#Andrzej Lobaczewski

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

'Student SUPPORTS Hamas fully' | Peter Hughes: 'Kindness to one group can mean cruelty to another'

Andrew Doyle: Has kindness become cruel and divisive? Well, that's a theory being advanced by Dr Peter Hughes, a philosopher and author who has written this week about how acting with extreme kindness to one group can lead to acts of cruelty towards another. And I'm delighted to say that Dr Peter Hughes joins me now. Welcome to the show.

Peter Hughes: Thank you very much for inviting me.

Doyle: So, Peter, where does this theory of yours come from?

Hughes: Well, it comes originally from the work of a Polish psychiatrist called Andrzej Łobaczewski. He wrote a book when Poland was in a communist occupation called, "Political ponerology." And that means the theory of the origin of evil. And what really fascinated him was how, what he called a pathological minority, a minority of people who were narcissistic, grandiose, but mediocre and believed in themselves way beyond what their competence would dictate, took it upon themselves…

Doyle: I know few people like that.

Hughes: … but they took it upon themselves to decide what people could think, what people could do, what people could say, and he was fascinated by this. And he wrote this book in collaboration with other psychiatrists. It originally, they threw one copy of it on the fire when the secret police came around, just in time, they smuggled another one out to the Vatican which got lost, and then eventually he recovered it from memory and rewrote it from memory, missing a lot of the statistical data, but the basic points he made were true. And what I'm fascinated in is how a pathological minority can come to power, can hold power, when the majority of the people do not believe in what they're saying. In our case, what we pathologize in our society is kindness.

Doyle: So, there's something very interesting about this idea. I've seen kindness and being a victim weaponized so that effectively, the assertion of victimhood becomes a means to bully others, and to cudel others. Which sounds counterintuitive of course, but we see it all the time. So, we see it among activists, we've seen it on the streets of London. We've seen people chanting for, effectively, genocide and death of Jewish people. And saying that they are victims and that's why they're doing it. What's going on there?

Hughes: Well, because what you do is you have a strong allegiance to your ingroup and that means you have a strong aversion to your outgroup, and the more depth and virulence you support your ingroup, the more likely you are to be violent to your outgroups. Let me give you some examples. We had a a case recently, obviously in the wake of the Hamas atrocities in Israel, we've had people tearing down posters of children who've been who've been taken hostage. We've had universities making statements condemning Israel with no mention of Hamas whatsoever. We had yesterday a student in, I think, a Canadian college called Durham College saying that she supports herass fully and believes they should do it in her words again and again and again and again. And it's all done in the name of kindness for the oppressed.

Hughes: So, once you divide the world into oppressor and oppressed, the righteous and the unrighteous, the sinful and the blameless, then you can unleash unlimited cruelty.

Doyle: But is it just because these things have become abstractions to these people? You know, they're not there on the ground seeing the children being burnt alive, seeing people being raped and tortured and murdered, and so therefore they can see this as something that's happening far away and they can sort of, I suppose, romanticize it and change it into something that it isn't?

Hughes: But it's slightly different from that. Because the psychology, and what makes it such a a catastrophe really, is that the psychology of it is very robust, because they're really talking only to themselves. And what they're doing is that one person who believes in this type of pathological kindness will connect very well with somebody else who doesn't. Whereas, for the mass of ordinary people, they have a very different understanding of kindness. We understand kindness as being giving to someone who has a need, who might be in trouble, who might be struggling, regardless of what their belief is.

One of the foundational stories for our own civilization is the Good Samaritan. And of course, the Good Samaritan is someone who comes along and helps someone who's been robbed and attacked, even though they come from different social groups and the Samaritan is the exile, the other, if you want. And these acts of kindness which ordinary people engaged in are being demonized because they're not using the correct language.

Doyle: But it is baffling to me. You know, we saw that activist at the Trans Pride rally calling on, basically, the crowd to punch women who disagreed with them and getting a big cheer, right. Now what's going there, because these are a group of people who are saying they are demonized and victimized. But they are the bullies, quite clearly in that situation.

Hughes: Well, Łobaczewski estimated about 5 to 6% of a population - he called it the pathological underbelly - will drive these ideas. But what they do is, they pathologize, then they pathologize normal people and everybody else gets pulled into this catastrophic world.

Doyle: Okay that's interesting, so it's a minority.

Hughes: It's a minority that drive this, it's not a majority.

Doyle: Well, I was going to say because with all the the death threats and rape threats that go towards JK Rowling simply for having an opinion that most people hold, and for for a very compassionate opinion as it happens. Now, it would never occur to me, I can't think of any scenario where I would behave like that and yet you see these thousands and thousands of people doing that. I can't think of any scenario where I would attempt to defend terrorists like people are doing. So, is it just, it's not that we've suddenly got sociopathy on a widespread level. It's not that.

Hughes: No, it's not. I think it spreads and people can ally themselves to this pathological minority, but a minority that drives it. So, if you look at the situation with Hamas for example, Hamas went into the -- I, we don't need to go into all the details about what they did -- but, we know how horrific and horrendous it was. And that is the pathological minority.These are people who are jihadists, who will stop at nothing to erase Jews from the face or the Earth.

Doyle: I don't believe their supporters could do that.

Hughes: But not only could they not do it, they couldn't even watch it. But yet, they will cheer. They will say yes, let's do it again and again. Okay then here's a cudgel, here's an axe, here's a knife, do it. "Well, I couldn't do that." So, the way to counter these people, if there is a way to counter them because they've got so deep in our society, into the bureaucracies that govern our institutions and our corporations, but you have to isolate the pathocrats. Because most people just want to get on. Most people understand empathy. Most people are capable of looking at other people and seeing them as a fellow human being, as a fellow sufferer.

Doyle: It's about reclaiming humanity, right?

Hughes: About reclaiming one's humanity, and one's collective humanity from the pathological minority.

Doyle: So, finally, because we don't have much time, but there is nothing new about this in so far as if you go back to the Inquisition. The people who are strapping those individuals to the rack and torturing them -- they did think they were doing it for God. They did think they were on the side of the Angels. It's perfectly possible throughout human history for for good people to do the most horrendous things.

Hughes: Horrendous things. But what makes a tyranny of kindness so dangerous is that people can punish other people, the outgroup endlessly, take great pleasure in it, and still remain virtuous. And that is truly terrifying. And is where we're at. And we have to understand, the tyranny of kindness is also a tyranny of virtue which, interestingly enough we remember the Republic of Virtue at the end of the French Revolution which is what Robespierre and his fellow revolutionaries saw as the endpoint of the French Revolution. And where did that end? It ended in bloodshed and the guillotine. And that is where we're headed unless we isolate these pathocrats, reclaim normal kindness from its pathological underbelly, and reclaim words like love, hate and kindness for the mass of people, of normal people.

One final point, and Łobaczewski makes this really well, he said the only crime that normal people commit which makes them punished so much for their views, is that they're not psychopaths. And normal people aren't. Ordinary people are decent.

I believe in the decency of humanity, I absolutely do, but then I see these marches and I see most of them are not chanting anti-semitic chants or engaging in that kind of thing. But they are turning a blind eye when other people are. That's what disturbs me. That makes me think that it's become so normalized in that movement. How do you reach those people? I couldn't walk past someone calling for genocide and ignore it. I don't know how you reach that point, and once you've reached that point, isn't it a question of deradicalization rather than persuasion?

Hughes: It is, it is a process of deradicalization. But deradicalization is simply one form of psychological realignment, when what you're doing is you're enabling people to see that they've got this virus in their heads which is driving their behavior, which is against their interest and it's against the interest of all their fellow human beings, including those closest to them. Nobody wins in this game. Nobody at all wins, because where it ends is in chaos and bloodshed. And who's going to gain from that? No one.

Doyle: Well, I think it's absolutely chilling stuff. Dr Peter Hughes thank you so much for joining us.

[violetlunette]

violetlunette, have you heard of the Polish psychiatrist Andrzej Łobaczewski, also known as Andrew Lobaczewski? He published a book called Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes, and there's a copy of Chapter 3 from that book, The Hysteroidal Cycle, available online at the cassiopaea website. It explains how societies lose the ability to distinguish between healthy and distorted morality, and how the behavior of "characteropaths" becomes normal.

Sorry, I took so long to respond. But that seems interesting and I’ll check it out when I can.

[alphaman99]

“There have always been 'society pedagogues', less outstanding but more numerous, who have become fascinated by their own great ideas, which might, sometimes, even be true, but are more often constricted or contain the taint of some hidden pathological thought processes. Such people have always striven to impose pedagogical methods which would impoverish and deform the development of individuals’ and societies’ psychological world view; they inflict permanent harm upon societies, depriving them of universally useful values." -Andrzej Lobaczewski, Polish underground resistance fighter/Psychiatrist. 1921-2008, "Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes" (thanks, L.S.)