control of our societies.

As editors Knight-Jadczyk and Henry See remark in a 2006 footnote: “The ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ is now well known to have been a hoaxed attribution to Jews.

“However, the contents of the Protocols are clearly not ‘hoaxed ideas’ since a reasonable assessment of the events in the United States over the past 50 years or so gives ample evidence of their application in order to bring about the current Neoconservative administration.

“Anyone who wishes to understand what has happened in the US only needs to read the Protocols to understand that some group of deviant individuals took them to heart.

“The document ‘Project for a New American Century’, produced by the Neoconservatives, reads as if it had been inspired by the same schizoid worldview”. [61]

They add later: “The Neocon-Bush administration is currently using Christian-Zionism as the ideology by which they mask pathocracy”. [62]

When we consider that ZIM created totalitarian communist and fascist states, manufactured and prolonged two world wars, controls the globalist bodies imposing the dystopian Great Reset and was responsible for conducting and covering up for the Gaza Genocide, we can hardly have any doubts about the deep connections between toxic Jewish supremacism and the contemporary reign of psychopathic evil.

[Audio version]

In the second essay in this trilogy, I will step away from ponerological theory to look at another author’s very personal experience of psychopathic power, before returning to Lobaczewski and looking at his, and the other writer’s, suggestions as to how we might escape from this civilizational nightmare.

[1] Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door (Broadway, 2005), cit. Laura Knight-Jadczyk, ‘Editor’s Preface’, Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Political Ponerology: A science on the nature of evil adjusted for political purposes, (Ponerologia Polityczna) translated by Alexandra Chciuk-Celt, edited with Notes and Commentary by Laura Knight-Jadczyk and Henry See (Grande Prairie, Alberta: Red Pill Press, 2006), pp. 10-11. All subsequent page references are to Lobaczewski’s book, unless otherwise stated.
[2] p. 19.
[3] p. 21.
[4] p. 71.
[5] pp. 23-24.
[6] For more on this phenomenon, see Paul Cudenec, ‘Fake anti-communists: ZIM’s Cold War on our culture, Part II’, https://winteroak.org.uk/2025/09/08/fake-anti-communists/
[7] p. 223.
[8] p. 24.
[9] Knight-Jadczyk, p. 8.
[10] Knight-Jadczyk, p. 9.
[11] p. 37.
[12] p. 69.
[13] p. 70.
[14] p. 206.
[15] Stout, cit. Knight-Jadczyk p. 12.
[16] Knight-Jadczyk, pp. 17-18.
[17] pp. 90-91.
[18] p. 91.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Hervey Cleckley, The Mask of Sanity (C.V. Mosby Co, 1976), p. 386, cit. p. 91.
[21] Salekin, Trobst, Krioukova, ‘Construct Validity of Psychopathy in a Community Sample: A Nomological Net Approach’, Journal of Personality Disorders 15(5) (2001), pp. 425-441, cit. Knight-Jadczyk, p. 13.
[22] p. 92.
[23] p. 98.
[24] pp. 48-49.
[25] p. 31.
[26] p. 98.
[27] p. 111.
[28] p. 121.
[29] p. 131.
[30] p. 55.
[31] p. 14.
[32] Ken Magid and Carole A. McKelvey, ‘The Psychopaths’ Favourite Playground: Business Relationships’, HIGH RISK: Children Without a Conscience (Bantam Books, 1987), cit. p. 15.
[33] p. 90.
[34] See Paul Cudenec, ‘Christianity and the forces of evil’. https://winteroak.org.uk/2025/10/01/christianity-and-the-forces-of-evil/
[35] p. 191.
[36] p. 34.
[37] p. 35.
[38] p. 113.
[39] p. 117.
[40] p. 120.
[41] p. 116.
[42] p. 133.
[43] pp. 136-37.
[44] p. 144.
[45] p. 187.
[46] p. 201.
[47] p. 145.
[48] pp. 145-46.
[49] p. 146.
[50] Ibid.
[51] Paul Cudenec, ‘Adolf Hitler and the zio-imperialist mafia’, https://winteroak.org.uk/2025/05/08/adolf-hitler-and-the-zio-imperialist-mafia/
[52] p. 25.
[53] https://x.com/Lowkey0nline/status/1977663070328771055
[54] p. 22.
[55] p. 40.
[56] p. 89.
[57] Paul Cudenec, ‘Karl Marx and the throb of evil’, https://winteroak.org.uk/2025/05/20/karl-marx-and-the-throb-of-evil/
[58] p. 221.
[59] p. 88.
[60] p. 131.
[61] Laura Knight-Jadcyzk and Henry See, p. 131.
[62] p. 191.