psychopaths are closely associated with a profound lack of ability to con-
struct an empathic mental and emotional “facsimile” of another person. They
seem completely unable to “get into the skin” of others, except in a purely
intellectual sense. [Editor’s note.]
POLITICAL PONEROLOGY
127
members of the species Homo Sapiens.53 Our species instinct is
our first teacher; it stays with us everywhere throughout our
lives. Upon this defective instinctive substratum, the deficits of
higher feelings and the deformities and impoverishments in
psychological, moral, and social concepts develop in corre-
spondence with these gaps.
Our natural world of concepts – based upon species in-
stincts as described in an earlier chapter - strikes the psycho-
path as a nearly incomprehensible convention with no justifica-
tion in their own psychological experience. They think that
customs and principles of decency are a foreign convention
invented and imposed by someone else, (“probably by priests”)
silly, onerous, sometimes even ridiculous. At the same time,
however, they easily perceive the deficiencies and weaknesses
of our natural language of psychological and moral concepts in
a manner somewhat reminiscent of the attitude of a contempo-
rary psychologist—except in caricature.
The average intelligence of the psychopath, especially if
measured via commonly used tests, is somewhat lower than
that of normal people, albeit similarly variegated. Despite the
wide variety of intelligence and interests, this group does not
contain examples of the highest intelligence, nor do we find
technical or craftsmanship talents among them. The most gifted
members of this kind may thus achieve accomplishments in
those sciences which do not require a correct humanistic world
view or practical skills. (Academic decency is another matter,
however.) Whenever we attempt to construct special tests to
measure “life wisdom” or “socio-moral imagination”, even if
the difficulties of psychometric evaluation are taken into ac-
count, individuals of this type indicate a deficit disproportion-
ate to their personal IQ.
In spite of their deficiencies in normal psychological and
moral knowledge, they develop and then have at their disposal
a knowledge of their own, something lacked by people with a
natural world view. They learn to recognize each other in a
crowd as early as childhood, and they develop an awareness of
the existence of other individuals similar to them. They also
53 What’s missing in psychopaths are the qualities that people depend on for
living in social harmony. [Editor’s note.]
128
PONEROLOGY
become conscious of being different from the world of those
other people surrounding them. They view us from a certain
distance, like a para-specific variety. Natural human reactions -
which often fail to elicit interest to normal people because they
are considered self-evident - strike the psychopath as strange
and, interesting, and even comical. They therefore observe us,
deriving conclusions, forming their different world of concepts.
They become experts in our weaknesses and sometimes effect
heartless experiments. The suffering and injustice they cause
inspire no guilt within them, since such reactions from others
are simply a result of their being different and apply only to
“those other” people they perceive to be not quite conspecific.
Neither a normal person nor our natural world view can fully
conceive nor properly evaluate the existence of this world of
different concepts.
A researcher into such phenomena can glimpse the deviant
knowledge of the psychopath through long-term studies of the
personalities of such people, using it with some difficulty, like
a foreign language. As we shall see below, such practical skill
becomes rather widespread in nations afflicted by that macro-
social pathological phenomenon wherein this anomaly plays
the inspiring role.
A normal person can learn to speak their conceptual lan-
guage even somewhat proficiently, but the psychopath is never
able to incorporate the world view of a normal person, although
they often try to do so all their lives. The product of their ef-
forts is only a role and a mask behind which they hide their
deviant reality.
Another myth and role they often play, albeit containing a
grain of truth in relation to the “special psychological knowl-
edge” that the psychopath acquires regarding normal people,
would be the psychopaths’ brilliant mind or psychological gen-
ius; some of them actually believe in this and attempt to insinu-
ate this belief to others.
In speaking of the mask of psychological normality worn by
such individuals (and by similar deviants to a lesser extent), we
should mention the book The Mask of Sanity; by Hervey
Cleckley, who made this very phenomenon the crux of his
reflections. A fragment:
POLITICAL PONEROLOGY
129
Let us remember that his typical behavior defeats what ap-
pear to be his own aims. Is it not he himself who is most
deeply deceived by his apparent normality? Although he de-
liberately cheats others and is quite conscious of his lies, he
appears unable to distinguish adequately between his own
pseudointentions, pseudoremorse, pseudolove, etc., and the
genuine responses of a normal person. His monumental lack
of insight indicates how little he appreciates the nature of his
disorder. When others fail to accept immediately his “word of
honor as a gentleman”, his amazement, I believe, is often
genuine. His subjective experience is so bleached of deep
emotion that he is invincibly ignorant of what life means to
others.
His awareness of hypocrisy’s opposite is so insubstantially
theoretical that it becomes questionable if what we chiefly
mean by hypocrisy should be attributed to him. Having no ma-
jor value himself, can he be said to realize adequately the na-
ture and quality of the outrages his conduct inflicts upon oth-
ers? A young child who has no impressive memory of severe
pain may have been told by his mother it is wrong to cut off
the dog’s tail. Knowing it is wrong he may proceed with the
operation. We need not totally absolve him of responsibility if
we say he realizes less what he did than an adult who, in full
appreciation of physical agony, so uses a knife. Can a person
experience the deeper levels of sorrow without considerable
knowledge of happiness? Can he achieve evil intention in the
full sense without real awareness of evil’s opposite? I have no
final answer to these questions. 54
All researchers into psychopathy underline three qualities
primarily with regard to this most typical variety: The absence
of a sense of guilt for antisocial actions, the inability to love
truly, and the tendency to be garrulous in a way which easily
deviates from reality.55
54 Hervey Cleckley: The Mask of Sanity, 1976; C.V. Mosby Co., p. 386.
55 In their paper, “Construct Validity of Psychopathy in a Community Sam-