Science of the SpiritS


Cult

Best of the Web: The Pathocrats

The concepts in the following video, even the term "Pathocrat", is taken from the seminal book Political Ponerology: A Science of Evil Adjusted for Political Purpose by Andrew Lobaczewski. We find it curious that this book is not even mentioned in the video.


An evolutionary perspective on psychopaths in power.
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Political Ponerology: A Science on The Nature of Evil adjusted for Political Purposes, by Dr. Andrew Lobaczewski

Here's a link that discusses the book.

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SOTT Focus: Political Ponerology: A Science on The Nature of Evil adjusted for Political Purposes


Comment: Now more than ever people need to understand the devastation and suffering wrought on our world by the few at the expense of the many. Presented for the first time on Sott.net, what follows is Laura Knight-Jadczyk's comprehensive review of Political Ponerology: A Science on The Nature of Evil adjusted for Political Purposes, the product of monumental efforts from intrepid researchers of a generation past to bring humanity into awareness about the psychopaths that rule our world.


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Political Ponerology: A Science on The Nature of Evil adjusted for Political Purposes by Andrew M. Lobaczewski with commentary and additional quoted material by Laura Knight-Jadczyk
Pathocracy is a disease of great social movements followed by entire societies, nations, and empires. In the course of human history, it has affected social, political, and religious movements as well as the accompanying ideologies and turned them into caricatures of themselves. This occurred as a result of the participation of pathological agents in a pathodynamically similar process. That explains why all the pathocracies of the world are, and have been, so similar in their essential properties.

Identifying these phenomena through history and properly qualifying them according to their true nature and contents - not according to the ideology in question, which succumbed to the process of caricaturization - is a job for historians.

The actions of [pathocracy] affect an entire society, starting with the leaders and infiltrating every town, business, and institution. The pathological social structure gradually covers the entire country creating a "new class" within that nation. This privileged class [of pathocrats] feels permanently threatened by the "others", i.e. by the majority of normal people. Neither do the pathocrats entertain any illusions about their personal fate should there be a return to the system of normal man.

- Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Political Ponerology: A science on the nature of evil adjusted for political purposes

Comment: Andrew M. Lobczewski's book is available from QFG Publishing. Get your copy today and protect yourselves and your loved ones from the evil that is eating this world inside out.


Butterfly

Best of the Web: Eight changes to my life as a result of just four weeks of daily meditation

Comment: All of the benefits listed in this article are real, and much, much more with the Éiriú Eolas stress control, healing and rejuvenation program available online FREE!

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© unknown
Last month, I read a study showing that just eight weeks of daily meditation leads to increased grey matter densities in areas of the brain associated with memory, sense of self, empathy, and stress-regulation. I shared this with some friends, and we immediately formed a meditation group, committed to meditating for eight weeks straight in order to duplicate the results.

In just one day of meditation I saw improvements, but I feared writing about them due to possible placebo effects. But now, I'm becoming more and more confident in the power of meditation. I'm four weeks into the program, and here's what I've noticed:

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Child brain scans to pick out future criminals

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© ALAMYThe researchers argue that, by predicting which children have the potential to be trouble, treatments could be introduced to keep them on the straight and narrow
The seeds of criminal and anti-social behaviour can be found in children as young as three, scientists have claimed.

More researchers believe that violent tendencies have a biological basis and that tests and brain imaging can pick them up in children.

They argue that, by predicting which children have the potential to be trouble, treatments could be introduced to keep them on the straight and narrow. If the tests are accurate enough then a form of screening could be introduced in the same way we test for some diseases.

The theories were put forward by two leading criminologists at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington.

Prof Adrian Raine, a British criminologist, argued that abnormal physical brain make-up could be a cause of criminality, as well as helping to predict it.

His studies have shown that psychopaths and criminals have smaller areas of the brain such as the amygdala and prefrontal cortex, both of which regulate and control emotion and behaviour. He also believes that a lack of conditioning to fear punishment, which can be measured in toddlers before disruptive behaviour is apparent, could also be a strong indicator.

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SOTT Focus: Ponerology 101: The Dangers of Pit Bulls and Climate Control

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© Sott.net
I hope you are all getting the point of this series so far: psychopaths are a big problem in our world! But it's not that simple. Take an analogy. Timmy is sick. He caught a bug at school the other week and is down for the count. Thankfully for his parents, they're somewhat eccentrically obsessed with health and cleanliness and had immediately placed Timmy in a microbiologically sterile bubble in their guest bedroom, before proceeding to decontaminate the entire house and its occupants. The pathogen that threatens the health of those he might come in contact with is successfully locked in. (Unfortunately for Timmy, so is he!) However, Timmy's parents didn't factor Sunshine, the family's pet pit-bull, into their anti-infection equation.

So, one afternoon, while Timmy is reminiscing about his former life outside the bubble, along comes Sunshine who pokes a hole in the bubble's protective layer with his favorite stick. The highly contagious, airborne infection is now free to surf the air waves of 21st century climate control, and through a series of highly improbable events, Timmy's sister, parents, dog and goldfish all come down with the nasty bug. The infection then spreads throughout the neighborhood, city, and eventually, the world, as local businessmen who don't mind an aggressive pat down from the TSA and exposing their genitals to puerile airport security personnel via Peeping-Tom-Technology, travel to very serious and important business meetings. So, what's the point of this? Simply put, psychopaths need a number of things to have their effect in lieu of the direct interaction of personal relationships. Among a psychopath's best tools to spread his malevolence are fanatic bulldogs and the cold theories of human nature that determine the intellectual climate of a society. It's through these intermediaries that our bodies and minds are systematically infected - ponerized.

Comment: Go to Part 8 in the Ponerology 101 series


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The Root of the Feeling of Religiousness

Many Religions
© Payvand Iran News
In the past ten days, the news on spaceweather.com has been all about increased solar activity and appearance of gigantic sunspots on our Sun.

Coincidentally reading through and amending my translation of Gurdjieff's Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, I accidentally reached the explanation of a cosmic phenomenon which he calls Law of Solioonensius, emerging as the result of increasing tension in our Sun spreading naturally to all its planet, with the resulting effect that 'feeling of religiousness' increases in us. This is when we can use the opportunity to accelerate the development of Objective Reason in us through our own desires and efforts to be what we are supposed to be, Humans, distinguished from other creatures solely by virtue of this Reason. It is like a booty given to all to strive in this direction. This is what our far far ancestors, before our division to casts and classes knew and thus used the opportunity in the corresponding way. With the dawn of history and our divisions to classes, when this same cosmic phenomenon happens, and we recognize a strange 'feeling' in ourselves as a result, we apparently take it as a symptom of 'nervousness' leading to another feeling which Gurdjieff calls the 'Need of Freedom.'

With this introduction, all of a sudden remembering the fact that this state of affairs has been going on almost continuously with only short periods of 'peace' among and within nations inhabiting this part of our Mother Earth since WWII and Communist Revolution and later Islamic Revolution, and the coincidence of higher activity of our Sun these days with mass movements in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Algeria, Libya, and the persistence of 'Silent Green Movement' in Iran, all manifesting the "need of freedom", I thought this sharing may open a new window as it did for me.

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US Senator Scott Brown Recalls Childhood Abuse

Tells "60 Minutes" Writing About Abuse Was An Act Of Catharsis For Him


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The Illusion of Truth

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© Thomas HawkRepetition is used everywhere—advertising, politics and the media—but does it really persuade us? Psychology studies reveal all...
We see ads for the same products over and over again. Politicians repeat the same messages endlessly (even when it has nothing to do with the question they've been asked). Journalists repeat the same opinions day after day.

Can all this repetition really be persuasive?

It seems too simplistic that just repeating a persuasive message should increase its effect, but that's exactly what psychological research finds (again and again). Repetition is one of the easiest and most widespread methods of persuasion. In fact it's so obvious that we sometimes forget how powerful it is.

People rate statements that have been repeated just once as more valid or true than things they've heard for the first time. They even rate statements as truer when the person saying them has been repeatedly lying (Begg et al., 1992).

And when we think something is more true, we also tend to be more persuaded by it. Several studies have shown that people are more swayed when they hear statements of opinion and persuasive messages more than once.

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Shamanism As Evolutionary Medicine

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Although it appears that our paleo ancestors inhabiting temperate and tropical ecosystems had no modern diet-related diseases, they did suffer dis-eases, and universally had "medicine men," also known among anthropologists as "shamans." As a medical system, shamanism maintains that many apparently physical dis-eases have spiritual causes. Indigenous/shamanic tribal cultures "believe" that spirits exist and play roles in individual, tribal, and ecological health. Shamanic interventions address traumas affecting the soul/spirit through direct interaction with the spiritual realm, achieved through altered states of consciousness that provide entrance to a non-ordinary reality.

All this talk of spirits certainly makes anxiety for modern "scientific" atheists and Judeo-Christian religionists alike. The former will dismiss such talk as mumbo-jumbo without empirical basis, a threat to rationality and logic. They will tend to dismiss shamanism as dealing with non-existent "supernatural" entities. The latter believe that for some odd reason the One True God chose to reveal himself and the Rules for the Right Way of Life only to the members of several middle Eastern desert tribes, leaving everyone else in the dark. They also believe that this God gave these chosen people not only the right but the duty to convert all other tribes to their faith and way of life, if not by persuasion then by force. These people call non-believers by various names like heretic, infidel, heathen, pagan, and so on, and have called shamanic culture "demonic."

In either case, shamanism directly competes with the "authorities." Atheists may consider shamans a threat to the authority of "reason," science, and scientists, and religionists certainly consider shamans a threat to the authority of their faith, dogma, and priests. Shamanism comes from non-hierarchical tribal culture in which no one has ultimate authority over another, and thus it conflicts with civilization and all types of authority.

To illustrate the modern discomfort with shamanism, in 1892, in a speech at the Smithsonian Institution, John Bourke called shamans "an influence antagonistic to the rapid absorption of new customs" and said "only after we have thoroughly routed the medicine men from their entrenchments and made them an object of ridicule can we [whites] hope to bend and train the minds of our Indian wards in the direction of civilization."

Comment: Psychologist John Schumaker points out in his book The Corruption of Reality that human beings seem to come hardwired with a need to dissociate. This brain's capacity to dissociate could represent a means of shutting down the physical and connecting with the spiritual.

It also seems clear from the evidence that Schumaker presents, that it is a hard-wired function that is just waiting to be taken advantage of by any "snake-oil salesman" that comes along. It is also abundantly evident that those who do not utilize this ability of the brain - those who suppress it - suffer from other disorders.

For more information on this topic and how to heal your body, mind and spirit, see the Éiriu Eolas website.


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Antagonistic people may increase heart attack, stroke risk

American Heart Association rapid access journal report

Antagonistic people, particularly those who are competitive and aggressive, may be increasing their risk of heart attack or stroke, researchers report in Hypertension: Journal of the American Heart Association.

Researchers for the U.S. National Institute on Aging (NIA), a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), studied 5,614 Italians in four villages and found that those who scored high for antagonistic traits on a standard personality test had greater thickening of the neck (carotid) arteries compared to people who were more agreeable. Thickness of neck artery walls is a risk factor for heart attack and stroke.

Three years later, those who scored higher on antagonism or low agreeableness - especially those who were manipulative and quick to express anger - continued to have thickening of their artery walls. These traits also predicted greater progression of arterial thickening.