Pathocracy can be defined generally as a condition of government under psychopathic domination, one in which a sufficient number of psychologically defective personalities have organized to subjugate a vulnerable and passive citizenry.  Pathocratic systems are not at all uncommon in the world's history, but it is only now that we have developed the language and the methods of analysis by which to identify them.  They are known to arise from dogmatic and extreme forms of political ideology, often within well-ordered democratic systems, and evolve rapidly without correction towards hybrid forms of despotism.

After all the destructive conflicts of the 20th century, it would seem impossible that the barren seeds of a collective political psychosis could take root and flourish again in the modern world.  But within two years of the Biden presidency, we have become aware of the same deep-running pathology emerging from the psychological bacteria that thrive and multiply in toxic liberal environments.  Liberalism has abandoned its original defense of the principle of individual freedom and become one of those degenerative closed systems of thinking and behavior that allow for the accumulation of pathogenic material within them. 

The liberal mind is highly susceptible to pathogenic suggestion.  It is the last and perhaps most dangerous of the unlit caverns remaining to science regarding the psychology of radical conformist movements that contribute to the ideological colonization and overthrow of democratic systems.  An organized search of its vast holding of intellectual deformities will yield countless volumes in the study of intelligence gone wrong.  The liberal mind is Jung's concept of a "collective unconscious" presenting to the world, in its unrestrained egotism and denial of psychological reality, the troubled mind of a psychopath.

Regardless of the strong or weak potential for evil in psychopathic personalities, all psychopaths are deceivers who must lie to hide their personalities and intentions.  Their deception is a survival tactic in societies that have learned to distrust them and to fear their pursuit of domination.  Psychopaths in turn regard the conventions protecting society from their egotism as discriminatory, repressive, and unjust.  Their ideal world would not be drawn from the great book of human understanding but from the erasure of those laws and customs that have successfully limited their influence.  Their world would be one of "social justice."

Psychopaths find purpose in their sense of difference from others, in the certainty of their superiority, and in their ability to deceive, manipulate, and hurt.  The normal personality has a choice as to whether or not to harm someone else, but psychopaths do not have that choice.  They lack the empathy or the conscience necessary to care for the happiness and wellbeing of others.  Their complete indifference towards those close to them is their power, and that power is of the nature of evil.  Psychiatry typically encounters evil in a broad range of personality disorders and prescribes treatment on an individual basis, as each case presents unique features; but when these same disorders emerge collectively at the macrosocial level through the influence of social media and organized political activity, clinical study has yet to be attempted.

When psychologically defective personalities acquire the power of direct communication with a vast audience along with the ability to control public opinion, their thought-ending virus spreads quickly throughout social networks.  If evil is to triumph in our nation's political affairs, its ministers need only the means of limiting the flow of information available to the public.  The ignorant should be ruled by the informed, for that is the purpose of government, they tell us, and it remains for liberal news organizations to keep the people in a reliable state of ignorance.  The authoritarianism this enables is beyond question.  "Democracy Dies in Darkness," according to the Washington Post's deliberately ambiguous motto, which seems to read superficially as a general caution against tyranny but which functions in ministerial code as a daily reminder and general order to all liberal news organizations to extinguish any lights that may shine upon the plain truth of the Left's totalitarian ambitions.  Conservatives may own the stronger argument, but liberals own the media.

What we do not know about the evil of pathocratic domination in the modern era will hurt us.  A pathocracy, once established, cannot pause in its progression through the institutions of democracy and like a cancer, it can only perish with the host on which it feeds.  An enlightened citizenry is the only cure for the political evil that now informs liberal culture.  But the moment we cease to learn, we become stupid.  It is the most crucial of obligations to our common humanity: to learn, to understand, to participate in the essential flow and exchange of knowledge.  Knowledge is the only way out of the traps and cages of compulsory thinking that the ideologues have prepared for us.

But students can no longer attend school with the expectation of knowledge.  Education in a pathocratic environment is revisionist, dogmatic, and final; and nothing good will come from the programed hostility of activists who are caught in the vortex of liberal propaganda.  These are the ones who hate, who teach their hatred to others, and who are making copies of themselves in the minds of our children.  We see the formation in liberal culture of a synthesis of Marxist ideology and structural racism originating neither from impulse nor anger, but from hatred without a cause, the kind of hatred that can only be learned through instruction in the pure evil of identity politics -- the new name for official racism in America.

Progress in human understanding cannot proceed along these political lines of force.  The measurable degeneration of human intelligence is significantly a product of indoctrination into psychologically defective world views.  The effects of compulsory belief systems as obstructions to normal psychological development must be understood if we are to confront the true nature of political psychopathy in free societies.  A proper study of the genesis of evil at macrosocial levels is therefore necessary, specifically to examine the problem from a scientific rather than a moral point of view.  If well-governed democratic systems are sustainable, then we must learn how to recognize the emerging political and social pathologies that threaten them, and then to popularize the science at earlier levels of public education.

Evil is written upon the gateway to every liberal dream of power.  Better to enlist among the generals of a new liberal order, the words are telling us, than among the legions of a free society.  But there can be no tolerance for the trauma that pathocratic domination brings to the millions of good people who must turn from their just pursuits to confront the terror of pernicious indoctrination.  Certainly, this is evil.  There can be no agreement with its terms nor space provided for its instruction.  To tolerate evil is to give it sanctuary, but to bargain with evil is to give it legitimacy.

Philip Ahlrich can be reached for comment at phahl@icloud.com.