Interview by Geoff Brady from In Other News Radio with Harrison Koehli on Political Ponerology and psychopaths.


Transcript:

Geoff: We are going to go to a clip of a past interview that we did on January 24th this year. And we're going to hear a clip from Laura Knight-Jadczyk, who also works with the website Signs of the Times. And she had helped put together this book, Political Ponerology. I think she wrote a forward to it. But lets go to a clip.

Clip:

Geoff: There is a small minority of the human population unable to experience or comprehend the normal range of human emotions, they're called psychopaths. The study of psychopaths and their rise to power is researched in the book titled Political Ponerology, by Andrew Lobaczewski. The original manuscript of this book went into the furnace minutes before a secret police raid in communist Poland. The second copy was painfully reassembled by scientists and sent to the Vatican, there was no acknowledgment. The third and final copy was written from memory, it's publication was then blocked by Zbigniew Brzezinski.

The book is described as shocking in its clinically spare descriptions of the true nature of evil. The application of this research is revealed in many books such as Snakes in Suits, Women Who Love Psychopaths, and much of Chris Hedges' work, in fact the first sentence in Chris Hedges' article titled, Wall Street Will be Back for More, Chris writes, "Corporations which control the levers of power in government and finance, promote and empower the psychologically maimed."

When we discuss the ways in which psychopaths rise to power and how they interact within a corporation, or as head of state, we'll look at the insidious effects a psychopathic rule has on individuals and groups. It's mentioned in the introduction that this is the most important book you'll ever read, because at some point, no matter where you are, you will feel the touch or relentless grip of evil. We speak first with author, investigator and journalist Laura Knight-Jadczyk, who wrote the introduction. Laura Knight-Jadczyk welcome to the show.

Laura: Thank you very much.

Geoff: Ok, this book Political Ponerology, A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes. The history of this book is absolutely astounding, Laura can you tell our listeners a bit about your experience with psychopaths, and the information in this book?

Laura: Yes, I think I can. My personal experience came about through the fact that I was doing some research and writing on the web, and I came under attack by small gang of individuals who began publishing, what were clearly lies, and these were people who had tried to worm their way into my confidence earlier, and I had thought that they were just basically normal people. And when these lies started appearing, it was very, what would you say, disorienting. Kind of the way you feel when you hear yourself on a tape recorder for the first time. Who is this person they're talking about, who is this person they are describing, I don't recognise this, this is not part of my reality. Like most people I thought, you just need to explain, to talk it out, point out the facts and everybody will understand. But this didn't seem to work, these people seem to have a certain power to persuade and convince people, and I'll give you just a small example.

My husband is a scientist and has been a university professor for 30 years, he's retired now, but part of the scientific life is that you often go to conferences, and these conferences are funded by universities and you get invited there, they take their wives, they have these meetings and so on, the wives meet together and do different things. So we went to a conference and it was in Marseille. During the course of the time, one of the other scientists, who was a personal friend of my husband, they had co-authored of book on Riemannian geometry together. So he invited us for dinner, they had a little boat, we got in their little boat and we went out to a restaurant on an island and had dinner and that's that. So I wrote up a little travel log for my readers, with all the pictures and so forth, and published it on my website. Well this got turned into a Soros sponsored luxury Mediterranean cruise, just so completely divorced from reality that it was shocking.

So I had this going on and I began to research what kind of human being could do these things, and I followed one thread after the other and that was where I got into research on psychopathy. It didn't take long for me to put some things together and I have a team working with me, some people who are actually professionals in their fields, psychologists, neuropsychology specialists, a physician and of course my husband and I had access to many other professionals in the field that would help me and answer my questions.

So I began writing on the topic and publishing articles, and also publishing articles using this individual and his team who were attacking me as examples. This was the material that the author of Political Ponerology found on the internet and read it, and he wrote me a letter because he recognized that I was looking at the same kind of thing that he had experienced on a larger political level. I was seeing it on a slightly smaller social level, like the internet being like a political sphere of activity, where there are groups that try to distort the understanding of other people and try to persuade them to believe and see things in a certain way, and then there are people who are just trying to tell the truth and do the work honestly.

So, he wrote to me and said, "I see you're looking for the same things that we were looking for then, and you have cone to many of the same conclusions but I can give you some material that you don't have, I can give you some identifications, some classifications, some categories and I can tell you how they work together," because I was asking these questions, like what kind of person would do this, how do they work together. Because it was clear that the attackers that were acting against me, were a semi-organised group, but it wasn't organised in any way that I could really understand, so I said, "yeah, I'll read it," so he sent it to me.

Geoff: And it was this book?

Laura: It was the manuscript.

Geoff: Were they working at it, working on it at the time, translating?

Laura: No, he had written the third version of it back in the 80's, but nothing had ever been done with it. He'd had some problems, he had Zbigniew Brzezinski, who offered to help him but then buried the book. Several other things happened, where was trying to get this information out and all he experienced was attacks too.

Geoff: We're talking about the author, Andrew Lobaczewski?

Laura: Yeah, Lobaczewski. And at this point he's 83, 84 years old when he first wrote to me. I took a little time and then finally I opened the book one night, and it's not a very big book, as you know, and I began to read, and it was extremely dense and difficult and it was a lot more difficult before we did the editing that we did do, which wasn't a lot, at his request, we didn't edit very much at all.

I read it and the hair stood up on my head. My god, he's describing on a large political scale exactly what I have seen and experienced via these attack groups, this counter intelligence program that has been launched against me on the internet, and not just me, there are others. It's like an infiltration and a corruption, it's something that is so insidious, so unbelievable, because any group can get together with a benevolent goal, say for example 911 truth, and with the right kind of pathological individual involved in the work, that group can be corrupted and turned around and have everything that's inside them, all of their goals and objectives turned and twisted until they end up just fighting with each other.

Geoff: One bad apple.

Laura: Yeah, that saying is absolutely true, because it's a poison. There's some work done by Paul Babiak and Robert Hare, Hare being the world's living expert on psychopathy, and they wrote this book Snakes in Suits. Babiak was doing some consulting work for the corporations, and he goes in there and he has a situation, so realises there's something wrong here, he was basically seeing kind of the same thing I was seeing in these internet dynamics. And he wrote to Robert Hare, and Robert said, "well you've got a psychopath in there among the bunch somewhere," and he sent him a psychopathy checklist, he checked to guy off, the person in the corporation, and this guy, low and behold, probably is a psychopath. And one of the things they do when they check out a psychopath is not just the self-report, because the chief characteristic of a psychopath is that all they do is tell lies. So it's not just lies, you have to get information...

Geoff: Very persuasively I understand too.

Laura: Yeah, you have to get information from people who work with them closely and also their background, you have to check out factual data about their background. I don't know if you've seen the little movie I, Psychopath about Sam Vaknin, this is a fascinating movie you should really look it up and try to have a look at that one, because not only do they take him in and test him, with the psychological tests, he scored very high, but they also, unbeknown to him, sent for his school record, interviewed his family members, his close friends, teachers, people he'd grown up with and so forth. Because If was going to be telling any lies about his life or his experiences, they would be able to get the information that would either validate or invalidate what he was saying from numerous sources. The psychopath has a unique ability to persuade people that what they're saying is the truth without anybody ever thinking or bothering to go and check the facts and data.

Geoff: This was your catalyst for studying the nature of this condition, and so here we are, now you have this broader understanding, you've gone through this book, now let's look at what you've learned in your research now, we can start by looking at some of the psychopaths maybe in charge of the economic problems that the country and the world is facing, those people on Wall Street, not all of them are psychopaths, but the system is diseased. What is the nature or the relationship between those people who aren't psychopaths, but they're under a psychopathic system?

Laura: Let me give you a little example, take the legal system. The legal system is setup so that basically it's kind of like a trial by ordeal. In the old days they had a trial by ordeal, they touch your tongue with a hot poker and supposedly if you're lying your tongue will be dry and the poker will burn you, but if you're telling the truth your tongue will be moist and the poker won't burn you, well a normal person who feels fear, his mouth is going to go dry and the poker is going to burn him, so the person who is feeling fear, not because he's a liar but because he's normal, is going to burned and be condemned, but a psychopath who feels no fear whatsoever can lie and touch his tongue with a hot poker and it will be moist and he won't get burned, and he gets away with it.

In the legal system we have today, it's a little a little more advanced than this old trial by ordeal, but it's not that much different because you're getting tried in front of a jury of your peers, but these are people who do not know you, they do not know who is accusing you, they do not know the attorneys, they know nothing except what is allowed to be presented in court. Then you take an oath, the oath acts on an honest person with a conscience, I am swearing to tell the truth. And of course if they tell a lie they look guilty, their eyes shift around, they make these funny movements, all these studies about how to tell if somebody's lying applies to a normal person who is trying to tell the truth, or tell a lie. But, it doesn't apply to a psychopath, a psychopath can get up there and swear an oath and lie so convincingly that an innocent person is condemned.

Geoff: This is really fascinating, it points out in the book Political Ponerology, our guest Laura Knight-Jadczyk had written the introduction for, it points out in the book that a psychopath in early childhood may look at someone crying as, oh there's water coming out of their eyes, that's interesting, and then they learn to understand that these are emotions and then begin to mimic them, and if they're very, very intelligent they begin to mimic other emotions, but carefully craft the art of lying, with no emotion at all. However, do you often wonder about somebody that really lives on a bed of lies throughout their lives, how can they remember all of that?

Laura: Well it's funny because psychopaths seem to have no problems, it's like their brains are like instant constructions, but then if they get caught in a lie, they go on and continuously create their reality from one minute to the next. Hare gives the example of somebody who was caught in a raw faced lie in the court room, they had a cast of his shoeprint, and an eyewitness and he still insisted he was being railroaded and that they were all just attacking him for no good reason. In his reality he had done nothing wrong.

If you've read Hare's book, Without Conscience, he did some really comical interviews with criminals, but you've got to understand, Hare worked with criminals, Cleckley worked with a little bit more upper class people who were not exactly criminal but got put into a hospital by their families because they were a big problem. The biggest problem are the psychopaths that we can only infer exist, based on what little we can glean from those that come under our scrutiny in prisons or hospitals or quite by accident. And actually there is one really good way to find out what goes on with psychopaths, and that is by talking to the victims.

End of clip

Geoff: Talking to the victims is one of the top ways, because as Laura Jadczyk, who we just heard in that interview mentioned, you will rarely or never get a confession out of psychopaths even when maybe there's DNA evidence, but that just shows you how incredible this topic is.

Joining us know on the line is one of the top specialists in political ponerology, his name's Harrison Koehli and he has done a lot of work in psychopaths in power and how they operate among normal people, he's also with Red Pill Press publishers. Harrison how are you?

Harrison: Good Jeff, thanks for having me on.

Geoff: It's a delight to have you, to talk a little bit more and in depth about what this is, what this condition is and the importance of it. Can you just even begin identifying the importance of learning about psychopathy and those psychopaths in power around us right now, especially with the scare tactics and the Osama Bin Laden issue.

Harrison: Well, that's really the hidden reason that the world is the way it is. When we look through history, even in just contemporary times, a person with a conscience will look at that and be horrified. If you look at the history of the church, warfare, corrupt governments, feudalism, slavery, we wonder, how did this happen. If we look at this situation, the human situation, it seems to be this great mystery and we don't know and we haven't known what the cause of it is. And if we look at the history of reform and attempts at reform, none of them seemed to have worked because we're still where we've always been.

Of course the names have changed, the faces have changed, even the outer forms of the beast have changed, but the effects are still the same, and as you brought up, with Osama Bin Laden we have this farce of an operation that's gone on and if you take what the government is saying even at face value, then what we have here is an extrajudicial assassination, allegedly helped along by the use of torture on captured Al-Qaida members. And personally I think the story is ridiculous, just every piece of it, but if you just take that at face value it's horrifying to have this kind of behaviour endorsed and cheered on by the public and by governments around the world. It just shows the kind of mindset that we're living in, that this kind of thing can be condoned and even supported.

Geoff: Oh yeah, I was in Ground Zero on Thursday with Sandra Hicks and they were shouting us down with USA and A-hole really loud and he had a shirt that said 911 was an effing lie, and it provokes people and everything but he held his ground. But, to get this wave of hatred and intensity at that moment was just, you really understood it. The other thing I wanted to get into is, in the book, Political Ponerology, in this book they talk about the hysteroidal cycle, the cycles and social movement that contribute to the phenomena. And as you were talking, the war on terror and how they just amp up the social hysteria, this is a critical sociological factor that psychopaths take advantage of. Talk about that, that's really what we're going through right now because since the Osama Bin Laden news, this wave of propaganda, now of course here come all the stories of the toy left on the road and all that.

Harrison: Yeah, again, there's only one word, or there's a few words to describe it, and absurd and ridiculous are two of them. Because this cycle of hysteria is, like you said, it's one of the most important factors that facilitates the rise of psychopaths into positions of power. And just in a few words, what it basically is, is a social cycle, where people's ability to think goes out the window.

If you think about it, when you can't think, when you're actually in a state where your mind isn't working, what that really is, is basically a state of fear, that's one of the things that gets you going. And so this promotion of social hysteria, you've got the bomb scares, like you said, toys on the road, and it's been happening for years, it's been happening since 911. And you get people walking on the street, with a backpack and people thinking it's a suicide bomber, you get that in Israel a lot. There's the famous cycle going on in Israel and it just keeps going and going, and what happens is that people, like I said, lose the ability to think. They stop thinking critically and they start becoming like those people that were shouting you down at Ground Zero.

Geoff: Yeah, it was irrational and it was emotional and it was chest beating and name calling, that's all it was, there was no exchange of information, facts and points of view, it was just emotional and irrational based, emotionally charged, all of it. And it almost got violent and I thought we were both going to get pummelled and beat up by a combination of union construction workers, some guys that were just angry about 911 and then some soldiers. And meanwhile there are 10 or 20 people with their iPhones with camera on us the whole time. It was really something to behold, but above this all, it's being orchestrated by psychopaths in power, and if you could elaborate on that a little bit?

Harrison: Well it's two things, it's being orchestrated and it's being exploited. And that's the way that the game works, and the modus operandi of psychopaths in power is the path of least resistance, so they'll take the easiest way out. So if there's a possible threat or fear to exploit, that's just naturally occurring, they'll do that. If there's a gang or a mob on the street that can be steered in a certain direction, they'll do that. But when they need it at a certain time and a certain place they'll manufacture it. And so you get these two types of situations that come about, there's the created ones and just the ones that they just happen to be able to use in the moment.

And so this latest Osama Bin Laden one could have been either, it's difficult to know exactly what went on. It could have been some kind of operation that they had to do for some reason and they just tagged on that it was Osama Bin Laden, even though there's absolutely no real evidence that he was there at that time, in fact he's probably been dead for 10 years now. So it could have been that it was another operation, they just tagged this on, it's useful, it happened to be at the time that they could use it, or it could have been a total fiction from the get go.

Geoff: Right, the outside enemy creation, the fake enemy.

Harrison: Yup, and that's exactly what it is. It goes right back to Orwell, and Orwell had it right even though he presented the ideas in the form of fiction, there's so much great information in that book 1984, the whole character of Emmanuel Goldstein and how this rebel leader, this legend among the people who were against the party, turned out to be a fictional creation of the party itself. He was, basically, if he ever existed at all, he became this tool, this controlled opposition, a way of controlling the people who were opposed to the party.

And that's what Osama Bin Laden has been, that's what Al-Qaida is. It's a fictional creation that is brought up, the tool in their bag of tricks, brought out whenever needed in order to fulfil a certain agenda, and it works that way every time. So all you have to do when you read the news is, whenever there's some kind of terrorist scare, either in the airlines or just anywhere, I just use airlines as an example, so this crotch bomber, the underwear bomber, another ridiculous story from a few years ago, and then...

Geoff: I just want to stop you there on that one because once, and that man was from Yemen, of course once that happened then the President Obama had suspended any release of the Yemeni prisoners from Guantanamo, so they already had a hard time leaving Guantanamo, they weren't suspended, they were slated to be released at some point and that was suspended indefinitely. So you had that, and secondly you had the handler who I believe was Indian, in a suit, who guided that underwear bomber, and then you had the back scatter radiation scanners set and ready to go, even before that event happened. And then you had the former Secretary of Homeland Security, with his Chertoff Security Group profiting off these scanners. Is this where you were going?

Harrison: That's exactly where I was going and you said it better than I would have, so thanks for that.

Geoff: Well, we're really pleased and happy to have you on to discuss in depth this book Political Ponerology. Our guest here tonight on this special fund raising addition of In Other News is Harrison Koehli, and again he's a specialist in political ponerology, that's the study of psychopaths in power.

We're going to get in depth here on the topic psychopathy and what that really is, we're covering some of the real world applications of how psychopaths are manipulating people, politics, resources, right now, and especially how they're manipulating people and manipulating their fear and how it all works together, orchestrated with the mainstream media, this is not something that's being made up. This is something that has been recently uncovered, because the study of psychopathy is a missing piece of the puzzle right now, because they banned the study of political ponerology, of psychopaths, and how, who and what they are because if there was any kind of screening system then a lot of these people who have risen to power and become dictators and fascist dictators, they would never gotten through the door to begin with. Then you start to look at the screening system, do these screening systems exist, and there was a recent story that I sent you Harrison, but before we even talk about that we need to see a couple of phones light here.

A Cambridge University scientists says evil is a lack of empathy, which can be measured and monitored and is susceptible for education and treatment. I want to talk with you about this particular story, it's really interesting, but what are your thoughts on this?

Harrison: Well, I just want to premise this by saying I haven't read his book, we're talking about Simon Barren-Cohen and he's written a book, I think it's called Zero Degrees of Empathy. And his idea is that what we've called evil, and he doesn't like the word evil, is basically a lack of empathy, which I agree with. The part where it gets kind of murky, is something you just mentioned, he thinks that empathy, can be, let's say fostered, learned or, taught to people without empathy, and that's where it gets a little bit tricky. Because, from everything that I've read and from what the actual experts in psychopathy say, because, Barren-Cohen, he's an expert in Autism and Asperger's, but as far as I know, not an expert in psychopathy. All the experts in psychopathy say that psychopaths do not have any empathy. Now, they both agree on that, but this is an important point, because we need to understand what empathy is in order to figure out this problem.

Geoff: Tell us what that is, because here it says, it defines empathy in 2 parts, as the drive to identify other people's thoughts and feelings and the drive to respond appropriately to these thoughts and feelings.

Harrison: Ok so that's the definition. I think it's a pretty one sided and incomplete definition, what he's basically describing can be called, let's say, cognitive empathy, so that's the ability to look at a person and get an idea, say ok, I think this is what this person is feeling and thinking and I think this is what I should do right in this situation for that person.

Now, that is a cognitive process, it's a thinking process, and anyone with a great brain can do it, and that's this murky area I was talking about. Because psychopaths can be very intelligent, they can read clues very well, they can see people's facial expressions, well some, not others, tests have shown they can recognise some emotions better than others, but they can see these signs, they can pick up on them, they can get an idea of what's going through another person's head.

But the thing is that they see it very cognitively, almost in a game theory manner. Ok, if I do this, this person does that, if I change this, I do this differently, this person will go in another direction, it's almost like a chessboard and they're just moving pieces. And so that can be cognitive empathy. I can see that a person's uncomfortable in this situation and I can remember that this person had yelled at them, so I might get an idea, ok maybe they're upset with this person that yelled at them, and I can form this conclusion in my mind and I can formulate a plan after that. Ok, well that's all well and good, but I don't think that's empathy.

Geoff: Ok, so, empathy is more about the feeling itself, where you can understand how a person is feeling because of what has happened, and you're not trying to second guess with your mind, it's more with the heart/mind connection.

Harrison: So, just an example would be, when you're reading the newspaper or watching the news, now I'll preface this by saying that the media take advantage of empathy, and governments do, and that's the way it's always been. Psychopaths and political elites use people's best traits and their emotions against them to manipulate them.

Geoff: I'm glad you mentioned that.

Harrison: So when we have, let's say a news report on a different country, some other country, where there's a war going on and they have this human interest piece on this family. They go into the detail, they've got the music, and you get into this life and you see, let's say this child, and it's this child's life whose been killed brutally in war and you see their parents weeping and crying and you see all of the destruction around and all their emotions, and you cry, and you feel their loss and you feel everything that's going on and just the heartbreak and the hopelessness of the situation and when you feel another person's emotions, that's the first part of empathy.

But like you said, there's a heart/brain connection, that's the heart. Now the brain is also a part of it, because if you just feel it, now it's a very automatic thing, and this will get back to the Barren-Cohen thing, him saying that some people lack empathy and that's the root of evil, that's the truth. But, the sticky point is that when a person lacks this thing, it's something that the majority of other people have, even to a very small degree, so everyone, every normal human that is not a psychopath, is programmed this way, it's our genetics, it's our biology. We are biologically programmed to respond with emotion to another's emotion. It's called limbic resonance, or it uses mirror neurons, it's been called sympathy or emotional syntony. But the thing about that is, practically everyone's got it, but at that level, just at that base emotional level it's fickle, it can go one way or the other.

If you wake up in the morning and you stub your toe and you cut yourself shaving and someone flips you off and swears at you as you're coming out of your apartment, and you're basically in a bad mood, then you've basically been primed, maybe to not be as empathic as you would usually be. So you walk on the street and someone does something to you and you might respond with an outlash at them, you might swear at them, forgetting, and not remembering yourself, not being able to put yourself in that person's position, and just treating them as, well you're in a reactive state, and so it's really just come and go, it depends on who you're with, the situation you're in, what the feeling of the group happens to be, and that's, I'm going to make a couple of circles around here, that goes back to the people that were at Ground Zero, they were in this, this group hive, this group state, where their empathy for you was turned off. Some of them might have been ready to lynch you and that's pretty common.

So they're in this opposite state from empathy, their emotions are switched in this other direction, they're functioning on that group level with that group, they're basically high on their emotion at the moment, which is the vengeance, the great feeling, the feeling that their teams won in sports, when actually it was their covert ops military that assassinated someone. And yet they identify that with sports, like that's the same feeling that they get, so they didn't have any empathy at that time. But I'd say that probably the majority of those people if you catch them at a different time and in a different circumstance, they would probably respond with some degree of sympathy towards you, just in a different situation and probably they didn't know who you were.

Geoff: True, true, you really put an interesting spin on this. The people that you are talking about are not true psychopaths, but they were manipulated to respond in a similar ways by psychopaths. But that's not really where we're going necessarily, we're looking at the psychopaths in power, but yes, regular human beings that are not psychopaths lose empathy periodically for various reasons, I understand that. To get into the screening of psychopathy and those who are psychopaths, that's another realm and I would like to talk with you a little bit in depth more on that. Harrison, what are your thoughts just on this book alone?

Harrison: Well personally I think it's one of the most important books ever written and that it should be read by politicians, lawyers, and professors and it should be taught, at least the concepts should be taught from a young age. I would have loved to have a course like this in junior high or high school, and even a general psychology course at those times, because that's really the knowledge that makes a difference, it's psychological knowledge, not only about normal human psychology but deviant psychologies, so psychopathologies. So I think this is the book that can make a difference, because it gets into the root causes of all these things that have been shrouded in mystery for so long. I think this is the last hope, it's the thing that can make a difference. So I'm glad that you're supporting the book, I'm glad that you're giving copies away with donations because this needs to go places and people need to read this material.

Geoff: It is, yeah, I think it's incredible. Let me ask you, why do you think the leaders in communist countries banned the study of psychopathy and the study of psychopaths?

Harrison: Well, it's pretty simple, it's the same reason that we have phrases like 'wolves in sheep's clothing', or a 'fox in a henhouse'. If you have a fox go into the henhouse the hens know what the fox looks like. It's like the Canadian politician, I always forget his name, I think Tommy Douglas, who had a little parable he'd tell at his meetings and that was that the cats and the mice, the politicians were the cats and the people were the mice, and the mice always elected the cats. So there's this qualitative difference between the two, and that's the difference between a psychopath and a normal person, and the reason the study of psychopathy was banned, it's like the wolf taking off its sheep's clothing, he's exposed. When you have the ability, when you have the science to expose the psychopath for what he is, then the wolf gets shot by the farmer, the fox gets expelled from the henhouse and politicians and psychopaths would not be allowed and they would be actively denied these positions of power.

So when they've entrenched their power, when they've come to power, what Lobaczewski and his colleges discovered was that these people had this kind of knowledge, they knew something about it, because as soon as they took over all of a sudden the libraries no longer had the kinds of books that would have been helpful to diagnosing these problems. Those subjects were banned in universities, everything was changed, and that's because if this stuff is allowed to be taught widely, or generally understood or even taught to select groups, it's a great danger to those in power, because this is the tool to diagnose the problem, and from there the solutions come and psychopaths can't stay in power if people know and are able to diagnose the problem. They need it to be hidden, they need it to be secret. So that's the way it was in the Eastern European countries, it was totally blocked, totally embargoed, so these things had to be studied in secret. If you were caught studying these things you'd be arrested, tortured and/or murdered. And that was the reality.

Like when Lobaczewski wrote his book, he was one of the last ones. When he sent us the book, when he sent us his manuscript, he was the last one alive, he'd lost so many of his colleges and friends. And I won't hesitate to say that it's a miracle that this book even survived, that this one man was able to get the small, because this wasn't even everything, there was so much knowledge and research that was lost, simply because they had to operate in secret, so Lobaczewski, the author, didn't even know all the people involved in the research, it had to be passed around secretly and anonymously. And the reason they did this is because they understood the situation they were under, the conditions, that if one of them was caught and if one of them was tortured they could reveal the whole bunch. So they specifically and consciously decided not to even be aware of everyone in their little circle of scientists, they didn't even necessarily know each other's names, they just had each other's research.

Geoff: Wow, I didn't even know that part, that's incredible. Do you know about people Harrison that are studying psychopathy here in the United States?

Harrison: How do you mean?

Geoff: Do doctors study this, because I'm thinking this person at Cambridge, do you think there's going to be a screening system to diagnose psychopathy in any significant way, a screening system?

Harrison: Well there are several researchers whose specialty is in psychopathy. The problem that I've seen is that their approach is pretty narrow. They went to grad school and thought, ok what am I going to do, well this sounds interesting, or maybe their prof studied psychopathy, and so they get into it and then they just follow the protocols, they go to prisons, they find the psychopaths that are in the prisons and do the PCLR on them, that's the psychopathy checklist, that's the standard diagnostic tool for criminal psychopathy. Then they get them in the lab and they do little tests here and there and they get some good research and some good results, but they don't seem to see the big picture, as far as I'm concerned. They see the significance in terms of crime, but a lot of them don't even get into the issues of successful psychopathy. These are the type of psychopaths that are on Wall Street for example. You brought up Bernie Madoff which is a great example. So there's a smaller subset of these academics, these real scientists and researchers that do get into this area, so that's a smaller subset.

So Robert Hare, who Laura Knight-Jadczyk mentioned in the segments you were playing before we started talking, he and his college Paul Babiak, they wrote the book Snakes in Suits, and that's about psychopaths in the work place, psychopaths in a corporate environment. So they developed what they called the B-scan, the business scan. It's a diagnostic tool for identifying psychopathy in the work place. So it's something that corporations or business can use when they hire people, to try to screen out psychopaths. So it is starting to go in that direction, unfortunately that's the only place I'm aware of that it's being used in some businesses, but it is a start.

Geoff: I understand Chris Hedges was writing about this how, I think it was the Leeman brothers, intentionally hired psychopathic people to do trades in Wall Street.

Harrison: Yeah that's entirely possible, I didn't read that article.

Geoff: Or Goldman Sachs, some investment firm, where they intentionally wanted psychopaths, who wouldn't feel anything by making these really terrible trades, they wouldn't be emotionally effected.

Harrison: Yeah, and it's a strange situation because it's one of the things Hare and Babiak talk about in their book actually, but they look at it maybe from a somewhat rose coloured glasses, tinted perspective, I'm not sure. They say that corporations will hire psychopaths and they'll look for those traits because they think that they'll get something out of them, they'll think that they're pretty positive. Ok, well they'll work great under pressure, they don't necessarily need good people skills because they'll just get the job done, and they work hard and they're motivated, because they want the best for themselves and they'll do the best job. And so in their minds, these corporations are doing it because they're misinterpreting these traits.

Geoff: Does that backfire for the corporation?

Harrison: Yes, and that's their point, it backfires for the corporation. What they thought were these great traits end up leading to the psychopaths tearing corporations apart, fomenting these little infights and divide and conquer. And it just becomes their little chess board, their little war room and they wreak havoc on corporations and businesses. But the more cynical way of looking at it might be, like you mentioned, that these people are actively looking for these traits, knowing what's going on and maybe just based on the way they're set up, if the psychopaths are the ones already in these positions and doing the hiring then they themselves wouldn't be able to see the negative consequences of this. And maybe they just don't care, they're just in it for the quick buck, they're in it to make the money now, and who really cares about what happens in the future, because that's the psychopaths' mindset.

Geoff: Interesting! Harrison just said that Ponerology is the most important book ever written. Is that what you said Harrison?

Harrison: Well something like that, one of the most important books ever written.

Geoff: Why do you say that, why is it?

Harrison: Well, because it ties into what I was saying in the beginning of the show, is that when you look at human history, when you look at the human condition, when you look at all the suffering and you look at all the attempts to change it, all the attempts at reform because it's gotten nowhere, and when you keep all that in your mind and you just think about the amount of suffering and carnage and warfare and murder and torture that goes on, and you think of the futility of all of the attempts to change it, and then when you realise the problem, when you realise the causal chains that are set, that lead to these behaviours, then you start to see that a solution is possible, and that change isn't impossible, and that hope for humanity is really what I think drives this book and makes it so important, because it is something that hasn't been available, it is knowledge that has never been so scientifically, so methodically set out, exactly how these processors happen, what the social conditions are, what the different types of people are, how they interact, the different events that happened, the different human reactions that they manipulate and it just sets it out so clearly and offers the beginnings of some solutions, that I think, if there is any hope for humanity, and that's an open question, then this would be it.

I think that's the most important thing. I think that the human condition as we see it, where the power elites, the people in charge, and even if we ignore that and have a look at the situation as it is, with the state of nutrition and health care and psychology and technology, like you said about the other shows you've been having with cell phone radiation. We have all of these different toxins and assaults on our system coming from every direction, and these entire systems and corporations and businesses get so thoroughly entrenched, I mean monetarily, so monetarily and emotionally, so that to get rid of them it would be impossible and people don't want it, even though...

Geoff: You mean their profiting from it immensely, and there's no turning back.

Harrison: Yeah, there's no turning back. So we have the oil industry, with their pollution, you have cell phone radiation. I was out today in the mall doing some shopping and everyone I saw had their cell phone in their hand looking at it, talking on it, texting. And I just think, how absurd it is and these things can never change as long as the business model continues as it is and the business model is basically that of a psychopath.

Geoff: Oh, that's interesting how you phrased that, because to me what's being exploited with cell phones is the natural ability for people to communicate with each other, and it's just a very basic description but to me I think that's exactly what they did. One thing that you mentioned too, another passage I found discussing psychopathy with business crimes, the consequences to the average citizen from business crimes are staggering. Criminologist George Bennet says, they account for nearly 30% of case filings in the US district courts, more than any other category of crime. The combined burglary, mugging and other property losses induced by country street punks come to about 4 billion a year. However, the seemingly upstanding citizens in our corporate board rooms, and the humble clerks in our retails stores bilk us out of between 40 and 200 billion dollars a year, as opposed to the 4 billion from just the street crime. I thought that was an interesting statistic, as you've pointed out as well, there are many levels of psychopathy.

Harrison, this book really moved a couple of listeners who went in depth to respond, I think I sent you a couple of emails of one of the listeners who had been describing and connecting some dots himself and he even mentioned that this is a missing piece of what's going on in this country and in the world. When I say what's going, what's going wrong right now. So your work in Political Ponerology, what is some of the feedback that you get on this topic, just with friends and some people who have just a basic interest?

Harrison: Well, most people that I talk about it with have a pretty positive response, well, it varies in certain ways. I think that on some level most people are aware of these concepts, it's not a really foreign idea. We've got this little kind of post card ad for the website Sott.net, it's an alternative news website that basically presents the news, everything from weather to health to psychology to current events. We're basically affiliated with that site and you can buy the book from there as well. Well the little postcard ad got these cool graphics and it says, 6% of the world's population are psychopaths, or something like that and it's got this catchy little phrase on it and when people see it they go, oh yeah, they kind of laugh and go, oh yeah, that's totally true. And they've heard nothing about ponerology, it's just something that they're aware of, because they can see the connections. I can't count the number of times growing up that I heard about jokes or let's say slightly off colour comments about politicians. This stuff is known on a kind of common sense level, not necessarily with that scientific rigor. So when you combine the two, when you combine the common sense idea with the science, then that's when things start to be made crystal clear, and the picture just comes onto focus.

Geoff: And let me just say, the science is in this book, Political Ponerology. One of our listeners had sent in some really great emails, sort of thinking out loud but it was not rambling. One point that he made, he said, "every well-meaning group or organisation that becomes large enough to become a sizable impact on society will become infiltrated and undermined by psychopaths in 5 to 10 years." He says, "the only way to keep any organisation on its original path is to somehow identify all psychopaths and prohibit their admittance to the group." I thought that was pretty powerful and he began to relate that specifically to peace organisations and anti-war organisations. I don't know if that's true, if that's how they crumble and fall apart, they don't have any sustaining impact, I'm not sure, but did you guys even go into that realm, did you study that?

Harrison: Yeah, well Lobaczewski actually deals with that specifically in the book and when you sent that to me I thought it was a great little summation of the idea, because I don't know about the years, 5 to 10 years, I can't be sure about the time frame, but the idea I think is 100% correct. That every group, and that's important to know, every group that does not have this knowledge and does not actively enforce it and apply it, will be infiltrated, whether that be through, let's say something like cointelpro type operations or just through the natural process. You've got a population and you've got a certain percentage of psychopaths. When a group reaches a certain number, you'll get a certain number of psychopaths. And that's what the book Ponerology describes, are these natural processes, the directions things turn.

So when you have a psychopath in the group there's specific things that happen, there is specific effects, psychological effects on the group members and you have the kind of self-reflection bias process that starts happening, so the psychopath will gravitate and move towards these positions of influence and power. They may be behind the scenes, they may be the guy whispering plan of action into the figure head or leader's ear. This effects start happening, the group starts slowly going off track but they keep the same language.

Now this is an important point, these aren't necessarily gangs or these rough violent groups that necessarily come to power. It can be a totally innocent, well intentioned humanitarian group that can be totally sideswiped by this psychopathic contagion. Because what happens is these psychopaths start gaining influence and then they just twist things ever so slightly, so they're still saying out loud the original aims and motivations of the group, so they still sound all high and mighty, but they start doing things in slightly different ways.

And some members of the group will kind of see this, they'll get a whiff of it, a slight scent that something isn't going quite right and they'll say, this isn't what I signed up for, I can't do this anymore, I'm out of here. And you can get that in corporations, when there's a takeover, a merger or a something and things just kind of change and you can just feel it in the air, you can feel there is a different atmosphere. And so that might cause some people to leave, because things don't seem as human as they did before, there's this kind of cold metallic kind of oppressive feeling that kind of comes in and that's the way I'll describe it.

Then, later on, as the process develops and goes further along, it starts becoming more active, so not only do these more normal people leave, they start being actively denied entrance or being expelled from the group. Or, conflicts are arranged and setup so that they leave one way or the other.

And again you find this in corporations and business and politics. If you just look at the history of politics, you read about everything that goes on behind the scenes with all these political manoeuvrings, they're classic psychopathic manoeuvres, they're the effect of what Lobaczewski calls ponerization of the groups and the whole process put together is ponerogenesis, the origins and causes and processes of how what he terms evil comes about. So yeah, your listener got it right, this is essential to know, because every group can and will be infiltrated one way or another, it's just a matter of statistics.

And even then, often that probably doesn't need to happen, because if you look at the history of the, well let's take the US government specifically, with a history of cointelpro, the history of a government which has identified anti-war groups, groups with humanitarian aims, who, if you meet them in person they turn out to be pretty decent people, there's not a terrorist in the bunch. And so these groups are the ones that the FBI targeted for infiltration and destruction. They would infiltrate them, they would setup situations and conflicts so that the groups would fall apart, or get into conflict with other groups, so they would isolate themselves.

Geoff: And now they target them as terrorists.

Harrison: Yeah, exactly, and they get labelled as terrorists, or terrorist sympathisers, and they get put on watch lists and no-fly lists and they get hounded. So these groups are controlled, and this is an important point, because this is something that these groups don't want to hear. They don't want to hear that they've been infiltrated, that they're being steered in a direction that is counter to their aims, because they want to believe that they're doing good, and in a sense they are, they have good intentions, but you know what they say about good intentions, they pave the way to somewhere.

Geoff: Indeed, and you just revealed where that somewhere is. Thank you Harrison, for explaining some of the details and especially going into depth on what this listener had sent to me. That's thing, this listener heard the interview that we had done back in January and he went out and bought the book, so that was one of the motivations to bring this book as a premium this evening, because I suspect that there are other listeners out there that would want this book as well, the book is called Political Ponerology and we've been talking in depth about that for the past hour and 40 minutes. Do you think Harrison that there will be some kind of evolved screening process that will be really easy to find, I guess, these hardened psychopaths in our midst?

Harrison: Well I think it's possible, do I think it will happen, I'd say with the way things are going I'd say it's pretty unlikely. I think before anything like that happens there needs to be a huge change, and I mean from the grass roots level. I just don't see either the inclination or the interest or the willingness to even look at these issues in the fields and systems that need them. I think the systems of politics and corporations and the legal system, I think they're just too thoroughly ponerized to be able to even take a look at it, and so I'm not completely out of hope, because I do think it's possible, but I don't know exactly how it's going to play out. I think that the first thing that is needed is for a mass number of people to understand this and to basically demand it. And I think that's the only way it's going to happen, it's not going to happen from the top up, because the top is where the problem is.

Geoff: And that's what we're trying to do this evening actually, is bring this information to the grass roots, it's one of the critical keys here, is understanding the psychopath diagnosis, the people who are involved at the highest levels are making the decisions, but who are these people and what is their pathology?Harrison, where are you going now with the study more about and write more about this topic? I know you cover a range of issues that we discussed already. Do you research and look at that through the lens of psychopathy?

Harrison: Yeah, I'd say once it's there it's kind of hard not to see everything through that lens, just try to see the implications of it in everything that you research. One of the things that I and the group that I'm a part of does this research has been doing lately and in the future is, we've got a magazine, called the Dot Connector magazine, where we apply these concepts and try to take as an objective approach as possible, to topics everywhere, from politics to health and nutrition, we've got recipes in there, science, spiritualty, a little bit of everything, we've got book reviews, movie reviews, and you just google Dot Connector magazine, I think the website is dotconnector.org so that's one avenue that we've been using.

One of the things that I've been doing lately is, well for the past couple of years I've been writing a series on sott.net called Ponerology 101, where I've just been getting into the basics. Kind of some information that's not necessarily in the book Ponerology, like some research that's come out since the book was written, or just from a different avenue. So I've got into the issues of psychopathy on Wall Street, and corporate psychopathy, and some of the research that was done on the Nazis at the Nuremburg trials. So that's one thing that I've been doing so listeners can check that out at Sott.net.

And one thing that we're doing actually, for ponerology specifically, later this year we're going to be putting out a new edition of the book, because one of the big complaints that we get, is something that you've mentioned, that the book's just really difficult to read, the sentences are really long and really dense, really complicated, so what we're doing is we're going to release a new addition. Everything will be there but we're clarifying language, clearing up some of the sentences, just trying to make it flow better and read a little bit more easily, but at the same time adding a whole bunch of extra research and footnotes and just trying to basically bring it up to date and make it more accessible, because we know that it is a slog to get through, so that's something that we're working on and we're hoping to get that ready, I'm hoping by...

Geoff: You can get through this book, I just want to tell listeners, you can get through this book and this is the undiluted version, this is packed with information, yes the sentences are long, but the listeners can read long sentences here, it's almost guaranteed here a WBAI.

We have to wrap up this evening, Harrison I want to say thank you again for being on with us for the nearly two hours. It's just been a pleasure talking with you and learning more about the study of psychopaths, psychopaths in power and why it is important to begin with and to understand why this is important, this is like one of the keys here. So Harrison Koehli thank you very much.

Harrison: Thank you Jeff, it's been a pleasure as always.