Q: (L) Alright, what else? There's one question I'd like to ask. There was a discussion on the forum the other day about spanking. And it is my contention that there are some situations where that is the only thing to do, but that it should be very rare. I mean, special situations. Maybe I myself did not follow that model, but there were some instances where that was the only solution. Am I just self-justifying? (Ark) For me it was good. Otherwise probably I would become a criminal. {laughter}

(Andromeda) What if a child is gonna go play in the traffic? Is he gonna take you seriously? I mean, for their protection they need that.

(Ark) I was playing on the railways, and my mother came and saw me and she grabbed my ear and pulled me back home. For a week I couldn't touch my ear!

(Andromeda) That might have saved your life.

(L) Did it keep you off the railroad tracks?

(Ark) Oh yeah.

(L) Would anything else have worked?

(Ark) Um...

(L) If she had told you it was bad to play on the railroad tracks, would you have listened?

(Ark) I knew it!

(L) So it was the fear of consequences that prevented you.

(Ark) You just don't think about it.

(L) So, you think that spanking makes you think about things?

(PoB) It makes you remember.

(Ark) Spanking made me pass a history exam. Otherwise it was another year in the same class.

(L) Alright, so let me ask my question again: Is...

A: Let us ask you: Are there situations in life where asserting yourself physically is appropriate?

Q: (L) Well I would have to say yes. (Andromeda) Definitely. (L) In a world populated by psychopaths, crazy people, bullies, and behaviors that are hurtful and harmful to you and people that you love...

A: Okay, then how will children learn about those situations if they do not have a model of behavior?

Q: (L) Well, I mean a model of behavior seeing an adult stand up to another adult, not an adult to a child.

A: Children can be bullies and manipulators, too!

Q: (Atriedes) In fact that's usually what children who don't get spanked by their parents become: manipulators.

(L) I've never seen a child who didn't have firm limits drawn that were stuck to that did not become completely obnoxious. I've heard people say that they've never spanked their child and little Johnny is oh so wonderful. And they don't know what little Johnny is really like.

(Atriedes) Also think about how society is, how it outlaws any physical reaction between adults in the sense that you don't have a physical recourse anymore. It's against the law to get into a fight. If someone's hurting you, or doing something and taking your stuff, and you resist them, you're in trouble. They're not. So you have no way of enforcing any kind of social order because your hands are tied that way. And that's kind of happened after the whole "don't spank your child" thing. They make all these laws about "no violence" and the world has just gotten more violent. Because, of course, the rules only apply to normal people, not psychopaths, and especially not the psychopaths at the top.

(L) Yeah, it's kind of a thorny issue. So I guess kind of the way we discussed on the forum is how it is.

(Ark) Rare and just.

A: Yes

Q: (Ailén) That's the problem. Most parents don't do it in the right situations or in the right way.

(Atriedes) And there's a difference between abuse and spanking. One's a way to dominate someone else, and the other is a way to enforce structure and rules. If your purpose is to enforce structure and rules, and you are thoughtful about it, then it's not abuse.

(L) It's also about consequences. If you don't learn it at a certain age, you never learn it. It's like the time is gone, and you have to have it put into your physiology at a young age. And I don't say at a really young age. Children younger than three shouldn't be spanked, but only after they're three or four years old, and even then it should be just a smack on the butt or something minor...

(Ark) You can teach a child something, and it will take ten years. And there will be recursion. You spank once, and... (L) And they learn it forever. (Atriedes) The sad thing is that pain is a lot more effective to form memories.

(L) That's true because most of us when we're growing up only understand what someone else is going through if we understand it ourselves. You see someone else cut their finger and you know what it feels like because you cut your finger. It's like a physical thing that you get in your body. Then you do something that hurts somebody else and maybe you're too young to understand intellectually the seriousness of it, but then you get a smack on the butt and you understand in a kind of genetic or physiological way that you did something that hurt somebody else and you got a smack. Later on when you're older it's explained, but you have a foundation on which that explanation can make sense. If you've never had anything physical happen to you as a consequence or repercussion of anything you've ever done, and then all of a sudden when you're ten years old and your cognitive facilities start to kick in and somebody starts explaining things to you, you will not understand. You will not understand what pain or suffering really is because you've never had anything, no consequence.

A: Very close. Remember the woman described in Ponerology as a characteropath?

Q: (L) The one with the brothers where they defended everything she said and everything she did. She never had to have any consequences for anything she ever did. But then wasn't that supposed to be some kind of brain damage?

A: The same can result from indulgence.

Q: (Galaxia) Does being an only child cause some of them to be missing something in their brain because they didn't have any siblings? Do they have brain damage or something?

A: Sometimes, yes. The important thing about discipline for children is activation of brain chemistry mixes at certain windows of imprinting. The human organism is largely a product of evolutionary pressures. To act as if there are no dangers in the environment, to raise a child without exposure to the natural consequences of growing in a hostile environment, is to deprive the child of many systemic cascades of brain activity necessary for proper growth and development.

Q: (Ailén) In other words, no discipline, no activation of a sense of reality.

(L) Yeah, they live in a bubble forever.

We recognize that the inability to recognize pathological forms of behavior, and thus pathology itself, within one's social milieu is the First Criterion of Ponerogenesis. When groups base their understanding of Evil on unfounded and simplistic beliefs, as are propagated by the vast majority of religious organizations, they risk being used as tools by the very Evil they claim to oppose. In such a dynamic, the aforementioned lack of discernment works in conjunction with human moral failings, and it is common to see religious groups denouncing the "Evil" of others, whether homosexuals or people of different ethnicities or religious, while ignoring the deplorable behavior of their own members, and even engaging in pathological behavior themselves. As such, we repudiate the notions that a "statement of faith" absolves one of the "sins".

Psychopaths cannot change their nature, nor should they, and yet the mere declaration of being a "good Christian" or "born again", for example, is often taken to be sufficient grounds for the inclusion in religious groups, and denial of the psychopath's true nature. PaleoChristianity has thus always taken efforts to protect against the inclusion of psychopaths within their midst by refusing their access to positions of influence within the group. The first reaction of those who would destroy fairness and justice to such exclusion is of course the cry that such groups are "unfair" and "unjust". We repudiate such interpretations, asking instead, is it "fair" to allow the fox to enter the hen-house or the wolf to guard the sheep?

Several years ago two graduate students and I submitted a paper to a scientific journal. The paper described an experiment in which we had used a biomedical recorder to monitor electrical activity in the brains of several groups of adult men while they performed a language task. This activity was traced on chart paper as a series of waves, referred to as an electroencephalogram (EEG). The editor returned our paper with his apologies. His reason, he told us: 'Frankly, we found some of the brain wave patterns depicted in the paper very odd. Those EEGs couldn't have come from real people."

Some of the brain wave recordings were indeed odd, but we hadn't gathered them from aliens and we certainly hadn't made them up. We had obtained them from a class of individuals found in every race, culture, society, and walk of life. Everybody has met these people, been deceived and manipulated by them, and forced to live with or repair the damage they have wrought. These often charming - but always deadly - individuals have a clinical name: psychopaths. Their hallmark is a stunning lack of conscience; their game is self-gratification at the other person's expense. Many spend time in prision, but many do not. All take more than they give.