Red Pill Press editor Harrison Koehli discusses the book Political Ponerology written by Andrew Lobaczewski.

Transcript:

Dustin: So in the studio with me I have Harrison. Harrison are you there?

Harrison: Yup, I'm here, can you hear me?

Dustin: Yeah, I can hear you just great, can you hear me?

Harrison: Yes.

Dustin: Ok perfect. So, I actually can't remember your last name.

Harrison: It's pronounced Koehli (kay-lee).

Dustin: Ok, so I have Harrison Koehli with me, and you're a publisher or editor?

Harrison: Both actually, I work for the publishing company Red Pill Press, I also do editing for that company. We're pretty small, we've only got a few employees in Grand Prairie, so we share a lot of the work.

Dustin: I'm going to tell you right now, I was travelling up there, I went to see my mom and I stopped in at the local Head shop and I got directed down to your book store. What's the name again?

Harrison: It's called the Rabbit Hole.

Dustin: The Rabbit Hole, which is perfectly, aptly named. But I went in there and just an amazing selection of books, and I was turned on through the Red Pill Press to this book Political Ponerology. But first I want to find out, it's just an unlikely place in some sense to find such an amazing collection of books, published in Grand Prairie, how did the Red Pill Press get going?

Harrison: Well it was really just a guy that happened to live in Grand Prairie, we got the idea, we needed to start this company to publish some books that we were interested in and it just happened to be where we ended up, so, location didn't really matter, it was the material we wanted to publish, which was this book and a few others when we started out. But it was really more about the book than the location, the location just happened.

Dustin: Just, that's where the people happened to be.

Harrison: Yup.

Dustin: Anyway, living in BC and living in Nelson and we have kind of like a trans-humic exchange with Alberta holidayers and land purchasers and what ever, we kind of like consider it kind of a hinterland over the mountains, you know? But it's heartening to know that there's such amazing publishing going on there. Now, why was this book of importance to get published.

Harrison: Well, we believe and a lot of others do, that it's a pretty revolutionary book. It was actually written in 1984 and originally published in a limited edition at one of the University's in New York, so only a few copies were printed, the author Andrew Lobaczewski wasn't able to get it published in New York for various reasons, which I could get into tonight. So the book basically sat in a few University libraries until the author found a website of one of the other authors that we publish and contacted her because she had a page on psychopathy. So she'd written a bunch on psychopaths and their influence in politics, and so he contacted her and basically said, "I've written this book, can I send you a copy?" So, she got the copy, she read it and realised what an amazing book it was and that it needed to be published, and so we got on that and we're happy to have done it because this book wouldn't have been made available if it wasn't for the fact that Lobaczewski found the website and got in contact with someone who understood, or could see the importance of the book.

Dustin: I understand that in the past, that it garnered some pretty harsh attention from communist folk.

Harrison: Yeah, there's a bit of a back story to that starting with the Nazi invasion of Poland actually, because the author is from Poland, he is a psychologist and when the Nazis invaded they outlawed the practise of psychology and psychiatry, and they actually killed the vast majority of the psychologists living at the time. There were over 400 in 1939, in 1940 there were about 50.

Dustin: Oh my God, I didn't know that.pauza

Harrison: Yeah, it's a pretty amazing fact, it was basically genocide against the Polish people, and then the Soviets, after the Nazi's fell, the Soviets came in. And the Soviets socialised psychology and they strictly controlled it, they were only allowed to practise Pavlovian psychiatry, so they weren't allowed to research things like psychopathy. What actually happened was, they strictly controlled the subjects that were allowed to be researched, and books were destroyed and topics were banned, and Lobaczewski mentions, and he told us that, to be caught doing research on psychopathy could lead, you would either get sent to prison, you'd be executed or you'd be exiled. And so this kind of research was done under strict conspiracy, Lobaczewski didn't even know the names of a lot of the people that were collaborating with him on this work, because to know names would be too dangerous if one of them got caught, being tortured they might reveal the other names, so they had this network of people that operated in secrecy, they sent things using a little bit of scientific run-around, they called their papers, for example, some notes on mentally deficient children, and it would actually be papers about the leaders of the regime at the time.

Dustin: So that what was the main fear of the communist party, was their own leaders, their own infrastructure would be, it was being analysed for what it was, and for what the leaders were.

Harrison: Yeah and actually, pretty early on in the 60's a bunch of the psychologists in Poland and Hungry, a bunch of those regions, they got together and they, in private, they knew right away that it was what they called a macro-social psychopathological system, it was a social system that was run by people that were pathological. And so they knew this but they couldn't really say anything about it, because, like I said, if they would they'd be arrested, possibly executed, and so the first 2 editions of this book were actually destroyed. Lobaczewski was just one researcher out of many, he specialised in the study of psychopaths, and it got to the point in the 60's where there was a big crack down on psychologists and he lost all his contacts, so he took up the responsibility to write the book, because the person who had planned to write the book just disappeared. So he wrote the book and he was living in a small town, and I can't remember the name of it, in Poland at the time, and the locals warned him that there was going to be a secret police raid on his house, and so he took everything he had to the furnace and burned it and minutes later the secret police showed up. So the first cop was destroyed in order to save his life, second copy was lost, he tried to get it out of the country but the person he gave it to didn't do anything with it, who knows what happened to it, and then eventually he was denounced by, there was actually, he contacted a guy who worked for Radio Free Europe and the roaming correspondent and the roving correspondent denounced him to the Polish authorities, he was probably a Polish secret service agent, and so denounced him and this was the 3 rd or 4th time he had been arrested, and they told him either you are going to prison or we'll give you your passport. So he took his passport and moved to New York where he went through a whole bunch of more trouble, and that's where he eventually wrote the 3rd copy of the book, which is the one that we published.

Dustin: Now can you tell me the meaning of the word Ponerology, it's spelled, for listeners out there P-O-N-E-R-O-L-O-G-Y.

Harrison: Ponerology is derived from the Greek word poneros, and poneros means evil, I believe it's used in the New Testament, and the connotation for it is an evil with a corrupting influence. So Ponerology, originally was a little known branch of theology which studied evil in religious terms, and Lobaczewski decided to adopt that term for a scientific purpose because there was no, and there still isn't, in the general scientific community, there isn't a field that studies evil in general, and its nature in individuals and the effect that those individuals have on groups, other individuals and social processes. So Ponerology is the scientific study of evil.

First 10 minutes (10:00)

Dustin: And so this Political Ponerology, the study of evil, influencing evil in politics.

Harrison: Yes.

Dustin: The influencing of people in politics. Now I've been slowly making my way through, I'm like maybe a third of the way though because I'm telling you it's pretty heavy reading, like it's not light on the skull.

Harrison: No it's really tough.

Dustin: It's like you almost need a Jungian psychology degree to really grasp some of the concepts. He explains everything really well, but it's very, very complex.

Harrison: Yeah and that's one of the unfortunate things about the book, is that it's written in a very dense psychological language. We've had a bunch of people, like we've had people tell us, that have no psychology background, that it was tough to read, but they read it once, twice three times and it eventually all starts making sense. So, it is a chore, it's tough to get through it the first time, but once you do and once you get your head around some of the new words he uses, if you have a dictionary next to you it helps, once you do that, there's just so much to the book, it's pretty thin, but it even took me ages to get through it all.

Dustin: Um hm I'm still working on it. So, I'm just not sure where to start here on the actual book itself, like where do you think you would start with trying to kind of explain where the book is going in terms of our western culture, or, a broader sense of how these leaders, the nature of their, kind of psychosis.

Harrison: Well I think a good analogy to start with would be, just to get an overall idea of what the book represents and why it's important is to look at the experiment that Milgram did, I don't know if you've heard about it or not, the Milgram experiment, but Milgram was a psychologist, I believe it was in the 60's that he did this experiment. And what he did was, he did an experiment where there were 2 subjects, one was hooked up to a machine that administered electric shocks, and this person was actually an actor, who the other person didn't know was an actor. The other person, the real test subject, would be in the room and would be told it was a learning experiment and that each time the person gave a wrong answer they were to administer a shock and so the test was to see how shocks affected learning. But the real goal of the experiment was to see how many people would actually administer the shock to the fullest degree which was a lethal degree, just because the experimenter told them to do so. And it ended up that, well first of all, every single subject went passed 300 volts, 300 is about the range, the upper range of what I think a Taser administers. And, about 50% went above 450 volts, so a large amount of people administered what they believed to be a lethal shock to a person just because the experimenter told them to. And so this is really a microcosm of what happens and what the book describes, in a sense that we have these leaders who are psychopathic, will basically tell a population what to do, not in so many words, and just by the very nature of them saying it, and being an authority, there will be a group of people that will follow them no matter what. And so it's really a, the books describes this two pronged dynamic, there's the people who follow the will of leaders who tell them what to do, and then there's the nature of the leaders themselves. So there's these two groups, and Ponerology deals mostly with the social dominators, people that become leaders. But then there's also a bunch of research being done on the followers, and I guess I could talk about both groups, if that's all right.

Dustin: Yeah, is there, there's an aspect of sociopathy and psychopathy right?

Harrison: Could you say that again?

Dustin: Is the sociopathic nature and the psychopathic naturetogether, does one lead into the other.

Harrison: Well, it depends on who you ask for your definitions, because there's a bit of controversy in the field. Sociopathy implies a social influence that basically creates the antisocial behaviour, but the word psychopath, in the field it's used to describe someone who is born with a certain personality. So a psychopath is born a psychopath, there's nothing that can happen in childhood that will make them better or anything that can happen later on to make them better, they're actually, Lobaczewski describes it as, they're actually born with a deficit, they can't, they are born without the ability to feel higher emotions. Whereas a sociopath is someone who becomes antisocial through early childhood experiences, brain damage, that sort of thing.

Dustin: Ok, I just wanted to make sure what those two different kinds of ideas were.

Harrison: And one of the important things to remember is, as Lobaczewski points out, it's the psychopaths that are the most dangerous, and I guess I can talk a little but about psychopaths. There's a lot of misconceptions about them, most people hear the word they think of Hannibal Lector or Ted Bundy. Now, the thing is, Ted Bundy was a psychopath but very few, like a miniscule number of psychopaths are serial killers, and that's what most people think of when they hear the word, is a serial killer. But what psychopathy is really describing is a group of people, now the numbers vary, Robert Hare, whose one of the leading experts in the field, he operates in Vancouver actually, he estimates about 1% of the population is a psychopath, and what that means is that these people are essentially emotionally retarded, they're born without the ability to form social bonds, to feel for other people, they're completely egocentric, they feel no guilt. So from the time that they are children they develop without the emotions everyone else has. Now normal people will develop with the emotions, they'll learn to feel empathy for other people, they'll learn social conventions, things that are considered polite, or things you just don't do. Psychopaths grow up without all of this, and so they live in a world where everyone else makes these strange, has these strange reactions to things that happen. So, if a person laughs or cries, or feels embarrassed or anxious, these things strike a psychopath as being just illogical strange reactions with no meaning behind them. One of the, I can't remember which one, but one of the researches in psychopathy gave one story, how he was interviewing a psychopath in prison, and they were doing a test on him to see his reactions to emotions on faces, so they show him a picture of a certain emotion and ask what emotion that was. Now, this one psychopath, when he was shown a picture of fear, he said that he didn't know what emotion it was, all he knew is that that's the face that people made before he stabbed them.

Dustin: Oh my god

Harrison: Yeah so they have no comprehension of what other people feel, it's just some strange facial reaction that they make.

Dustin: Now just because they can't feel and they don't understand, are they unpopular people.

Harrison: Well no, because, this is the interesting thing, is that they cant feel emotion but what they can do is that they realise that they have to act in a certain way to get what they want. So they learn from a very early age how to imitate human emotion.

Dustin: Oh wow

Harrison: So what they do is, another scary story is that Robert Hare who I mentioned previously, he was called in as an advisor for a movie, I can't remember which actress was in it, bur he was advising this actress who was playing a psychopath, and she asked for a scene to kind of get into this character and he said, ok well imagine you're waling down the street and you see a car accident, and outside the car accident there's a mother and her child has just been killed in the accident, so she sees the mother there holding her child weeping, what the psychopath would do is go home, go in front of the mirror and start contorting their face, trying to make the expression of crying. So they learn all these facial reactions, facial expressions and things to say in certain situations so that they really seem like they are a normal person.

2nd 10 minutes 20:04

Harrison: And the thing is, is that they're kind of more than normal, they're extra normal.

Dustin: They're perfectly normal.

Harrison: Yup, so they're perfectly charming, they say all the right things, they're popular, and that's why it comes as such a shock when people find out that these people lead a second life. Ted Bundy was a republican candidate, he was going places, he was a charming attractive man, and then all of a sudden out of nowhere it's revealed that he's this serial killer, and often times when this happens, not just with Ted Bundy, but with politicians and business men and even just husbands, it's revealed that they've got this second life and people just can't believe it, like their best friends, you know I had no idea, and some of them don't believe it when it does happen.

Dustin: Yeah they go into a state of denial, that, no it couldn't possibly be.

Harrison: And that's what we have with our political system, is that there are so many people who just will not even, they just can't except that, let's say their favourite politician is a psychopath, or even that this kind of thing happens, it just pushes too many buttons, it causes you to ask too many questions and so a lot of people will just close shut when they hear the idea.

Dustin: So, the character of a psychopath is suited towards politics.

Harrison: What's that, sorry I couldn't hear you.

Dustin: The psychopathic characteristics are perfectly suited for politics.

Harrison: Yeah exactly, because they'll say anything, they'll lie, psychopaths are pathological liars, they'll tell an enormous amount of lies and they won't feel anything about it. That's one of the things that all the researchers noticed when they interviewed them, is that even when the psychopath has to know that the researcher knows that they are lying, they'll still lie and they'll just tell lie upon lie, upon lie, and then once they're caught in a lie they'll just lie again to cover up for the other lie. It's almost like they can't realise that, they just don't care, it's like they don't know what a fact is, they just create reality as it comes into their minds, they have this idea of, ok well I know what I want so I'm going to manipulate these facts so that the people that I'm manipulating will know the reality that I am creating. In Robert Hare's book, Without Conscience, he gives one example of the psychopath who, he had a bunch of women, and one of them, I think it was his wife, found out about his mistress, so he lied to her and said, oh you know that's a total lie, I love you, I've never cheated on you whatsoever, and so when Robert Hare asked him about this, he said, but you were lying, and he said, well she didn't know that, it depends entirely on what the people they're lying to think, so, in this case the wife didn't know, so what he was telling her was the truth because that's what he wanted her to know. It doesn't really make any sense how they think, it's totally foreign.

Dustin: So what I'm interested in to is, how does that relate to the power structure within politics, those who are above them and can give them commands, a higher power than they are, how do they react to being told what to do, or respond to commands or how do they fit into like a military or political hierarchy.

Harrison: Well, if I understand your question, the way psychopaths work is that they'll be totally submissive to someone whose in a higher position to them, but, they'll always, behind the scenes, be working to take that persons position. So, again Robert Hare wrote another book called Snakes in Suits about psychopaths in the corporate environment, in business in corporations, companies, things like that, and he gave the how they work in that kind of environment. And what they'll do is they'll see immediately who can further their advancement and who doesn't, so everyone who cant do anything for them is worthless to them, but they'll really nurture the relationships with the people who can possibly do something for them. So they'll be perfect psychopaths to whoever is above them, constantly trying to get their position. So in the political environment, if there's someone higher than them, they'll give the appearance of being a total lackey, a total crony to this person, but when the time comes they'll stab them in the back and take their position.

Dustin: So, oh wow, so that's perfect for politics and for actually military too, for advancement and how you go up n the ranks. Now, what happens when they hit the top, when they become a prime minister, a high ranking politician, a CEO, when they hit the top what, do they change, do they, how does that operate on us, because the people under these politicians are people who are affected by them.

Harrison: Well that's really what inspired Lobaczewski to write his book, is that, he was writing it from a position where psychopaths were in top positions. What he defines as a pathocracy is a social system in which not only is the leader of a country a psychopath, but by the nature of the way that person came to power, pretty much every person in a position of authority is a psychopath. And this has happened historically in let's say, Nazi Germany, USSR, the Spanish Inquisition, the Catholic Church for centuries. So really he describes what he calls the hysteroidal cycle, so it's basically a cycle of history where there are 2 important phases. One, which he probably describe our society as being in today, is the cycle, a stage of hysteria and egoism and selfishness. So we've got a culture where, especially in the States, it's just hysterical, there are so many instances of, let's say on flights, where someone will say something or will have some kind of protrusion on their body and someone will get paranoid and tell the flight attendants and they will ground the flight. Or there'll be some kind of strange electronic device on the street and people will think it's a bomb and call the police. And it's just this state of fear, fear and ignorance and it's this kind of environment that is the perfect, well it's the perfect environment in which a psychopath can gain power, and once they get to power, certain things happen and it's a, Lobaczewski describes the process in his book, the different stages it goes through, but it gets to the point that if something isn't done about it, it's pretty much a sure thing that, what it means is, when there are psychopaths in power, what you get is genocide and what you get is endless war and oppression of the people. And this is really the process that Naomi Wolf describes in her book The End of America, what she calls a fascist shift, and that's when a government slowly shifts to oppressing its own people. And that's really a defining characteristic of a pathocracy; it is that a group of psychopaths in charge turns against their own people.

Dustin: We've been covering that in the Canadian version of that, and originally why I was kind of interested in this book was that I'd been covering Stephen Harper's fundamentalist evangelical church leanings, and that kind of thing and how the fascist shift was going on in Canada and with our leader Stephen Harper and how the different stages of the fascist shift were happening here in Canada, so I love Naomi Wolf's work for sure.

Harrison: Yeah it's a great book, I recommend that everyone read it, it's a lot easier to read than Ponerology, though a lot of the parallels are easier to see when you read that book. One of the things I like about her book, well, it kind of fits into the work on, there are some Canadian psychologists doing on the people that submit to psychopathic authorities. Because Stephen Harper, you mentioned his fundamentalism, I'd hazard a guess that underneath it all, Harper isn't a fundamentalist.

3rd 10 minutes 29:54

Harrison: Now the thing about psychopaths is that will, just like they learn to imitate emotion, and one of the early researchers in psychopathy called it a mask of sanity, so they'll wear a mask of sanity, just as they'll do that, politicians will wear an ideological mask, they'll pretend to be a certain ideology just to gain a support base. So, in the case of Christians they'll pretend to be Christian to garner the support of the Christian base and then exploit that to gain power. Now this ties into the work of Bob Altemeyer, I believe he is at the University of Manitoba, he does, he's done work on what is called right-wing authoritarianism, and it's kind of a misleading name because right-wing authoritarianism doesn't necessarily mean that you're on the right end of the political spectrum, it really describes people who are just submissive to authority in general, it just so happens that in North America those people happen to be right-wing and a lot of them happen to be fundamentalist Christians. Now, when Gorbachev, in, I can't remember what year it was, it might have been 1989, actually allowed some conversation between North America and Soviet scholars, researchers, and they found out that this personality type, the authoritarian personality type, was the same in each country. For the people that were supporting the communist government, were the exact same people that were supporting the right-wing government in America and Canada, and so we have this phenomenon where the kind of people that support any type of government are the same kind of people, and yet they hate each other. So, there's, I just want to, there's something funny in Bob Altemeyer's book called the authoritarians, which is available online, just to kind if describe what these people are like, and they number anywhere from 15-30% of the population, according to the studies he's done. So he was doing a test to see, just kind of, the kind of answers they would give to certain questions, and so, he was asking what kind of laws that they would agree to, what kind of power that they would give the authorities, and so I'm just going to read a short paragraph from this book, he said, finally, just to take this to its ludicrous extreme I asked for reactions to a law to eliminate right-wing authoritarians, I told that subjects that right-wing authoritarians are people who are so submissive to authority, so aggressive in the name of authority and so conventional that they may cause a threat to democratic rule, surely, some of the high right-wing authoritarians realised that if they supported this law they were the very people who the law would persecute, and by proxy would there for put itself in jail. But not all of them realised this, for authoritarian followers still favoured, more than others did, a law to persecute themselves, you can almost hear the circuits clanking shut in their brains, and he quotes what they might say, if the government says these people are dangerous they've got to be stopped. So we've got these group of people that will support a politician no matter what, and they will fight to protect that politician, and these are the type of people, that in Milgram's study would go the entire distance to administering a lethal shock just because the authority tells them to. So Bob Altemeyer thinks that this is the biggest problem we've got in our society now, is that there's this group of people that will follow a person like Stephen Harper to the limits, if he continues to pretend to be Christian.

Dustin: It's kind of ironic because recently, we had the whole coming out of one of the big evangelicals who used to meet with Bush every week, with his gay lover, his gay lover who got crack for him and they would smoke crack and have sex, and he got busted. And then recently we just had the call-girls, the whole call-girls scandal, where now all of a sudden these extreme evangelical fundamentalist Christians are being busted for having call-girls at their hotel rooms and this and that, so, it's happening right now, the kind of, the facade being ripped away, of what, you know these politicians in the States, who are extreme Christians and even had been advocating in their own sermons, you know very harsh laws against the very activities that they got busted for.

Harrison: Yup, and that's what you find with psychopaths, is that they will, like I said, they'll pretend to be a certain and thing and they'll give a perfect image of being an upright citizen and a good Christian, and then they make one mistake or something gets revealed and the whole mask, the whole façade comes down and you see just what hypocrites they really are. And it's happened so many times, well, you asked about the implications of when a psychopath is in a position of power, what Lobaczewski noticed in Poland was that once the psychopaths got to power they'd keep up their mask of sanity for, let's say propaganda purposes and for dealing with other countries, but in a lot of cases that mask would be taken off and their true nature would be revealed. You can kind of see this in the example of Nazi Germany, where certain people just became animals, and Lobaczewski actually called it transpersonification, it's like their personality totally changes. What actually happens is that they find an excuse to stop acting, and one of the, probably one of the most important things or concepts in the book is that because psychopaths don't develop emotionally, they have this twisted view of the world, they see other humans as almost this inferior species that is weak and that has these strange emotional reactions. And so a psychopath will view himself as oppressed, now we've seen this in the case of Josef Fritzl in Austria recently, I don't know if you've heard about the case, but I don't know everything about it but he kept his daughter locked in the basement of this house, basically in a dungeon, he fathered several children with her, tortured her, and he was eventually caught and the revealing thing was when he was caught, he was talking about how his jailers were treating him like a monster and they were oppressing him, and the thing is, is that in his mind he actually believes it, because for a psychopath, total freedom means that they can do whatever they want without any kind of retribution or any kind of consequence. So Josef Fritzl, in this case would like nothing more than to be able to keep his daughter in the dungeon and torture her without any kind of opposition, and the fact that he gets opposition from the world of normal people is to him the harshest of oppression. Psychopaths actually have this twisted sense of oppression because they aren't free to do whatever they want, they aren't free to oppress people, to destroy people's lives. So, what will happen is you've got this group of psychopaths in a country that will want to have supreme power, they'll see that the only way that they can have their freedom is if they have control over everyone. This is what kind of spurs them on to gain political power and it's what motivates their quest, and once they achieve that power, they allow themselves, to a certain degree, to reveal that mask, so they can oppress their people, so that's what happens, in this end of America, fascist shift type thing, is that the people become the enemy, that is the non-psychopath, and so you'll be punished for any type of free thought or any type of conscience, or any type of display of conscience.

Dustin: Or emotion or feeling or resonance or anything like that. So what about, the one ting I was wondering about is, you find within these power structures very tight nit families, like almost, I would say almost like bloodlines that seem to follow through. Is there a genetic correlation in psychopathy, like because if you look at the Bush dynasty we got three generations, right we got Prescott Bush, we got George Bush senior and we got George Bush junior, all with the same traits all with the same kind of ideas.

Harrison: Well I think you're right, Lobaczewski, well the Polish psychologists before the Nazi invasion, they had this pretty advance understanding of psychopathy, they new as much about it as we know now, 60 years ago.

4th 10 minutes - 40:01

Harrison: And one of the things they knewwas that it was a genetic disorder. So, even now we've got psychologists who are trying to promote the idea that it is completely socially created, but that just doesn't hold up to the science and the research that's been done, it is a genetic anomaly and one of the things that Lobaczewski thought, and this hasn't been confirmed yet, because we don't know which gene, or which genes are the ones that give rise to a psychopathic individual, but he thought that it was transmitted by the X chromosome, in the same manner that red and green colour-blindness is. So red/green colour-blindness affects more males than it does females. Just because it's the way that the, well females have two X chromosomes, a male only has one, so if a male gets the infected X chromosome he's got it no matter what, but a female can have a normal X chromosome and an infected one. So, he hypothesized that psychopathy must be some kind of gene on the X chromosome and that would explain why it's a prevalence of males who have it and the females that have it, have it in a toned down version. They're very, well according to the research he did, there were very few full-blown female psychopaths, so it looks, just the fact that it is genetic is kind of, it's suggestive that there's kind of, we can call it a bloodline thing, it probably gets passed down in the families.

Dustin: It just amazes me if you look at the resonances between how Prescott Bush helped setup Hitler and the bombing of the Reichstag and the America Holland lines supplying of arms to the SS and that kind of thing. And then George Bush's twin towers, supplying arms to the Taliban, like all this stuff it just has so many, you know it's almost uncanny.

Harrison: Yeah and the link between it is this psychopathy because even in two cultures with opposing political structures, when it gets down to it, just like the supporters of the leaders of the same. So you'll get examples of. Lets say, American politicians, like Bush's grandfather, he wasn't a politician, but people in the power structure of a country who maybe on the opposite end of the political spectrum as one of their enemies but when it comes down to it they're basically on the same side. So we can see this even in our world today where leaders whose countries may be, you know, at odds a little bit, when it comes down to it, they'll agree on the important points behind the scenes, which are basically oppression of the people.

Dustin: So, the next thing I would ask, what do you think about the idea of having psychopathological testing for all leaders in politics, do you think they'd go for it.

Harrison: Well, it's tough situation because one of the chapters in Ponerology is on the subject of pathocracy and psychiatry and what Lobaczewski experienced is that in a pathocracy the leaders will take control of psychology and psychiatry, they'll basically be psychopathic agents in these sciences. So the only danger about this testing is that if you get a psychopath doing the testing, that's manipulating the results then it wont work.

Dustin: Yeah, they'll make the traits of psychopathy the required traits, and the traits of freethinking the undesirable traits. We can see that in all sciences, we can see it in pharmacology we can see it in any aspect of science, it's completely controlled by what the corporate entities want as their end goal, the results will be what ever they want them to be, you just throw enough funding at it and you'll get it, you know

Harrison: Yeah, and one of our editors interviewed Lobaczewski a year or two ago and asked him could anything have been done in the last fifty years that would have out our world on the right course. He said yes something could have been done and that would have been to pass laws in various countries, pass laws not allowing psychopaths to gain political power.

Dustin: No, he really said that.

Harrison: Yeah.

Dustin: Oh wow. Ok, as I was kind of joking, I thought it would be like, but wow ok.

Harrison: No, no, because it's like he makes an analogy in the book, he says, it's kind of like in a factory if you hired a person with red/green colour-blind, who do certain work where it's necessary to distinguish between red and green, it's just, it's a no brainer that, that person can't do the job.

Dustin: Or a criminal record for paedophiles at a day-care centre.

Harrison: It's like putting a paedophile in charge of a preschool.

Dustin: Yeah it's like, go ahead, what about my criminal record, oh don't worry about it.

Harrison: So, that's really one of the most important things that we an do, is to somehow get some kind of law banning psychopaths from getting political power, the problem is that not a lot of people know what psychopathy is or what psychopaths are.

Dustin: That scares me, just saying that, just scares me because you're right, they would control it, they would make it so they would always get in. The terms of psychopathy, the traits the questions, everything would be manipulated to such a point that in the end the law would be turned against you. So then we would have to change the while political corporate structure to make it happen.

Harrison: And that's what is depressing about it, it would require such a vast shift in everything, like our whole social structure and that's why it's so depressing is that the majority of people don't want their world to be crumbled, they don't want the foundation to be taken out from underneath them, so in effect they'll except a system that will give them short term comfort even if it means long term slavery, and so really the only way we're going to get anywhere is if we have some radical changes to our political system, but that's not going to happen, because people will hold onto this system because it provides some degree of comfort, it gives them food and shelter.

Dustin: Security and survival, well you know in an animal sense, like you know where your food is coming from, you know where you're driving to, that kind of security.

Harrison: And anything that threatens to take that away, anything that threatens to take that from you, you're going to be aggressive towards, you're going to react aggressively towards. So, as great an idea is, I don't if that will work, I think one of the things that can work, the only thing that's a fool proof way is to, first of all, get public awareness out about psychopathy, what its true nature is. Once people have a good understanding for it they can kind of see it in their own lives and see, just that, see how it affects their own lives, and once it starts on that grass roots level then it can apply to every social structure because then every person can recognize a psychopath who is manipulating them, or who is manipulating a group of people, then that psychopath has no power, it's like a magician that has its tricks revealed, the tricks no longer work if you know the secret behind them.

Dustin: Don't look behind the curtain, in the Wizard of Oz. So it's more, so the best thing we can do is just to become aware of the kind of traits that a psychopath has and just be aware of them and bring them to light if you can.

Harrison: Yeah and one of therecommendations that Lobaczewski makes in the book is something that people can do right now, and that is to analyse what politicians say really closely, because they use the same tricks no matter what country they're from and some of them are pretty obvious once you get to know them.

5th 10 minutes 50:01

Harrison: One is what Hitler and Goring, a couple of them called the big lie. What a psychopath will do is tell a lie, it will be a big lie, and then they'll tell it over and over again as if it's 100% true and the effect this has on a normal person is that they'll think that, they wouldn't, a normal person wouldn't tell such a big lie, they'd feel guilty about it, so they think that this person must be telling the truth, or they must at least think that it's the truth, so they'll give this person a little bit of leeway and so, ok well he can't be lying, if he's wrong he might just be a little bit wrong, he might still be right. So, it brings all these doubts into the persons mind, but that's what the liar intends.

Dustin: Their humanism is the very thing the psychopath is manipulating for his own good.

Harrison: Yeah, as psychopaths grow up they learn all our weaknesses basically, all our emotional weaknesses. We have tendencies to think illogically and to make bad choices, and they're aware of all of that. They also take all of our good qualities and use them against us. So I just saw the new Indiana Jones movie today and there's a good example in there where, it's the hostage taking example, a psychopath knows that if you take a family member hostage and if you threaten to do something to them, then their family members, out of love, will do what you want them to do. We're seeing this, well, in Israel right now, and for the last sixty years, where the IDF will take some Palestinians, they'll arrest them and take them to jail and then threaten to do something to their family if they don't comply. And, you know, every police state does that.

Dustin: Yeah look at Guantanamo Bay.

Harrison: Yup, Guantanamo Bay, it's the same thing everywhere, so, well that's one of the things we can use is that whenever we see this dynamic we can identify that there must be a pathological root to it. A normal person doesn't torture someone for no reason at all, there's a, unfortunately I forget his name, but there's a researcher in the States who has done a lot of research on the nature of torture, and what he says is that torturers are almost always psychopathic, however there will be non-psychopathic torturers but the only reason they do it is because they're coerced into to doing it by a psychopath. So any time you have torture going on, there's a psychopathic influence in that system.

Dustin: Oh man, so the listeners are out there with their wide eyes going oh my god, the death and destruction, I guess one of the best things we can do is to foster compassion and kindness, and I actually have Gandhi's book here, Gandhi on non-violence, what I'll do is I'll just flick through and I'll just pick any random page, I'll do some stichomancy here, no bibliomancy, ok what does he say. The lawlessness if it can be so described that I have advocated, is like prescribing wholesome and necessary food for the body, behind my lawlessness there is discipline, construction and well being of society. It is an effective protest against an unjust and injurious law or act, it can never take the form of selfish evasion of duty, he's talking about non-violence.

Harrison: Well the thing about Ghandi is that he embodied every opposite of psychopathic traits and the problem is that in our society we don't seem to value these traits any longer, these traits that Ghandi had, instead we, well I wrote an article recently just commenting on my dissatisfaction at the state of the world, the fact that we basically worship sports hero's and celebrities and people who are really unremarkable individuals.

Dustin: Yeah, really in the scheme of things. Yeah we don't, that's one thing we don't have, mentors.

Harrison: No, we don't have mentors, we don't have true moral compass.

Dustin: Or like elders, who we can well that's the way we have to be, that's the, not the way we have to be, but there is an expression of true humanity, of compassion, love, understanding, all those traits that make us, the diamonds of our hearts, they're the real, that's where we're trying to go is towards compassion and love and understanding and good will and charity and all those traits, but those aren't traits that we're promoting that's for sure.

Harrison: No.

Dustin: We're promoting fast cars, tits, tough guys, bullies, all that crazy stuff, I mean there's nowhere you can go now without seeing it.

Harrison: No and this is all in Ponerology, again this is in the chapter where talks about, it's this kind of society that we live in that, it's like it weakens our immune system, now that fact that we don't have these strong values, that we just have non-values and we're a consumer society, you know that's just looking to be comfortable and have the next gadget, and it's this lack of awareness and this lack of compassion that really makes us weak to this, what Lobaczewski calls social disease of pathocracy, and unfortunately that means that things are going to get progressively worse, or, until or unless we find our moral centre and re-embody these values, because throughout the book Lobaczewski has a really humanitarian viewpoint, this non-violence, he points out that, as with the case with the communist revolution, there are all these ideologies that have some good intentions, like the communist revolution, but, they used violent means, and violence breeds violence, and when you use a psychopaths tricks, it kind of blurs the lines and that just gives a psychopath (unintelligible). As I was saying about sports heroes and celebrities we also have this ultimate fighting and things like that where we worship physical domination and we can see this in the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where this whole political structure worships military superiority and being stronger than the other person, and that's just a recipe for disaster.

Dustin: I was just a lacrosse tournament on the weekend, all weekend, haha, amateur sports, pretty mind blowing, I don't know, but there is something about team, I don't know. Here I am, you know my son is playing sports and I can see that kind of testosterone kind of power, you know, the will of sports and of dominating and that kind of thing.

Harrison: And you can really see it in a lot of the parents in sports.

Dustin: Yeah, oh yeah, trust me being the only parent with hair passed their shoulders and with like 5 different hues of colours on my clothing, at one point one parent yelled out shut up, and I was like whoa, but anyway, I don't mind, he scored five goals, no I'm kidding, can you imagine like, I'm talking on the radio but then we flash to the lacrosse game, kick his ass, come on. No I'm not like that, but I can see it in all aspects of corporate media, advertising, everything we aims towards is domination, domination of women, domination of earth, domination of each other, domination of space, it's everywhere.

6th 10 minutes 1:00:04

Dustin: Humanity is psychopathic, it's not that, it's in reaction to psychopathic individuals in power.

Harrison: Yeah, the thing about a psychopath is that a psychopath can't change, a human can, so as guilty as psychopaths are, we're pretty guilty ourselves for not doing anything about it, becoming so complacent and basically becoming psychopaths ourselves, to a certain degree.

Dustin: Or, psycho-empathic, whoa

Harrison: Yeah.

Dustin: So we should probably bring it to a close here, where do you think, I don't know how we could leave this on an upbeat, what do you think would be the best zone to kind of wind it down. I'm saying it for you because it must be, it's like 1:30 there or 12:30, it's getting late, I should probably wind down here pretty soon, where do you think, there's no happy ending here really, in some sense, is there anything that you can think of that would be a good way to kind of.

Harrison: Well I think you said something which is really important, is that the whole thing about human values and those qualities that are truly human, and the only thing we can do is to strive to become more human. And we can do that individually, it's like there's a spectrum of humanity and there are two poles, one on each end and there's the psychopathic pole and there's the pole of conscience, and right now the psychopathic pole is pretty strong and it's pulling a lot of people towards it, but, as more and more people take responsibility and become poles of conscience, that will attract people towards them and we see this happening repeatedly in history with great individuals like Ghandi, who inspire people to be better. So really the hope for humanity lies in every person with a conscience and who can see this, and luckily we have something that people didn't have in communist Russia or Germany, we have things like the Internet where we can communicate with each other relatively freely. Now, unfortunately the Internet itself is coming under increasing control, but it's still free to a degree, and as long as we have it we have a way of instant communication and getting the message across. So the hope of the world

Dustin: Humanity is psychopathic, it's not that, it's in reaction to psychopathic individuals in power.

Harrison: Yeah, the thing about a psychopath is that a psychopath can't change, a human can, so as guilty as psychopaths are, we're pretty guilty ourselves for not doing anything about it, becoming so complacent and basically becoming psychopaths ourselves, to a certain degree.

Dustin: Or, psycho-empathic, whoa

Harrison: Yeah.

Dustin: So we should probably bring it to a close here, where do you think, I don't know how we could leave this on an upbeat, what do you think would be the best zone to kind of wind it down. I'm saying it for you because it must be, it's like 1:30 there or 12:30, it's getting late, I should probably wind down here pretty soon, where do you think, there's no happy ending here really, in some sense, is there anything that you can think of that would be a good way to kind of.

Harrison: Well I think you said something which is really important, is that the whole thing about human values and those qualities that are truly human, and the only thing we can do is to strive to become more human. And we can do that individually, it's like there's a spectrum of humanity and there are two poles, one on each end and there's the psychopathic pole and there's the pole of conscience, and right now the psychopathic pole is pretty strong and it's pulling a lot of people towards it, but, as more and more people take responsibility and become poles of conscience, that will attract people towards them and we see this happening repeatedly in history with great individuals like Ghandi, who inspire people to be better. So really the hope for humanity lies in every person with a conscience and who can see this, and luckily we have something that people didn't have in communist Russia or Germany, we have things like the Internet where we can communicate with each other relatively freely. Now, unfortunately the Internet itself is coming under increasing control, but it's still free to a degree, and as long as we have it we have a way of instant communication and getting the message across. So the hope of the world is really, it's hard work, there's no hope by sitting back and watching things happen, which is the unfortunate thing, is that social change takes action, but it has to be right action, it can't be psychopathic because psychopathy breeds psychopathy. So things are pretty dismal but I just like to look at it as baby steps, we do whatever we can, I do whatever I can that's why I'm working at this publishing company, I try to get this work across this knowledge, this idea of psychopathy, because the more people understand, the healthier they will be and the less influence psychopaths will have.

Dustin: I just had a, whatever brain flash, but, the thing that, I think that the greatest thing we have really is each other and the promotion of our best traits of each other, like informing community and in creating a culture that promotes those values, but through each other.

Harrison: Yup, and I think once you get further into the book you'll see that Lobaczewski definitely would agree with you and he has a lot to say on the that subject, that is the world of normal people and what we can d. He focuses mainly on what they did under, harsher, what I'd think are harsher realities than we are facing right now, and what we may face in the future. So, really the hope is always there in humanity because even under the harshest conditions, thing can change and things have changed in the past, no matter how many times in the past that free-thought has been crushed, it's always survived, and it's survived because of the group of humanity that values conscience. So, yeah all we can do is try to be that humanity, be that group and be that group of conscience, and it's harder to be it in a society like ours, ironically it seems to be easier under suppression because you really understand what you lost.

Dustin: Yes, exactly, we're like the frog in the boiling water, it's slowly being heated up until it's boiling but the frog doesn't realise.

Harrison: And once we realise it we'll want o jump, but we have to realise that it's no going to be that easy to jump out, we're going to have to find a way out of there and it's going to be a labyrinth.

Dustin: We're going to have to drink the water and then jump, or something. Well man it has been so good to have you in the studio.

Omitted the rest as it was goodbyes etc 106:25