Psychopathy and the Origins of Totalitarianism

Many of the greatest horrors of the history of humanity owe their occurrence solely to the establishment and social enforcement of a false reality. With gratitude to the Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper and his important 1970 essay “Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power” for the term and idea, we can refer to these alternative realities as ideological pseudo-realities.

Pseudo-realities, being false and unreal, will always generate tragedy and evil on a scale that is at least proportional to the reach of their grip on power—which is their chief interest—whether social, cultural, economic, political, or (particularly) a combination of several or all of these. So important to the development and tragedies of societies are these pseudo-realities when they arise and take root that it is worth outlining their basic properties and structure so that they can be identified and properly resisted before they result in sociopolitical calamities—up to and including war, genocide, and even civilizational collapse, all of which can take many millions of lives and can ruin many millions more in the vain pursuit of a fiction whose believers are, or are made, sufficiently intolerant.

The Nature of Pseudo-realities Pseudo-realities are, simply put, false constructions of reality. It is hopefully obvious that among the features of pseudo-realities is that they must present a plausible but deliberately wrong understanding of reality. They are cult “realities” in the sense that they are the way that members of cults experience and interpret the world—both social and material—around them. We should immediately recognize that these deliberately incorrect interpretations of reality serve two related functions. First, they are meant to mold the world to accommodate small proportions of people who suffer pathological limitations on their abilities to cope with reality as it is. Second, they are designed to replace all other analyses and motivations with power, which these essentially or functionally psychopathic individuals will contort and deform to their permanent advantage so long as their pseudo-real regime can last.

Pseudo-realities are always social fictions, which, in light of the above, means political fictions. That is, they are maintained not because they are true, in the sense that they correspond to reality, either material or human, but because a sufficient quantity of people in the society they attack either believe them or refuse to challenge them. This implies that pseudo-realities are linguistic phenomena above all else, and where power-granting linguistic distortions are present, it is likely that they are there to create and prop up some pseudo-reality. This also means that they require power, coercion, manipulation, and eventually force to keep them in place.

Missed it first time around. Not sure how. Am glad to have been pointed to it for the first time today. Knew the jist of it inherently but had a hard time expressing that nugget of wisdom to others. Have now learned the powerful and compelling vocabulary necessary to do that.

This passage was particularly impactful:

“Most concerningly, psychopathic ideologies reliably generate (temporary but) functional psychopathy in otherwise normal people who, by means of these manipulations, become sufficiently convicted fellow travelers with and sympathizers to the ideology. Quite literally, aside from the direct effects of demoralization and the destabilization caused by the growing drift of their beliefs away from reality and toward unreality (pseudo-reality), a psychopathic ideology makes its sympathizers believe and act in psychopathic ways themselves, at least in a functional sense. These are the demands and costs of upholding the paralogic (so as not to be a “fool” in pseudo-reality) and paramorality (so as not to be the wrong kind of person in pseudo-reality), and slowly these victims of the ideology become the monsters they were too weak to fight. As noted previously, virtues like tolerance and empathy are intentionally perverted until they begin to bifurcate so that they carry a political valence (paramorality good, morality bad) that increasingly favors the pseudo-real ideology and becomes legitimately psychopathic as the effect strengthens.

“Eventually, a normal person subjected to these circumstances ceases to be normal. This occurs when they “awaken” to a “full consciousness” in the pseudo-reality. At that point, they will have reached a place where, from their perspective, pseudo-reality is reality and reality is the pseudo-reality. That is, they will be psychopathic themselves, in thrall to the paralogic of the pseudo-real delusion and with bifurcated and narrowed ethics and moral virtues under its paramoral system. Presumably, in the majority of such previously normal people, this effect is temporary and contingent upon participation in the cult, though it is likely that some of the relevant psychological damage will be long-lasting, if not permanent. Nevertheless, in the short term, the result of this dynamic is a growing body of functionally and legitimately psychopathic people accruing more and more power for themselves, which they use (in psychopathic ways) to enforce their ideological pseudo-reality on everyone, most notably everyone else.

“This process is quite exquisite. The deficiencies of the paralogic, caprice of the paramorality, and dissonance around the pseudo-reality itself will all tend to engender in the susceptible normal person a similar sense of distress about inhabiting reality as the pseudo-reality exists to enable. Obviously, this is convenient for recruitment, indoctrination, and eventual (psychopathic) reprogramming because the pseudo-reality is constructed in such a way as to enable those specific psychopathologies to flourish and avoid detection and treatment. In this regard, one might refer to the spread of a psychopathic ideology and its pseudo-reality by now-familiar phrases like “the madness of crowds,” which is more apt than one might realize at first blush, and even sociopolitical “zombification.”

“Importantly, this circumstance implies that the average “fellow traveler” in a cult ideology not only does not realize they’re a cultist who is using tools and tactics of manipulation (paralogic and paramorality) on people in their lives, both normal and ideologically “awakened” fellow cultists; they cannot realize this without first abandoning the paralogic and paramorality that has captured them and rejecting the ideological pseudo-reality in a fundamental way. They find themselves in the broken position not only of being functionally psychopathic but also of being reality-inverted such that they believe all normal people who are not (yet) cultists are the cultists while they, themselves, are not. This represents a complete reversal of sanity, and the conversion of normal to ideologically psychopathic is, by that point, complete. These people, as many have learned the hard way throughout history, are the otherwise good people who are capable of perpetrating genocides.”

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