>>13366351?obaczewski adopted the term "ponerology", which is derived from the Greek word poneros, from the branch of theology dealing with the study of evil. According to ?obaczewski, all societies vacillate between "happy times" and "unhappy times". During happy times, societies enjoy prosperity and suppress advanced psychological knowledge of psychopathological influence in the corridors of power. Though happy, these times are not necessarily morally advanced as the society's prosperity or happiness may be premised on the oppression of a target group. During unhappy times, the intelligentsia and society at large can recover this specialized knowledge to resolve the social order along mentally healthier lines.
A form of government interesting to ponerologists is one they have called pathocracy, in which individuals with personality disorders (especially psychopathy) occupy positions of power and influence. The result is a totalitarian system characterized by a government turned against its own people. A pathocracy may emerge when a society is insufficiently guarded against the typical and inevitable minority of such abnormal pathology, which ?obaczewski asserts is caused by biology or genetics. He argues that in such cases these individuals infiltrate an institution or state, prevailing moral values are perverted into their opposite, and a coded language like Orwell's doublethink circulates into the mainstream, using paralogic and paramoralism in place of genuine logic and morality.
There are various identifiable stages of pathocracy described by ?obaczewski. Ultimately, each pathocracy is foredoomed because the root of healthy social morality, according to ?obaczewski, is contained in the congenital instinctive infrastructure in the vast majority of the population. While some in the normal population are more susceptible to pathocratic influence, and become its lackeys, the majority instinctively resist.
