The vision of the Party's rule, its inhumanity and utter ruthlessness and mendacity frighten us and we hope it will never come to pass here. But we have no clue how to prevent it, and just like the people in Orwell's fictional world, we are perpetually caught off guard when it comes to pass in our own lives. One day we wake up and realize we are living in a nightmare, and we have been for a long time. "It'll never happen here" and "We've taken every precaution" become "When did it happen" and "How did we get to this point?" This perennial sickness takes hold of a nation and we are at its mercy.
Like any good novelist, Orwell tells a story and he makes it real. For that sheltered portion of humankind who have had the fortune of growing up without the threat of being arrested and tortured for daring to disagree with their inept leaders, the book provides a vicarious experience without which we are left vulnerable to a disease we know nothing about. But while the creation of a literary world can teach us many things, it cannot provide a way out. For that we need accurate knowledge.
1984 is a fictionalized account of pathocracy, as defined in Political Ponerology, and the reason it scares us is because it is completely outside our normal frame of reference. We have the same reaction to news accounts of senseless violence. Parents murdered by their 14-year-old son because they asked him to do his chores, after which he played video games. An 18-year-old woman disappears and is later found dead, beaten to death and wrapped in plastic. A trucker and his son admit to torturing a 20-year-old man in their basement, suffocating him and wrapping wire around his neck. A young boy is kidnapped, tortured, executed, and his organs harvested by forces of occupation before his body is returned to his parents.
The common theme, of course, is psychopathy. Psychopaths lack conscience and hunger for the darkness. They are sadistic in a way which, for us, is near impossible to fathom. The evil which they bring is not unintended, as when we realize only after the fact that our actions have caused another harm. Instead, their lives are spent feeding on the misery that they inflict on others. Whether the sexual sadism of serial rapist-torturer, or the subtle draining of a "toxic co-worker" who uses you, abuses you, and wears you down until you lose all grip on reality. We may even ask in desperation, "Why are you doing this to me?" The psychopath simply smirks. And in a world ruled by psychopaths we ask, "Why are you doing this to us?"
1984 frightens us because psychopathy frightens us. The key feature of a pathocracy is that psychopaths influence the economic, military, political, and cultural agenda of a nation. Like chameleons, they mask themselves in the features of their surroundings. Within those parameters they stage dramas, creating a new reality according to their desires. And this reality is one of deception, terror, ruthless expansion and complete heartlessness.
In the corporate world a psychopath gets ahead by destroying the careers of those who stand in his way, exploiting the work of others, starting rumors, creating conflicts. He always benefits from these, of course. A competitor falls out of favor. The psychopath is credited with the work of another. The bosses take his word over another who sees that he is a snake. An "enemy" finds herself without a job, blamed for something she didn't do. All the while the psychopath stage-manages. The man behind the curtain.
In politics, the pawns are the people, the chessboard is the world stage. Strategic countries are invaded because of the "threat" they pose. This threat is 0f course created by the psychopaths in charge using the vast resources of intelligence services. "Terrorist threats" are fabricated. Atrocities are committed and then pinned on imaginary "terrorist groups". Orwell had it right. Emmanuel Goldstein was a creation of the Party. The bombings blamed on him and his followers were committed by the Party itself for the purpose of keeping the population afraid and compliant.
Today, torture photos are "leaked" not to expose State brutality, but to show the people what happens to those who oppose the system. After all, you're either "with us" or you're "with the terrorists". That's some option. Dissent is conflated with terrorism. Terrorists are tortured and assassinated. The President of the United States even sanctions the assassination of U.S. citizens labeled "terrorists". "They are part of they enemy", after all. Some respond with shock that a country could willingly kill its own citizens, as if killing another country's citizens is any more human. Of course, the two options are equally atrocious, but to a psychopath, what's the difference? If you have a conscience, you are a threat. Your leaders hold you in as much disdain as any other "bleeding heart".
So what can be done? The first step is awareness of the reality of what goes on behind the scenes of political power: the workings of intelligence agencies, counterterrorism, foreign policy groups, etc. This can only be understood by applying ponerology, which identifies the source of the problem, and the exact social and psychological processes which push along the global pathocratic agenda. Psychopaths have been running the show for a long time, and they've been doing so because we haven't known what to look for. Commies, terrorists, Nazis, anarchists... All red herrings.
The true enemy hides in plain sight.
Harrison Koehli co-hosts SOTT Radio Network's MindMatters, and is an editor for Red Pill Press. He has been interviewed on several North American radio shows about his writings on the study of ponerology. In addition to music and books, Harrison enjoys tobacco and bacon (often at the same time) and dislikes cell phones, vegetables, and fascists (commies too).
Reader Comments
Snakes in suits, always the slickest out there. Best dressed, best shape, and the most determined to succeed. It's not just an 'alpha' thing.
1.-
On the Orwell novel "1984," everything has been said
or almost everything,
but certain tactical-ideological questions
have never been asked. So we are going to start by this:
Over time, which social class has benefited
from his book, the bourgeois class or the working class,
the oppressors or the oppressed?
If Orwell had lived today - hypothesis -,
would he had seen the revolutionary process of Cuba Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua… with the same eyes that he saw the socialism in the Soviet Union?
We have to know that controversy flared again over the fact
that the “left-conservatism” of Orwell,
shortly before his death,
jotted down a list of people (A) he regarded as political compromised
by their sympathy for Stalin and had it conveyed
to the Information Research Department (of the British)
of the Foreign Office…despite the fact that it was,
precisely,
the socialist army of the Soviet Union
who first entered Berlin to liberate us from the Capitalist Big-Brother
of Hitler, despite the fact that it was the socialist army of Russia
who, in Spain, fought, side by side with the people,
against the Capitalist Big-Brother of Franco,
while the Western democracies,
that Orwell defended,
sided with the Spanish Big-Brother.
2.-
The Orwellian thought gives us the archetypal contradictions
of bourgeois Jacobins that,
precisely,
George Lukács describes in his book,
"The Antinomy of Bourgeois Thought",
because, on the one hand,
Orwell tries to prevent us and warn
us about the world of zombies that is approaching,
which is entirely plausible because (something that Orwell omitted)
the sophisticated technological means of mind control
of the oppressors made it possible,
but, on the other hand,
Orwell, in his “left-conservatism”,
falls into what Michael Parenti entitled the last chapter
of his book, ('The Sword and the Dollar'): "Can We Trust the Russians?", because, Orwell, in his final days, as a good English gentleman,
instead of denouncing the whole entire capitalist regime
that was holding and protecting in Spain the bloodshed
that was taking place under Franco,
the Big-Brother in Spain,
he devoted himself to give the names of the people (A)
in sympathy with the socialism in Russia.
His anti-communism was very clear.
3.-
In 1946, four years before Orwell's death,
the "Big-Brother" in Russia proposed a ban
on the manufacture of atomic weapons and the destruction
of all existing arsenals,
along with a conventional reduction in arms.
In 1950 and again in 1951 and 1952
--and until the fall of Russian socialism in the late eighties --
at the United Nations, the Soviets proposed banning
the atomic bomb and asked for the establishment
of an international agency to enforce the ban.
This is was "a little different” Big-Brother
from the Big-Brother of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Now we can answer the question:
Which social class has benefited from his book,
the bourgeois class or the working class,
the oppressors or the oppressed?:
Answer: The bourgeois class of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
4.-
The passage of time has also brought another Antinomy
of the bourgeois thought regarding the "1984" of Orwell:
If the zombies - that's the world where we are going, according to Orwell -, need less coercive means than the no-zombies,
fewer tools to victimize them,
less repression,
less control and military force
to make them do what they should do,
WHY THE ECONOMIC BUDGET OF THE BIG-BROTHER,
The Pentagon (and other similar agencies),
increased steadily TO THE ACTUAL LEVEL OF $700 billion?
Orwell, it seems, in his "1984",
he did not understood the dialectical process of history
and its inherent dynamics in the intensity
of the class struggle that,
every hour,
increases more and more,
and the proof of that is the world in which we are living today
where the raising of consciousness,
for instance,
in Latin America, (and in many other places),
the “ALBA” (DAWN) and hopes that they are building
up everywhere are in overall contraposition
to the ‘orwellian’ world of the the United States and Europe.
5.-
Orwell, among others, indoctrinated us and led us
to classify capitalism with erroneous and distorted
psycho-analytical terms and psychiatric oxinogroms
such as "psychopaths", "pathocracy", etc.,
but doing so, it would be the same as to save
a serial killer from the death penalty because
he had "disturbed his mental faculties”.
Ladies and Gentleman:
we can not fool our self most of what we are already had been deceived: no "psychopath" and no "pathocracy"
could have made the astronomical capital accumulation (in a few hands)
that has been done by the capitalist billionaires
of the world; this enterprise is very serious,
calculated, rational, methodological,
and requires expert scientists, planners,
smart and wise men and women and an Imperial Legion well prepared,
and all of this mathematica tactics and strategies
cannot leave in the mind of a "psychopath",
as Karl Marx analyzed in “The Capital”;
they are products of responsible craniums,
which means: a structure in which the exploitation of man by man
reaches its extraordinary capacity,
efficiency and concordance,
qualities that the “psychopath” does not possess.
Here, in this trial, we cannot save the criminals from the guillotine
(the guilty ones that produce such barbarism)
by diagnosing them, as the doctors of the bourgeois clinic do,
with psychological terms.
Because what we have here is a GUILTY CONSCIOUS SYSTEM OF PRODUCTION
AND CONSUMPTION WITH THE ONLY PURPOSE OF OBTAINING THE MAXIMUM GAINS
AND PROFITS AT THE COST OF THE SLAVERY OF THE OTHERS.
And this is not a "pathocracy":
this is how capitalism work according
to the laws and 'fundamentum in re' of the "Das Kapital" of Marx.
6.-
" 'Or Well' 'Or Consciousness' ”?
This is the choice.
We need to use our INTELLIGENCE
in the same way that they are doing so,
for example,
in Venezuela and Bolivia,
to replace capitalism’s automatons and zombies
by a Rational World,
because, if not, we are all going to become
passengers of a modern 'Titanic',
and Or-Well, in this regard,
is no going to help the Third Class passengers
locked in the ship's hold
while the rich are fleeing,
in "an Orwellian way",
into the lifeboats ...
"Orwell, among others, indoctrinated us and led us to classify capitalism with erroneous and distorted psycho-analytical terms and psychiatric oxinogroms
such as "psychopaths", "pathocracy", etc., but doing so, it would be the same as to save a serial killer from the death penalty because he had "disturbed his mental faculties”."
Manuel, I think you should get youself a copy of Political Ponerology so you can understand why Sott.net uses these terms [Link]
I think that, instead of obtaining a copy of “Political Ponerology" (a term, incidentally, somewhat "Orwellian"), it would be better and more illuminating to recall the ideological conflict that broke out between Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich when the first instituted human behavior under psychoanalytic terms and the second tried to find the objective elements in social and economic roots that give the genesis to such behavior.
It is the socio-political-economic structures of capitalism that are the "raison d'être", the root, of the damage in the psycho-emotional apparatus of man and not vice versa. Therefore, these effects have to be tried, evaluated and labeled, according to their causes and not to their effects
.
Lobaczewski did exactly what Reich was trying to do: find the objective elements in social and economic roots that give the genesis to such behavior." Those roots are primarily psychological in nature, not psychoanalytic, and have to do with inherited emotional dysfunctions (psychopathies) and normal social psychology. Socio-political-economic structures are the effects of individual psychologies and social psychology, not the other way around.
"Socio-political-economic structures are the effects of individual psychologies and social psychology, not the other way around."
With the permission of your subjectivity:
! THIS IS ABSURD !
And what are the causes of "individual psychologies"?
Life is what makes consciousness
and not vice versa.
Man is a historical product,
his "psychology" is a historical product, a cultural product.
If you had born in the fifteenth century,
would you have the same social-psychology that you have now?
That is why the famous central 'cogito' of the existentialism is: the existence precedes the essence.
THE IDEA THAT MAN HAS NO NATURE (NO "PSYCHOLOGY" 'A PRIORI') IS NOW BEYOND DISPUTE. HE HAS OR RATHER IS A HISTORY. WHY THIS THEORY SHOULD HAVE CAUSED SUCH A SCANDAL WHEN IT WAS ADVANCE BY THE EXISTENTIALISTS A FEW YEARS AGO IS STILL NOT CLEAR SINCE IT IS NOW THE EXPLICIT ASSUMPTION OF ALL THE MAIN CURRENTS
O F C O N T E M P O R A R Y T H O U G H T.
The behaviour of animals is to this extent based on something like a nature. Complete isolation of the human child, on the other hand, reveals the absence of these dependable 'a priori' , of adaptive schemata peculiar to the species. Children deprived too early of all social contact -- those known as feral or 'wolf children -- become so stunted in their solitude that their behaviour comes to resemble that of the lower animals. Rather than a state of nature in which one can detect a rudimentary 'homo sapiens' or 'homo faber', one discovers instead a condition of such abnormality that to understand it one needs not psychology, but teratology.
The fact is that human behaviour does not depend on heredity to the same extent as animal behaviour. The system of biological needs and functions carried by the genotype and passed on to man at birth relates him to all other living creatures rather than defines him as
specifically human, and it is this very absence of predetermined characteristics which means that man's possibilities are unlimited. Man's is not a closed life, ruled and governed by a given nature, but an open one. He creates and imposes order on an acquired nature. This is why there has emerged under the pressure of cultural circumstances a variety of social types which diversify man in time and space, and why there is not just a single type with the character of a species.
If one studies the similarities between men one will find that what they have in common is a structure of possibilities, or rather of probabilities, which are only realized in some specific social context.
Before his encounter with others man is nothing but a notional quantity as thin and insubstantial as mist. To acquire his substance, he requires a milieu, the presence of others.
It is pointless to speculate on the precise origins of mankind; one must accept that before the appearance of a single man, there must have existed a proto-human society -- a society before being -- in which 'mutants' could develop. The exact nature of these mutations, which figure in the theory of evolution and which are presupposed by psycho-sociology, is not clear.
Nevertheless, of this much we can be certain: there exists today a being which, unlike everything else in the world, does not appear at birth as a "prefabricated system" but which has still to be constructed an has everything to learn.
But even in this cases It is possible to vaguely deduce the common denominators by observing recurrent circumstances and issues that lead to such situations and that need to be protected from exposure by those responsible, for example at my present research:
The suspect Queen Elizabeth II of the old Prusso-Teutonic 'Society of the Lizards' which is perhaps the command of the high Q levels of : Nazi International "Das geheime Deutschland", NATO, Papal Orders, Knights, Masonic lodges, Khazarian Zionist, World Council of Churches, and many other cloaks and guises.
[Link]