Ponerology’s Six Percent
From wikipedia:
Ponerology is the name given by Polish psychiatrist Andrzej Łobaczewski to an interdisciplinary study of the causes of periods of social injustice. This discipline makes use of data from psychology, psychopathology, sociology, philosophy, and history to account for such phenomena as aggressive war, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and police states.
A like-minded friend recently pointed out Lobaczewski’ book to me. I read the preface, the foreword, and the first chapter for free on Google books. In the first chapter, Andrzej claims that since the dawn of mankind, 6% of humanity has been comprised of suave, clever, law-abiding psychopaths who have zero conscience – none, nada, zilch. The “no conscience” advantage that these people have had over the other 94% of the populace has allowed the wretches to commit the greatest number of man-made atrocities over the entire course of history. Andrzej also states that this advantage allows them to perpetually rise, undiscovered, to the highest levels of government and industry. Scary stuff, no?
Here are a couple of my favorite passages from the book:
Psychology is the only science in which the observer and the observed belong to the same species, even the same person in an act of introspection. That is why his natural world view of humans can be neither sufficiently universal nor completely true.
Whenever a society has become enslaved to others or to the rule of an overly-privileged class, psychology is the first discipline to suffer from censorship and incursions on the part of an administrative body which starts claiming the last word as to what represents scientific truth.
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6% seems like a large number. If you applied that number to the US population that would mean there would be 18,000,000 of these “law-abiding psychopaths who have zero conscience”. Do we really have that many people walking around with no conscience? I know we do have people like that around us but to have that many people, means within a 1000 person company there would 60. The majority of the management staff would be those people. Because these people couldn’t be in any other type of position in the company. Interesting.
Judge for yourself, but according to Andrzej , there is that many. They may not all be little Hitlers 🙂
The book is supposedly backed up by science, not opinion. Again, judge for yourself.
6% may actually be a little low. When we take a look at the world and what’s going on I wouldn’t be surprised if it was higher from when Lobaczewski compiled this info in the 40’s. There are plenty of ‘successful’ psychopaths, and by successful I mean those who are never recognized as who they truly are. The ‘failed’ psychopaths will act out violently and let their mask down easily. An accurate knowledge of psychopathy is needed to interpret Lobaczewski’s work and to assess the situation. Here are some good fundamentals:
The Sociopath Next Door – Martha Stout
Women Who Love Psychopaths – Sandra Brown
Snakes in Suits – Robert Hare and Paul Babiak
Without Conscience – Robert Hare
The Mask of Sanity – Hervey Cleckley
Hi Lasev,
Thanks for the references. Lobaczewski’s book is depressing and scary enough for me.