Thread by @Narcopath_UK

What is #Pathocracy?

In order to understand the concept of pathocracy, you must first understand one of the foundational findings that Lobaczewski and his colleagues made in their research.

They discovered that there is a fundamental distinction – a distinction that reflects one of the most profound divisions in the human species – between what Lobaczewski calls normals and the pathological.

Normals are, basically, those humans that experience significant levels of compassion, empathy and conscience and hold, to a significant degree, values such as cooperation and peace.

The pathological are those affected by particular psychopathologies – specifically, various forms of psychopathy and certain personality disorders (or, as Lobaczewski calls them, characteropathies) – that alter their perception and worldview in such a way as to:

Greatly inhibit or even prevent the development of their ability to experience compassion, empathy or conscience, as well as certain emotions such as guilt or shame, as normals do

Just as color blind people cannot see colors like normally-sighted people, those with these psychopathologies, especially in their more extreme forms, simply cannot access these capacities or generate or appreciate these feelings in the same ways as normals.

Induce them to value domination and excessive acquisition - In fact the pathological’s values are so counter to those of normals that those things of which normals dream represent, to them, a nightmare.

Although great diversity exists in many aspects within humanity, this difference between normals and the pathological could be considered the “difference that makes a difference.”

In exploring the nature of and relationship between these two fundamental groups of humans, Lobaczewski and his colleagues made several further discoveries that also help inform an understanding of pathocracy, including that:

The pathological possess special talent for traumatizing normals in a variety of ways, some of which are quite insidious and devious, and they often learn very early in life how to assert and exploit this ability.

The psychopathologies that afflict the pathological are either inherited or acquired by means including brain lesion formation, trauma, adverse pre-natal or natal incidents or the influence of a pathological person during a critical window in development.

Pathological people often feel outcast or that they are unable to succeed in a system of normal man. So they dream of dominating and ruling the system themselves and making their values the norm.

When the pathological succeed in fulfilling this dream by taking over a system so that they, rather than normals, are in charge of it,

Lobaczewski describes this state or the system in such a state with the term pathocracy.

Lobaczewski explains that he chose this term to concisely emphasize that, even though the leaders of such systems, whom he calls pathocrats, hide their true nature behind various cloaks and in various guises,

so that they may seem remarkably different from each other in many respects, the common pathological quality of their leadership is their systems’ most salient aspect.

When he found out that another scientist had independently selected the very same term to describe such systems, his decision was finalized.

Lobaczewski says that a pathocracy is like a psychopathological person writ large. And just as its underlying disorders can be framed as diseases – each with its particular etiology, pathodynamics, diagnostic criteria and so on –

he considers pathocracy itself, in a sense, a disease. He repeatedly describes and explores it in those terms, metaphorically comparing it to infectious or cancerous processes and discussing how to identify its risk factors, diagnose it and

immunize people and systems to confer resistance against it. He even refers to pathocracy as “the great disease.”

Within a pathocracy, despite comprising a relatively small numerical minority, the pathological rule, controlling power structures to an enormously disproportionate degree and aggressively, but deceptively, imposing their values.

As Lobaczewski says:

“An objective observer might wish to compare this state to one in which the inmates of an asylum take over the running of the institution.”

Further Reading systemsthinker.com/interests/syst…