Influence Over Weak Minds

An article from a Connecticut paper highlights a point made by Andrew Lobaczewski in his book Political Ponerology about the sway pathological figures have on those whose minds are weak.

Bush Nuts Are George W. Bush lovers certifiable?
November 23, 2006
By Andy Bromage

A collective “I told you so” will ripple through the world of Bush-bashers once news of Christopher Lohse’s study gets out.

Lohse, a social work master’s student at Southern Connecticut State University, says he has proven what many progressives have probably suspected for years: a direct link between mental illness and support for President Bush.

Lohse says his study is no joke. The thesis draws on a survey of 69 psychiatric outpatients in three Connecticut locations during the 2004 presidential election. Lohse’s study, backed by SCSU Psychology professor Jaak Rakfeldt and statistician Misty Ginacola, found a correlation between the severity of a person’s psychosis and their preferences for president: The more psychotic the voter, the more likely they were to vote for Bush. […]

“Our study shows that psychotic patients prefer an authoritative leader,” Lohse says. “If your world is very mixed up, there’s something very comforting about someone telling you, ‘This is how it’s going to be.’”

The people who participated in this study were psychiatric outpatients. How many more people are there who are touched in some way who have not either needed psychiatric or psychological care, or who have been able to avoid it?

Lobaczewski's studies indicated that here is a certain percentage of the population who are so touched that they become the active foundation and support for the pathocrats.

Approximately 6% of the population constitutes the active structure of the new rulership, which carries its own peculiar consciousness of its own goals. Twice as many people constitute a second group: those who have managed to warp their personalities to meet the demands of the new reality. This leads to attitudes which can already be interpreted within the catego-ries of the natural psychological world view, i.e. the errors we are committing are much smaller. It is of course not possible to draw an exact boundary between these groups; the separation adduced here is merely descriptive in nature.

This second group consists of individuals who are, on the average, weaker, more sickly, and less vital. The frequency of known mental diseases in this group is at twice the rate of the national average. We can thus assume that the genesis of their submissive attitude toward the regime, their greater susceptibility to pathological effects, and their skittish opportunism includes various relatively impalpable anomalies. We observe not only physiological anomalies, but also the kinds described above at the lowest intensity, with the exception of essential psychopathy.

The 6% group constitute the new nobility; the 12% group gradually forms the new bourgeoisie, whose economic situation is the most advantageous. Adapting to the new conditions, not without conflicts of conscience, transforms this latter group into both dodgers and, simultaneously, intermediaries between the oppositional society and the active ponerological group, whom they can talk to in the appropriate language. They play such a crucial role within this system that both sides must take them into account. Since their technical capacities and skills are better than those of the active pathocratic group, they as-sume various managerial positions. Normal people see them as persons they can approach, generally without being subjected to pathological arrogance.

So it is that only 18% of the country’s population is in favor of the new system of government; but concerning the layer we have called the bourgeoisie, we may even be doubtful of the sincerity of their attitudes. This is the situation in the author’s homeland. This proportion can be variously estimated in other countries, from 15% in Hungary to 21% in Bulgaria, but it is never more than a relatively small minority.

[...]

People exist everywhere in the world with specifically susceptible deviant personalities; even a faraway pathocracy evokes a resonating response in them, working on their underlying feeling that “there is a place for people like us there”. Uncritical, frustrated, and abused people also exist everywhere, and they can be reached by appropriately elaborated propaganda. The future of a nation is greatly dependent on how many such people it contains. Thanks to its specific psychological knowledge and its conviction that normal people are naive, a pathocracy is able to improve its “anti-psychotherapeutic” techniques, and pathologically egotistical as usual, to insinuate its deviant world of concepts to others in other countries, thus making them susceptible to conquest and domination.

The most frequently used methods include paralogistic and conversion methods such as the projection of one’s own qualities and intention onto other persons, social groups, or nations, paramoral indignation, and reverse blocking. This last method is a pathocratic favorite used on the mass scale, driving the minds of average people into a dead end because, as a result, it causes them to search for the truth in the “golden mean” between the reality and its opposite.

As sweet as it might be to have some data that suggests that the mentally disturbed are more likely to support a pathocratic president, there is a very serious issue here. We are all sick to some extent through having been raised and socialized in a pathocratic society. The values, standards, and models that we have internalized are those of the pathological. We have all become pathological to one degree or another, and if we do not become aware of this sickness and use our reason, intelligence, and empathy to understand it in depth, we will also fall under the influence of pathocrats. The next one may not be as transparent as George W, so obviously out-of-synch with his emotions and reality. He or she may be wrapped in the cloak of saviour, of restorer of the Constitution, the hero who will undo the wrongs of the Bush regnum.