The best place to start when offering a review of this unusual work is to establish the context of this book as best presented in the following passages drawn from the author’s work itself.

Page 91

“ The psychopath feels little, if any guilt. He (she) can commit the most appalling acts, yet view them without remorse…. The psychopath has a warped capacity for love. His (her) emotional relationships, when they exist, are meager, fleeting, and designed to satisfy his (her) own desires. These two last traits, guiltlessness and lovelessness, conspicuously mark the psychopath as different from other men (women).

Page 89

“ They are arrogant, manipulative, sensation-seeking, Machiavellian, vindictive and out for their own gain.”

Page 90

“The world of normal people whom they hurt is incomprehensible and hostile to them, and life for the psychopath is the pursuit of its immediate attractions, moments of pleasure, and temporary feeling of power.”

Page 88

“They learn to recognize each other in a crowd as early as childhood and they develop an awareness of the existence other individuals similar to them”

The author’s delineation of Evil could be summarized as what happens when in any given period, place or circumstance psychopathic personalities network to the service of a shared purpose, goal or cause. The end result to the larger social order can be utter devastation.

The author attempts to move the understanding of Evil forward into a scientific study. A discipline if you will. This is in contrast to leaving the understanding of Evil within a traditional religious or moral construct.

The origin of this work is in the real world experience of a group of Polish student’s of psychology subjugated to the dictates of an imposed Communist regime right on the heals of a previous Nazi occupation. Andrew Lobaczewski is the last surviving member of a secret student clique matriculating at an unidentified Polish University one year from graduating. Rather then succumbing to the distortion of their education under the rule of a newly installed communist “Professor” they decided to engage in a scientific investigation of their own design under the nose of their captors. Their investigation would be to apply their previous psychological training to objectify the nature of the Evil they themselves were now subject to.

What is the benefit this? Perhaps this book for the first time in history attempts to explain the process of how a society or nation becomes prey to a small clique of psychopathic elites. Political Ponerology is the authors label to define this historically repetitive occurrence that up till now has never been understood by the masses of normal humans who have suffered at the hands of those small percentage of the population who are by definition deficient in normal human sentiment and who share the common goal of subjugating the general population of “normal” human beings down to the level of serfs. In this work the author unmasks the reasons why and the ways and the means by which these psychopaths gain control of entire countries in an effort to fulfill their secretly held desire for power that finally grants them the fulfillment they have always craved.

Once read you will never likely to view those who seek power in the same light. The book offers a maturing of ones worldview as it pertains to the power elite.

This is a very good book that attempts to find the psychological and political makeup of world leaders who have wreaked havoc and destruction on the world, causing millions of deaths throughout history, but focusing on the 19th and 20th centuries. He also tries to help us understand psychopaths who may be around us in everyday life but who don't gain fame. Evil is an important topic in his book and in the early part of his book, poignantly tells and reminds people that the prominent opinion that people are basically good but even so, some commit evil deeds. His opinion is that some in society, about six percent, are evil to begin with and don't want to do good things. Such people have a desire for power and look at others only to find ways to manipulate them and get something from then in order to gain for themselves what they want. The question of whether criminals are born or made is once again explored. The writer lived in Poland under a communist dictatorship and writes about his experience with the secret police and the totalitarian state in Poland. He had to destroy his works once because the state police were at his door. He describes some of his college teachers and how they affected some of his friends who later became oppressors in the State and tries to look to them to help describe how someone becomes sick enough in a political way to do harm to others. He evidently considers George W. Bush a psychopath, because, for one thing, he enjoyed torturing animals when he was young. People on the cover of his book are: George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Mussolini,Hitler, Stalin and other leaders, all of whom did bad things to their constituencies and other innocent people while they were in office.

This is a very hard book to read and understand and I've been trying to find some help with reading it. The author wants it to be a book for everyone to understand because everyone is in danger from political psychopaths but he writes it, in my opinion, for academics.

Jean

This manuscript is the ONLY one I've read that can actually explain WITHOUT bias, just what in hell is going on in our world. Who are these politicians and how can they behave as they do? Why don't most people 'SEE' that something isn't right with the Matrix-like system that we are 'under'? How can it be that we are ALWAYS at war, people are dieing of starvation, morality seems to mean nothing, etc. Political Ponerology puts a magnifying glass to THAT which has never been exposed and helps to answer those questions.

The time, effort, and extreme measures these researchers went through to bring this piece to publish is astonishing! The material is a bit dense, so one will definitely need to take their time when reading. Though, I think the information deserves the time, it ALSO deserves MASS attention! If only half of the population got their hands on this manuscript?! This book should be REQUIRED reading in every state and every country. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening. On a positive note I'm forever thankful that the manuscript 'Found The Light Of Day'. This book will remain in my library and I will be purchasing copies for those whom I care about.

With this book Lobaczewski has made a tremendous contribution to bringing together the disciplines of clinical psychology, sociology, and politics. While some of the text is rather academic and difficult to follow, the ideas expressed are valuable, and worth the thought. The book would greatly benefit from more examples, but (as the book points out) many of these were destroyed or lost thanks to repression in communist Poland. As a result, the book becomes more of a conceptual framework for understanding 'political ponerology'. As a historian, I greatly appreciate the few historical examples that he uses to illustrate his points. Some of these are even more apposite than the text states, and further discussion would more fully reveal what Lobaczewski was talking about. Again, however, the idea for this book was to create a new academic discipline and the terminology to support it, rather than to fully explore and research its application.

I rated the book at four stars, but the editor would get only one (and that's because I can't give negative stars). The Editor's Preface at least provides the warning that you're not dealing with somebody qualified to present such a professional work - even before the footnote acknowledging that the author has no academic degrees the writing is a pastiche of inapt literary references, a botched allusion to the Bible, political vituperation, and histrionic descriptions and metaphors (example: "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 right 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.").

The editor's footnotes are mostly benign explanations of terms or individuals mentioned (frequently sourced from Wikipedia), but with the occasional attack on George W. Bush and his administration that borders on the pathological. This occasionally verges on the absurd, as when the editor (in the context of "Schizoid characters" who "aim to impose their own conceptual world upon other people or social groups, using relatively controlled pathological egotism and the exceptional tenacity derived from their persistent nature") refers to the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion', the editor helpfully inserts a footnote explaining that these were falsely attributed to the Jews, but then goes on to say that "a reasonable [!?] assessment of the events in the United States over the past 50 years or so gives ample evidence of thir [sic] application in order to bring about the current Neoconservative administration."

We get it. You don't like Bush. Referring to it as the "Bush Reich" is a bit over the top, however, and is not fitting behavior for an editor.

Again, on the whole, the book itself is excellent, but the editing (apart from the occasional involuntary humor) is awful.

This book is the result of many decades of research by the author, a Polish clinical psychologist who lived through World War II and the Stalin era. It took over 20 years to be published, first in Polish in 1985 and finally in English in 2006. The research data was destroyed and the first manuscript (handwritten) had to be burned to save the author from imprisonment and perhaps death. The second handwritten manuscript, written from memory, was smuggled out to the Vatican and disappeared without feedback. This is the third incarnation of the manuscript.

The present edition in English translation has been corrected by the author after editing. The book discusses psychopathy and how and why all organizations and governments eventually come under attack and are converted into cancer-like entities he calls pathocracies.

The author has coined the term "ponerology" to apply to this branch of psychopathology. I find the book to be supported by the evolution of nearly all historical organizations in which power is concentrated.

This book is very hard reading, not because it needs to be, but because of tortured syntax and choice of words. However, it is groundbreaking and extremely important. It is a must read for anyone who is worried about the destruction of our form of government and the worship of the economic system we live with today, euphemistically called "free-enterprise capitalism".The rating is for the new discovery, not the literary excellence--or lack thereof.

Just finished the book. It's very heavy with psychiatric vocabulary. There is a kind of warning early in the book explaining that only specialized vocabulary can describe the subject matter. I'm dubious about that. If the message of the book is as important to the world as the author suggests, why not make a better attempt to make the book more accessible for as many readers as possible? The forward is well written...by a native English speaker I suppose. Lobaczewski's book is translated, naturally, from Polish I think. The translation is decent but I wouldn't say it's ideal for western readers. One very basic example is 'characteropathy'...a word that doesn't roll off the western tongue quite like 'personality disorder', which is what it means. This is a very simple example, and the term 'characteropathy' is explained on first use in the book...but not in the simple terms 'personality disorder'. Though we get the gist early in the book, it's only in an editor's Afterward, where characteropathy is simply described as 'personality disorder'. It kind of leaves you wondering why such a simple translation wasn't used throughout.

I'm not sure the book really answers it's own question...what is the genesis of evil...or where does evil come from? The book basically says it's hereditary, or the 'evil' individual was dropped on his head as an infant and suffered some brain lesions. It's kind of hard to prove. Anyway, I think the book has great points...namely, that the idea of evil and how it manifests on a large scale under the guise of this political ideology or that ideology needs to be studied exhaustively. The descriptions of the inter-relationship between 'evil' people and 'normal' people is useful. There's a lot of useful stuff in the book.

But, man...it's a tough read. Largely very dry and largely devoid of examples. The book is NOT accessible for a wide cross section of readers I wouldn't imagine. Mainly because of the, let's face it, clunky translation. At times I was totally engaged with the book...for much of it I was slogging through it just trying to get to the end.

After the Second World War it was expected that the Nuremberg Trials would answer, the question so many asked then and have asked since "why did it happen?" There was no answer then and very little light shed on the subject since in spite of many repetitions of the same phenomenon.

The phenomenon has been carried like a Trojan horse in the most damaged and dysfunctional of human minds since the dawn on man. Thanks to this book, this destructive meme has finally broken cover, in spite of how cleverly it has managed to hide itself up to now.

The book shows how popular movements are perverted from their original ideology to become something totally unrecognisable from their original form, inhabited at the centre by psychopaths with various levels of brain deficiencies stretching out to the neurotics on the outer edges and those who cannot be deranged forcibly ejected and hunted down.

This is a difficult read. It was originally written in Polish for academics was destroyed twice and reconstructed from memory. You may not find the translation very good but much of the terminology is from the foundation of psychology. Much of the material from this era has been destroyed by the forces this book studies. There are many subtle points so I imagine the translator erred on the side of caution. Hence, it is heavy going but well worth it.

I don't usually review books but this one is too important. This book shows a clear path to survival for the human race. This is only the second review for the kindle version. The paperback is nearly four times the price so it is a good saving. The paperback reviews can be found at the following location. Pay close attention to these. Some of the reviewers may display the phenomenon.

Political Ponerology (A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes)

This book was introduced as scientific. That is a lie! There is no verifiable data. There is no specific research to allow peer review. This book contains only opinions and speculations.

The flow of it points to a form of Eugenic elimination of her imagined bitumen.

Observe also that the writing style, vocabulary, and text organization of the writer and of the editor are the same. If this was written by Andrzej Lobaczewski, little of him remains. The book alludes to much too modern events and persons to have been written where and when claimed.

It is my conclusion that this book is more the work of the editor than of the purported author. Just check out her other books and publications. There are books about space aliens and conspiracies.

So, big caution here! Do not take this book seriously! In its favor though are two things. It does make you think. And it does have a new word 'Ponerology'.

O autor se descreve como membro da última turma do curso de psicologia na Polônia que pôde estudar com os livros dos melhores autores antes que esses livros fossem censurados pelo regime soviético.

O autor se declara um cientista e, como psicólogo, sua atitude ao estudar o problema que identifica, ou seja, os psicopatas no poder e a implantação à força do seu regime político "patocrático", no caso em tela na Polônia invadida pelos soviéticos, e seus efeitos sobre os indivíduos e na coletividade no curto e no longo prazos, um regime patológico em que os piores psicopatas detêm o poder e agridem, aterrorizam e torturam continuamente a população normal, é totalmente científica e tão isenta quanto possível, de tal maneira que algumas avaliações de compradores da Amazon classificam o autor e o seu texto como esquerdistas, sem perceber que ele busca a compreensão da maneira de pensar dos psicopatas e instruir o leitor sobre como perceber e reagir apropriadamente a essa maneira de pensar, com vistas a, no futuro, derrubar esse tipo de regime político e curar as pessoas a ele submetidas.

Espere y espere y me canse esperar.

Un gran bel libro poderoso e importante, direi indispensabile per squarciare il velo delle finzioni politiche. Peccato la brutta edizione e la brutta stampa che rende faticosa la lettura

La Ponerologie est la science de la nature du mal en politique. Le mot semble avoir été inventé par l'auteur. Le sujet, formellement important pour nous, humains, est en fait peu étudié dans un cadre vraiment scientifique. Il se traduit par les événements les plus effroyables de l'histoire de l'humanité : les guerres -traditionnelles, civiles, économiques, sanitaires- et les dictatures. L'auteur est appelé à définir le concept de pathocrate et de pathocratie. Le pathocrate n'est pas un fou mais un individu entièrement dépourvu de sens moral (donc d'empathie). Son anormalité est invisible : elle lui permet les raisonnements froids qui assurent la réussite sociale puisque l'écrasement de l'autre se fait naturellement sans restriction ni remord. L'auteur estime à 6 % en moyenne l'importance de ceux-ci dans la population. Il tire cette étude de son expérience de citoyen polonais sous l'ancien régime stalinien mais concède que la pathocratie peut naître, se développer et s'exercer dans le cadre de n'importe quelle idéologie (ou religion) bien que stalinisme et nazisme en aient donné des exemples purs récents. Les notes de l'éditeur insérées en bas de page illustrent d'ailleurs souvent des exemples liés à l'actuelle politique américaine.

Je ferai cependant quelques réserves. L'auteur fait une distinction très nette entre les États pathocratiques et les États dirigés par des gens « normaux ». Les pathocrates existent bien sûr dans ces derniers, mais ils n'auraient pas eu l'opportunité de modifier la nature de l’État. Je ne suis pas sûr que ce soit aussi net. Le cas très ambivalent des USA est là pour le prouver.

Enfin, sur la forme, il est regrettable qu'il n'y ait pratiquement aucun exemple concret inséré dans le fil des démonstrations. Le lecteur les trouvera sans doute de lui même les exemple illustratifs, mais ceux-ci auraient eu une bien meilleure portée s'ils avaient été insérés d'origine dans le texte. Les derniers chapitres « thérapie pour le monde », « Une vision du futur » où l'auteur nous donne des pistes pour dépister les pathocrates et les « soigner » me semblent bien optimistes.

For the sake of hope in restoring a sane humanity. Yes it's a harder read but nevertheless demonstrates us out of the 'we are all a little bad and a little good' reason for why the world is running so counter to any of the human values we like to warm ourselves with. It's a strong scientific jab down the middle of the mental noise we've been taught to think with.