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Wednesday, 25 June 2025

Here's a draft of a ponerological account of society, drawing from the insights of Andrzej Łobaczewski’s political ponerology, critical theory, and your own preoccupations with disintegration, distortion, and existential collapse. It is not a full system but a mode of analysis—a lens that sees the pathology of power as embedded in cultural, institutional, and psychological structures.

Toward a Ponerological Account of Society

A ponerological account of society begins with the grim hypothesis that evil is not anomalous. It is not external to the system, nor reducible to deviance or malevolent individuals. Rather, evil is a structural phenomenon—encoded into the forms of social reproduction and invisibly sanctified by bureaucratic language, institutional norms, and common sense.

Ponerology, the study of evil’s internal logic and mechanisms, demands more than psychological diagnosis or moral outrage. It asks: How is pathological power made normal, desirable, even virtuous? How are sick conditions defended by sane people?

I. The Psychopathization of Structure

Modern bureaucratic states, large corporations, and global technocratic regimes often display what Łobaczewski called “pathocracy”: governance by individuals with severely diminished empathy, often with high cognitive function and low affective attunement. These are not always clear-cut sociopaths, but people whose affective alienation allows them to excel in systems where detachment is an advantage.

In such regimes:

Truth becomes a liability.
Thought becomes a threat.
Emotion becomes a symptom to suppress.

Rationality is not discarded—it is weaponized. Institutions develop cultures where emotional detachment, proceduralism, and abstraction function as mechanisms of both control and moral immunity. “We were just following protocol.”

II. Ideology as a Cloak for Harm

The great trick of ponerogenic systems is not open violence, but ideological rationalization:

Meritocracy justifies exclusion.
Efficiency masks disposability.
Security legitimates surveillance.
Health conceals social control.

Even care—especially care—is instrumentalized: in schools, hospitals, prisons, and social work, the gesture of concern is used to justify abandonment. Compassion becomes a management strategy, hollowed out and converted into metrics.

The society does not merely suffer evil. It functions through it. And yet, it sees itself as good.

III. Language in a Ponerized Society

Language does not merely reflect reality—it manufactures legibility. In a ponerized society, language becomes:

A means of inoculating the soul against pain through euphemism.
A method of reversing guilt, placing the burden on the vulnerable, the marginal, the sick.
A tool for denying suffering by psychologizing it, or deferring it through red tape and "due process."

Words multiply. Meaning vanishes.

The most dangerous lies are those told through consensus: shared, official, seemingly humane. A society saturated in “communications” becomes incapable of witness. All becomes PR.

IV. The Role of the “Normal”

In ponerogenic systems, pathology hides in the clothing of the normative. Those who adapt too well are often most deeply complicit. They climb institutional ladders, speak in polished code, and exhibit neither hesitation nor doubt.

The truly broken, by contrast, may carry the refusal in their body: anxiety, collapse, psychosis, silence. Their pain is not a symptom of illness alone—but a sign that some part of them refuses to adapt to evil.

V. Descent into a Moral Night

The final stage of ponerogenesis is not chaos, but order.
It is not rebellion, but consensus.
It is not suffering, but the bureaucratic normalization of suffering.

It is a world where:

Thought becomes excess.
Love becomes naïve.
Witness becomes criminal.
And resistance is framed as “disinformation,” “instability,” or “extremism.”