SOME INDISPENSABLE CONCEPTS

Three principal heterogeneous items coincided in order to form our European civilization: Greek philosophy, Roman imperial and legal civilization, and Christianity, consolidated by time and effort of later generations. The culture of cognitive/spiritual heritage thus born was internally fuzzy wherever the language of concepts, being overly attached to matter and law, turned out to be too stiff to comprehend aspects of psychological and spiritual life.

Such a state of affairs had negative repercussions upon our ability to comprehend reality, especially that reality which concerns humanity and society. Europeans became unwilling to study reality (subordinating intellect to facts), but rather tended to impose upon nature their subjective ideational schemes, which are extrinsic and not completely coherent. Not until modern times, thanks to great developments in the hard sciences, which study facts by their very nature, as well as the apperception of the philosophical heritage of other cultures, could we help clarify our world of concepts and permit its own homogenization.

It is surprising to observe what an autonomous tribe the culture of the ancient Greeks represented. Even in those days, a civilization could hardly develop in isolation, without being affected by older cultures in particular. However, even with that consideration, it seems that Greece was relatively isolated, culturally speaking. This was probably due to the era of decay the archaeologist refer to as the “dark age”, which occurred in those Mediterranean areas between 1200 and 800 B.C., and also to the Achaean tribes’ belligerence.

Among the Greeks, a rich mythological imagination, developed in direct contact with nature and the experiences of life and war, furnished an image of this link with the nature of the country and peoples. These conditions saw the birth of a literary tradition, and later of philosophical reflections searching for generalities, essential contents, and criteria of values. The Greek heritage is fascinating due to its richness and individuality, but above all due to its primeval nature. Our civilization, however, would have been better served if the Greeks had made more ample use of the achievements of other civilizations.

Rome was too vital and practical to reflect profoundly upon the Greek thoughts it had appropriated. In this imperial civilization, administrative needs and juridical developments imposed practical priorities. For the Romans, the role of philosophy was more didactic, useful for helping to develop the thinking process which would later be utilized for the discharge of administrative functions and the exercise of political options. The Greek reflective influence softened Roman customs, which had a salutary effect on the development of the empire.

However, in any imperial civilization, the complex problems of human nature are troublesome factors complicating the legal regulations of public affairs and administrative functions. This begets a tendency to dismiss such matters and develop a concept of human personality simplified enough to serve the purposes of law.

 

Roman citizens could achieve their goals and develop their personal attitudes within the framework set by fate and legal principles, which characterized an individual’s situation based on premises having little to do with actual psychological properties. The spiritual life of people lacking the rights of citizenship was not an appropriate subject of deeper studies. Thus, cognitive psychology remained barren, a condition which always produces moral recession at both the individual and public levels.

Christianity had stronger ties with the ancient cultures of the Asiatic continent, including their philosophical and psychological reflections. This was of course a dynamic factor rendering it more attractive, but it was not the most important one. Observing and understanding the apparent transformations faith caused in human personalities created a psychological school of thought and art on the part of the early believers. This new relationship to another person, i.e. one’s neighbor, characterized by understanding, forgiveness, and love, opened the door to a psychological cognition which, often supported by charismatic phenomena, bore abundant fruit during the first three centuries after Christ.

An observer at the time might have expected Christianity to help develop the art of human understanding to a higher level than the older cultures and religions, and to hope that such knowledge would protect future generations from the dangers of speculative thought divorced from that profound psychological reality which can only be comprehended through sincere respect for another human being.

History, however, has not confirmed such an expectation.

 

The symptoms of decay in sensitivity and psychological comprehension, as well as the Roman Imperial tendency to impose extrinsic patterns upon human beings, can be observed as early as 350 A.D. During later eras, Christianity passed through all those difficulties which result from insufficient psychological cognition of reality. Exhaustive studies on the historical reasons for suppressing the development of human cognition in our civilization would be an extremely useful endeavor.

First of all, Christianity adapted the Greek heritage of philosophical thought and language to its purposes. This made it possible to develop its own philosophy, but the primeval and materialistic traits of that language imposed certain limits which hampered communication between Christianity and other religious cultures for many centuries.

Christ’s message expanded along the seacoast and beaten paths of the Roman empire’s transportation lines, within the imperial civilization, but only through bloody persecutions and ultimate compromises with Rome’s power and law. Rome finally dealt with the threat by appropriating Christianity to its own purposes and, as a result, the Christian Church appropriated Roman organizational forms and adapted to existing social institutions. As a result of this unavoidable process of adaptation, Christianity inherited Roman habits of legal thinking, including its indifference to human nature and its variety.

Two heterogeneous systems were thus linked together so permanently that later centuries forgot just how strange they actually were to each other. However, time and compromise did not eliminate the internal inconsistencies, and Roman influence divested Christianity of some of its profound primeval psychological knowledge. Christian tribes developing under different cultural conditions created forms so variegated that maintaining unity turned out to be an historical impossibility.

A “Western civilization” thus arose hampered by a serious deficiency in an area which both can and does play a creative role, and which is supposed to protect societies from various kinds of evil. This civilization developed formulations in the area of law, whether national, civil, or finally canon, which were conceived for invented and simplified beings.

 

These formulations gave short shrift to the total contents of the human personality and the great psychological differences between individual members of the species Homo sapiens. For many centuries any understanding of certain psychological anomalies found among some individuals was out of the question, even though these anomalies repeatedly caused disasters.

This civilization was insufficiently resistant to evil, which originates beyond the easily accessible areas of human consciousness and takes advantage of the enormous gap between formal or legal thought and psychological reality. In a civilization deficient in psychological cognition, hyperactive individuals driven by their internal doubts caused by a feelings of being different easily find a ready echo in other people’s insufficiently developed consciousness. Such individuals dream of imposing their power and their different experiential manner upon their environment and their society.

 

Unfortunately, in a psychologically ignorant society, their dreams have a good chance of becoming reality for them and a nightmare for others.


Psychology

In the 1870s, a tempestuous event occurred: a search for the hidden truth about human nature was initiated as a secular movement based on biological and medical progress, thus its cognition originated in the material sphere. From the very outset, many researchers had a vision of the great future role of this science for the good of peace and order. However, since it relegated prior knowledge to the spiritual sphere, any such approach to the human personality was necessarily one-sided.

 

People like Ivan Pavlov, C.G. Jung, and others soon noticed this one-sidedness and attempted to reach a synthesis. Pavlov, however, was not allowed to state his convictions in public.

Psychology is the only science wherein the observer and the observed belong to the same species, even to the same person in an act of introspection. It is thus easy for subjective error to steal into the reasoning process of the thinking person’s commonly used imaginings and individual habits. Error then often bites its own tail in a vicious circle, thus giving rise to problems due to the lack of distance between observer and observed, a difficulty unknown in other disciplines.
 

Some people, such as the behaviorists, attempted to avoid the above error at all costs. In the process, they impoverished the cognitive contents to such an extent that there was very little matter left. However, they produced a very profitable discipline of thought. Progress was very often elaborated by persons simultaneously driven by internal anxieties and searching for a method of ordering their own personalities via the road of knowledge and self-knowledge. If these anxieties were caused by a defective upbringing, then overcoming these difficulties gave rise to excellent discoveries.

 

However, if the cause for such anxieties rested within human nature, it resulted in a permanent tendency to deform the understanding of psychological phenomena. Within this science, progress is unfortunately very contingent upon the individual values and nature of its practitioners. It is also dependent upon the social climate. Wherever a society has become enslaved to others or to the rule of an overly-privileged native class, psychology is the first discipline to suffer from censorship and incursions on the part of an administrative body which starts claiming the last word as to what represents scientific truth.

Thanks to the work of outstanding pathfinders, however, the scientific discipline exists and continues to develop in spite of all these difficulties; it is useful for the life of society. Many researchers fill in the gaps of this science with detailed data which function as a corrective to the subjectivity and vagueness of famous pioneers. The childhood ailments of any new discipline persist, including a lack of general order and synthesis, as does the tendency to splinter into individual schools, expounding upon certain theoretical and practical achievements, at the cost of limiting themselves in other areas.

At the same time, however, findings of a practical nature are gleaned for the good of people who need help. The direct observations furnished by everyday work of therapists in the field are more instrumental in forming scientific comprehension and developing the language of contemporary psychology than any academic experiments or deliberations undertaken in a laboratory. After all, life itself provides variegated conditions, whether comfortable or tragic, which subject human individuals to experiments no scientist in any laboratory would ever undertake. This very volume exists because of studies, in the field, of inhuman experimentation upon entire nations.

Experience teaches a psychologist’s mind how to track another person’s life quickly and effectively, discovering the causes that conditioned the development of his personality and behavior. Our minds can thus also reconstruct those factors which influenced him, although he himself may be unaware of them. In doing this, we do not, as a rule, use the natural structure of concepts, often referred to as “common sense” relied upon by public opinion and many individuals.

 

Rather, we use categories which are as objective as we can possibly achieve. Psychologists utilize conceptual language with descriptions of phenomena that are independent of any common imaginings, and this is an indispensable tool of practical activity. In practice, however, it usually turns into clinical slang rather than the distinguished scientific language it would behoove us to foster. An analogy can be drawn between this conceptual language of psychology and mathematical symbols.

 

Very often, a single Greek letter stands for many pages of mathematical operations which is instantly recognized by the mathematician.

 

Objective language

In the categories of psychological objectivity, cognition and thought are based on the same logical and methodological principles shown to be the best tool in many other areas of naturalistic studies. Exceptions to these rules have become a tradition for ourselves and for creatures similar to us, but they turn out to engender more error than usefulness.

 

At the same time, however, consistent adherence to these principles, and rejection of additional scientific limitations, lead us toward the wide horizon from which it is possible to glimpse supernatural causality. Accepting the existence of such phenomena within the human personality becomes a necessity if our language of psychological concepts is to remain an objective structure.

In affirming his own personality, man has the tendency to repress from the field of his consciousness any associations indicating an external causative conditioning of his world view and behavior. Young people in particular want to believe they freely chose their intentions and decisions; at the same time, however, an experienced psychological analyst can track the causative conditions of these choices without much difficulty. Much of this conditioning is hidden within our childhood; the memories may be receding into the distance, but we carry the results of our early experiences around with us throughout our lives.
 

The better our understanding of the causality of the human personality, the stronger the impression that humanity is a part of nature and society, subject to dependencies we are ever better able to understand. Overcome by human nostalgia, we then wonder if there is really no room for a scope of freedom, for a Purusha⁹?

9 Sanskrit. A word literally meaning “man”; but bearing the mystical significance of the “Ideal Man”, the Higher Self within. The term Purusha is often used in the Esoteric philosophy to express the Spirit or the everlasting entitative individual of a Universe, a Solar System, or of a man. Purusha comes from the verb-root pri – to fill, to make complete, to bestow. One of the two ultimate realities of Sankhya philosophy. The divine Self, the absolute Reality, pure Consciousness. [Editor’s note.]

The more progress we make in our art of understanding human causation, the better we are able to liberate the person who trusts us from the toxic effects of conditioning, which has unnecessarily constricted his freedom of proper comprehension and decision making. We are thus in a position to close ranks with our patient in a search for the best way out of his problems. If we succumb to the temptation of using the natural structure of psychological concepts for this purpose, our advice to him would sound similar to the many non-productive pronouncements he has already heard and that never quite manage to really help him to become free of his problem.

The everyday, ordinary, psychological, societal, and moral world view is a product of man’s developmental process within a society, under the constant influence of innate traits. Among these innate traits are mankind’s phylogenetically determined instinctive foundation, and the upbringing furnished by the family and the environment.

 

No person can develop without being influenced by other people and their personalities, or by the values imbued by his civilization and his moral and religious traditions. That is why his natural world view of humans can be neither sufficiently universal nor completely true. Differences among individuals and nations are the product of both inherited dispositions and the ontogenesis¹⁰ of personalities.

 

10 Ontogeny (also ontogenesis or morphogenesis) describes the origin and the development of an organism from the fertilized egg to its mature form. Ontogeny is studied in developmental biology. [Editor’s note.]

It is thus significant that the main values of this human world view of nature indicate basic similarities in spite of great divergences in time, race, and civilization. This world view quite obviously derives from the nature of our species and the natural experience of human societies which have achieved a certain necessary level of civilization.

 

Refinements based on literary values or philosophical and moral reflections do show differences, but, generally speaking, they tend to bring together the natural conceptual languages of various civilizations and eras. People with a humanistic education may therefore get the impression that they have achieved wisdom.

We shall also continue to respect the wisdom of that “common sense” derived from life experience and reflections thereon.

However, a conscientious psychologist must ask the following questions:

• Even if the natural world view has been refined, does it mirror reality with sufficient reliability?

• Or does it only mirror our species’ perception?

• To what extent can we depend upon it as a basis for decision making in the individual, societal and political spheres of life?

Experience teaches us, first of all, that this natural world view has permanent and characteristic tendencies toward deformation dictated by our instinctive and emotional features. Secondly, our work exposes us to many phenomena which cannot be understood nor described by natural language alone. An objective scientific language able to analyze the essence of a phenomenon thus becomes an indispensable tool. It has also shown itself to be similarly indispensable for an understanding of the questions presented within this book.

Now, having laid the groundwork, let us attempt a listing of the most important reality-deforming tendencies and other insufficiencies of the natural human world view.

Those emotional features which are a natural component of the human personality are never completely appropriate to the reality being experienced. This results both from our instinct and from our common errors of upbringing. That is why the best tradition of philosophical and religious thought have counseled subduing the emotions in order to achieve a more accurate view of reality.

The natural world view is also characterized by a similar, emotional, tendency to endow our opinions with moral judgment, often so negative as to represent outrage. This appeals to tendencies which are deeply rooted in human nature and societal customs. We easily extrapolate this method of comprehension onto manifestations of improper human behavior, which are, in fact, caused by minor psychological deficiencies.

 

When another individual behaves in a way that we deem to be “bad”, we tend to make a judgment of negative intent rather than seeking to understand the psychological conditions that might be driving them, and convincing them that they are, in fact, behaving very properly. Thus, any moralizing interpretation of minor psychopathological phenomena is erroneous and merely leads to an exceptional number of unfortunate consequences, which is why we shall repeatedly refer to it.

Another defect of the natural world view is its lack of universality. In every society, a certain percentage of the people has developed a world view a good deal different from that used by the majority. The causes of the aberrations are by no means qualitatively monolithic; we will be discussing them in greater detail in the fourth chapter.

Another essential deficiency of the natural world view is its limited scope of applicability. Euclidean geometry would suffice for a technical reconstruction of our world and for a trip to the moon and the closest planets. We only need a geometry whose axioms are less natural if we reach inside of an atom or outside of our solar system. The average person does not encounter phenomena for which Euclidean geometry would be insufficient. Sometime during his lifetime, virtually every person is faced with problems he must deal with.

 

Since a comprehension of the truly operational factors is beyond the ken of his natural world view, he generally relies on emotion: intuition and the pursuit of happiness. Whenever we meet a person whose individual world view developed under the influence of non-typical conditions, we tend to pass moral judgment upon him in the name of our more typical world view. In short, whenever some unidentified psychopathological factor comes into play, the natural human world view ceases to be applicable.

Moving further, we often meet with sensible people endowed with a well-developed natural world view as regards psychological, societal, and moral aspects, frequently refined via literary influences, religious deliberations, and philosophical reflections. Such persons have a pronounced tendency to overrate the values of their world view, behaving as though it were an objective basis for judging other people.

 

They do not take into account the fact that such a system of apprehending human matters can also be erroneous, since it is insufficiently objective. Let us call such an attitude the “egotism of the natural world view”. To date, it has been the least pernicious type of egotism, being merely an overestimation of that method of comprehension containing the eternal values of human experience.

Today, however, the world is being jeopardized by a phenomenon which cannot be understood nor described by means of such a natural conceptual language; this kind of egotism thus becomes a dangerous factor stifling the possibility of objective counteractive measures. Developing and popularizing the objective psychological world view could thus significantly expand the scope of dealing with evil, via sensible action and pinpointed countermeasures.

The objective psychological language, based on mature philosophical criteria, must meet the requirements derived from its theoretical foundations, and meet the needs of individual and macrosocial practice. It should be evaluated fully on the basis of biological realities and constitute an extension of the analogous conceptual language elaborated by the older naturalistic sciences, particularly medicine. Its range of applicability should cover all those facts and phenomena conditioned upon cognizable biological factors for which this natural language has proved inadequate. It should, within this framework, allow sufficient understanding of the contents, and varied causes, for the genesis of the above-mentioned deviant world views.

Elaborating such a conceptual language, being far beyond the individual scope of any scientist, is a step-by-step affair; by means of the contribution of many researchers, it matures to the point when it could be organized under philosophical supervision in the light of above-mentioned foundations. Such a task would greatly contribute to the development of all bio-humanistic and social sciences by liberating them from the limitations and erroneous tendencies imposed by the overly great influence of the natural language of psychological imagination, especially when combined with an excessive component of egotism.

Most of the questions dealt with in this book are beyond the scope of applicability of the natural language.

 

The fifth chapter shall deal with a macrosocial phenomenon which has rendered our traditional scientific language completely deceptive. Understanding these phenomena thus requires consistent separation from the habits of that method of thinking and the use of the most objective system of concepts possible. For this purpose, it proves necessary to develop the contents, organize them, and familiarize the readers with them as well.

At the same time, an examination of the phenomena whose nature forced the use of such a system will render a great contribution to enriching and perfecting the objective system of concepts.

While working on these matters, the author gradually accustomed himself to comprehending reality by means of this very method, a way of thinking which turned out to be both the most appropriate and the most economical in terms of time and effort. It also protects the mind from its own natural egotism and any excessive emotionalism.

In the course of the above-mentioned inquiries, each researcher went through his own period of crisis and frustration when it became evident that the concepts he had trusted thus far proved to be inapplicable. Ostensibly, correct hypotheses formulated in the scientifically improved natural conceptual language turned out to be completely unfounded in the light of facts, and of preliminary statistical calculations. At the same time, the elaboration of concepts better suited for investigated reality became extremely complex: after all, the key to the question lies in a scientific area still in the process of development.

Surviving this period thus required an acceptance of and a respect for a feeling of nescience¹¹ truly worthy of a philosopher. Every science is born in an area uninhabited by popular imaginings that must be overcome and left behind. In this case, however, the procedure had to be exceptionally radical; we had to venture into any area indicated by systematic analysis of the facts we observed and experienced from within a full-blown condition of macrosocial evil, guided by the light of the requirements of scientific methodology. This had to be upheld in spite of the difficulties caused by extraordinary outside conditions and by our own human personalities.

Very few of the many people who started out on this road were able to arrive at the end, since they withdrew for various reasons connected to this period of frustration.

11 Literally, the absence of knowledge. [Editor’s note.]

Some of them concentrated on a single question; succumbing to a kind of fascination regarding its scientific value; they delved into detailed inquiries. Their achievements may be present in this work, since they understood the general mining of their work. Others gave up in the face of scientific problems, personal difficulties, or the fear of being discovered by the authorities, who are highly vigilant in such matters.

Perusing this book will therefore confront the reader with similar problems, albeit on a much smaller scale. A certain impression of injustice may be conveyed due to the need to leave behind a significant portion of our prior conceptualizations, the feeling that our natural world view is inapplicable, and the expendability of some emotional entanglements. I therefore ask my readers to accept these disturbing feelings in the spirit of the love of knowledge and its redeeming values.
The above explanations were crucial in order to render the language of this work more easily comprehensible to the readers.

 

The author has attempted to approach the matters described herein in such a way as to avoid both losing touch with the world of objective concepts and becoming incomprehensible to anyone outside a narrow circle of specialists. We must thus beg the reader to pardon any slips along the tightrope between the two methods of thought.

 

However, the author would not be an experienced psychologist if he could not predict that some readers will reject the scientific data adduced within this work, feeling that they constitute an attack upon the natural wisdom of their life-experience.

 

The Human Individual

When Auguste Comte¹² attempted to found the new science of sociology during the early nineteenth century, i.e. well before modern psychology was born, he was immediately confronted with the problem of man, a mystery he could not solve. If he rejected the Catholic Church’s oversimplifications of human nature, then nothing remained except traditional schemes for comprehending the personality, derived from well known social conditions.

 

He thus had to avoid this problem, among others, if he wanted to create his new scientific branch under such conditions.

12 Auguste Comte (1798 - 1857) was a French positivist thinker who invented the term “sociology” to name the new science made by Saint-Simon. Comte saw a “universal law” at work in all sciences which he called the “law of three phases”. It is for this law that he is best known in the English-speaking world; namely, that society has gone through three phases: Theological, Metaphysical, and Scientific. He also gave the name “Positive” to the last of these. The other universal law he called the “encyclopedic law”. By combining these laws, Comte developed a systematic and hierarchical classification of all sciences, including inorganic physics (astronomy, earth science and chemistry) and organic physics (biology and for the first time, physique sociale, later renamed sociologie). Comte saw this new science, sociology, as the last and greatest of all sciences, one that would include all other sciences, and which would integrate and relate their findings into a cohesive whole. (Wikipedia)

Therefore, he accepted that the basic cell of society is the family, something much easier to characterize and treat like an elementary model of societal relations. This could also be effected by means of a language of comprehensible concepts, without confronting problems which could truly not have been overcome at the time.

 

Slightly later, J. S. Mill¹³ pointed out the resulting deficiencies of psychological cognition and the role of the individuals.
 

13 John Stuart Mill (1806 – 1873), an English philosopher and political economist, was an influential liberal thinker of the 19th century. He was an advocate of utilitarianism, the ethical theory first proposed by his godfather Jeremy Bentham. During his time as an MP, Mill advocated easing the burdens on Ireland, and became the first person in parliament to call for women to be given the right to vote. In “Considerations on Representative Government”, Mill called for various reforms of Parliament and voting, especially proportional representation, the Single Transferable Vote, and the extension of suffrage. He was godfather to Bertrand Russell. Mill argued that it is Government’s role only to remove the barriers, such as laws, to behaviors that do not harm others.

 

Crucially, he felt that offense did not constitute harm, and therefore supported almost total freedom of speech; only in cases where free speech would lead to direct harm did Mill wish to limit it. For example, whipping up an angry mob to go and attack people would not be defended in Mill’s system. Mill argued that free discourse was vital to ensure progress. He argued that we could never be sure if a silenced opinion did not hold some portion of the truth. Ingeniously, he also argued that even false opinions have worth, in that in refuting false opinions the holders of true opinions have their beliefs reaffirmed. Without having to defend one’s beliefs, Mill argued, the beliefs would become dead and we would forget why we held them at all. [Editor’s note.]

Only now is sociology successfully dealing with the difficulties which resulted, laboriously reinforcing the existing foundations of science by the achievements of psychology, a science which by its very nature treats the individual as the basic object of observation.

 

This restructuring and acceptance of an objective psychological language will in time permit sociology to become a scientific discipline which can mirror the social reality with sufficient objectivity and attention to detail in order to render it a basis for practical action. After all, it is man who is the basic unit of society, including the entire complexity of his human personality.

In order to understand the functioning of an organism, medicine begins with cytology, which studies the variegated structures and functions of cells. If we want to understand the laws governing social life, we must similarly first understand the individual human being, his physiological and psychological nature, and fully accept the quality and scope of differences (particularly psychological ones) among the individuals who constitute two sexes, different families, associations, and social groups, as well as the complex structure of society itself.

The doctrinaire and propaganda-based Soviet system contains a characteristic built-in contradiction whose causes will be readily understandable toward the end of this book. Man’s descent from the animals, bereft of any extraordinary occurrences, is accepted there as the obvious basis for the materialistic world view.

 

At the same time, however, they suppress the fact that man has an instinctive endowment, i.e. something in common with the rest of the animal world. If faced with especially troublesome questions, they sometimes admit that man contains an insignificant survival of such phylogenetic heritage, however, they prevent the publication of any work studying this basic phenomenon of psychology.¹⁴

14 See: “A Mess in Psychiatry”, an interview with Robert van Voren, General Secretary of Geneva Initiative on Psychiatry, published in the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant on August 9, 1997 where he says: “Since 1950 Soviet psychiatry has not just been standing still, but has gone downhill. Absolutely nothing has changed. The bulk of the [Russian] psychiatrists could never find a job as a psychiatrist in the West. There, methods of treatment are customary about which you cannot even talk anymore in the West. ” [Editor’s note.]

In order to understand humanity, however, we must gain a primary understanding of mankind’s instinctive substratum and appreciate its salient role in the life of individuals and societies. This role easily escapes our notice, since our human species’ instinctive responses seem so self-evident and are so much taken for granted that it arouses insufficient interest. A psychologist, schooled in the observation of human beings, does not fully appreciate the role of this eternal phenomenon of nature until he has years of professional experience.

Man’s instinctive substratum has a slightly different biological structure than that of animals. Energetically speaking, it has become less dynamic and become more plastic, thereby giving up its job as the main dictator of behavior. It has become more receptive to the controls of reasoning, without, however, losing much of the rich specific contents of the human kind.

It is precisely this phylogenetically developed basis for our experience, and its emotional dynamism, that allow individuals to develop their feelings and social bounds, enabling us to intuit other people’s psychological state and individual or social psychological reality. It is thus possible to perceive and understand human customs and moral values. From infancy, this substratum stimulates various activities aiming at the development of the mind’s higher functions.

 

In other words, our instinct is our first tutor, whom we carry inside all our lives. Proper child-rearing is thus not limited to teaching a young person to control the overly violent reactions of his instinctual emotionalism; it also ought to teach him to appreciate the wisdom of nature contained and speaking through his instinctive endowment

This substratum contains millions of years’ worth of bio-psychological development that was the product of species’ life conditions, so it neither is nor can be a perfect creation. Our well known weaknesses of human nature and errors in the natural perception and comprehension of reality have thus been conditioned on that phylogenetic level for millennia.¹⁵

15 Konrad Lorenz: Evolution and Modification of Behavior (1965); On Aggression (1966); Studies in Animal and Human Behavior, Volume I (1970); Studies in Animal and Human Behavior, Volume II (1971); Behind the Mirror (1973); The Natural Science of the Human Species: An Introduction to Comparative Behavioral Research - The Russian Manuscript (1944-1948)(1995). Lorenz joined the Nazi Party in 1938 and accepted a university chair under the Nazi regime. His publications during that time led in later years to allegations that his scientific work had been contaminated by Nazi sympathies.

 

When accepting the Nobel Prize, he apologized for a 1940 publication that included Nazi views of science, saying that “many highly decent scientists hoped, like I did, for a short time for good from National Socialism, and many quickly turned away from it with the same horror as I.” It seems highly likely that Lorenz’s ideas about an inherited basis for behavior patterns were congenial to the Nazi authorities, but there is no evidence to suggest that his experimental work was either inspired or distorted by Nazi ideas. [Editor’s note.]

The common substratum of psychology has made it possible for peoples throughout the centuries and civilizations to create concepts regarding human, social, and moral matters which share significant similarities. Inter-epochal and interracial variations in this area are less striking than those differentiating persons whose instinctual human substratum is normal from those who are carriers of an instinctual bio-psychological defect, though they are members of the same race and civilization. It shall behoove us to return to this latter question repeatedly, since it has taken on a crucial importance for the problems dealt with in this book.

Man has lived in groups throughout his prehistory, so our species’ instinctual substratum was shaped in this tie, thus conditioning our emotions as regards the mining of existence. The need for an appropriate internal structure of commonality, and a striving to achieve a worthy role within that structure, are encoded at this very level. In the final analysis, our self-preservation instinct is rivaled by another feeling: the good of society demands that we make sacrifices, sometimes even the supreme sacrifice. At the same time, however, it is worth pointing out that if we love a man, we love his human instinct above all.

Our zeal to control anyone harmful to ourselves or our group is so primal in its near-reflex necessity as to leave no doubt that it is also encoded at the instinctual level. Our instinct, however, does not differentiate between behavior motivated by simple human failure and behavior performed by individuals with pathological aberrations. Quite the contrary: we instinctively tend to judge the latter more severely, harkening to nature’s striving to eliminate biologically or psychologically defective individuals. Our tendency to such evil generating error is thus conditioned at the instinctual level.

It is also at this level that differences begin to occur between normal individuals, influencing the formation of their characters, world views, and attitudes. The primary differences are in the bio-psychical dynamism of this substratum; differences of content are secondary. For some people the sthenic¹⁶ instinct supersedes psychology; for others, it easily relinquishes control to reason. It also appears that some people have a somewhat richer and more subtle instinctual endowment than others.

 

16 Relating to or marked by sthenia; strong, vigorous, or active. [Editor’s note.]

 

Significant deficiencies in this heritage nevertheless occur in only a tiny percentage of the human population; and we perceive this to be qualitatively pathological. We shall have to pay closer attention to such anomalies, since they participate in that pathogenesis of evil which we would like to understand more fully.

A more subtle structure of effect is built upon our instinctual substratum, thanks to constant cooperation from the latter as well as familial and societal child-rearing practices. With time, this structure becomes a more easily observable component of our personality, within which it plays an integrative role. This higher effect is instrumental in linking us to society, which is why its correct development is a proper duty of pedagogues and constitutes one of the objects of a psychotherapist’s efforts, if perceived to be abnormally formed. Both pedagogues and psychotherapists sometimes feel helpless, if this process of formation was influenced by a defective instinctual substratum.

Thanks to memory, that phenomenon ever better described by psychology, but whose nature remains partly mysterious, man stores life-experiences and purposely acquired knowledge. There are extensive individual variations in regard to this capacity, its quality, and its contents. A young person also looks at the world differently from an old man endowed with a good memory.

People with a good memory and a great deal of knowledge have a greater tendency to reach for the written data of collective memory in order to supplement their own.

This collected material constitutes the subject matter of the second psychological process, namely association; our understanding of its characteristics is constantly improving, although we have not yet been able to shed sufficient light upon its nurturance. In spite of, or maybe thanks to, the value judgments contributed to this question by psychologists and psychoanalysts, it appears that achieving a satisfactory synthetic understanding of the associative processes will not be possible unless and until we humbly decide to cross the boundaries of purely scientific comprehension.

Our reasoning faculties continue to develop throughout our entire active lives, thus, accurate judgmental abilities do not peak until our hair starts greying and the drive of instinct, emotion, and habit begins to abate. It is a collective product derived from an interaction between man and his environment, and from many generations’ worth of creation and transmission.

 

The environment may also have a destructive influence upon the development of our reasoning faculties. In its environment in particular, the human mind is contaminated by conversive thinking¹⁷, which is the most common anomaly in this process. It is for this reason that the proper development of mind requires periods of solitary reflection on occasion.

Man has also developed a psychological function not found among animals. Only man can apprehend a certain quantity of material or abstract imaginings within his field of attention, inspecting them internally in order to effect further operations of the mind upon this material. This enables us to confront facts, affect constructive and technical operations, and predict future results.

17 Conversive thinking: using terms but giving them opposing or twisted meanings. Examples: peacefulness = appeasement; freedom = license; initiative = arbitrariness; traditional = backward; rally = mob; efficiency = small-mindedness. Example: the words “peacefulness” and “appeasement” denote the same thing: a striving to establish peace, but have entirely different connotations which indicate the speaker’s attitude toward this striving toward peace. [Editor’s note.]

If the facts subjected to internal projection and inspection deal with man’s own personality, man performs an act of introspection essential for monitoring the state of a human personality and the meaning of his own behavior. This act of internal projection and inspection complements our consciousness; it characterizes no species other than the human. However, there is exceptionally wide divergence among individuals regarding the capacity for such mental acts. The efficiency of this mental function shows a somewhat low statistical correlation with general intelligence.

Thus, if we speak of man’s general intelligence, we must take into account both its internal structure and the individual differences occurring at every level of this structure. The substratum of our intelligence, after all, contains nature’s instinctual heritage of wisdom and error, giving rise to the basic intelligence of life experience. Superimposed upon this construct, thanks to memory and the associative capacity, is our ability to effect complex operations of thought, crowned by the act of internal projection, and to constantly improve their correctness. We are variously endowed with these capabilities, which makes for a mosaic of individually variegated talents.

Basic intelligence grows from this instinctual substratum under the influence of an amicable environment and a readily accessible compendium of human experience; it is intertwined with higher effect, enabling us to understand others and to intuit their psychological state by means of some naive realism. This conditions the development of moral reason.

This layer of our intelligence is widely distributed within society; the overwhelming majority of people have it, which is why we can so often admire the tact, the intuition, of social relationships, and sensible morality of people whose intellectual gifts are only average. We also see people with an outstanding intellect who lack these very natural values. As is the case with deficiencies in the instinctual substratum, the deficits of this basic structure of our intelligence frequently take on features we perceive as pathological.

The distribution of human intellectual capacity within societies is completely different, and its amplitude has the greatest scope. Highly gifted people constitute a tiny percentage of each population, and those with the highest quotient of intelligence constitute only a few per thousand. In spite of this, however, the latter play such a significant role in collective life that any society attempting to prevent them from fulfilling their duty does so at its own peril. At the same time, individuals barely able to master simple arithmetic and the art of writing are, in the majority, normal people whose basic intelligence is often entirely adequate.
 

It is a universal law of nature that the higher a given species’ psychological organization, the greater the psychological differences among individual units. Man is the most highly organized species; hence, these variations are the greatest. Both qualitatively and quantitatively, psychological differences occur in all structures of the human personality dealt with here, albeit in terms of necessary oversimplification. Profound psychological variegations may strike some as an injustice of nature, but they are her right and have meaning.

Nature’s seeming injustice, alluded to above, is, in fact, a great gift to humanity, enabling human societies to develop their complex structures and to be highly creative at both the individual and collective level. Thanks to psychological variety, the creative potential of any society is many times higher than it could possibly be if our species were psychologically more homogeneous. Thanks to these variations, the societal structure implicit within can also develop. The fate of human societies depends upon the proper adjustment of individuals within this structure and upon the manner in which innate variations of talents are utilized.
 

Our experience teaches us that psychological differences among people are the cause of misunderstandings and problems. We can overcome these problems only if we accept psychological differences as a law of nature and appreciate their creative value. This would also enable us to gain an objective comprehension of man and human societies; unfortunately, it would also teach us that equality under the law is inequality under the law of nature.

If we observe our human personality by consistently tracking psychological causation within, if we are able to exhaust the question to a sufficient degree, we shall come ever closer to phenomena whose biopsychological energy is very low, which begin to manifest themselves to us with certain characteristic subtlety. Discovering this phenomenon, we then attempt to track our associations particularly because we have exhausted the available analytical platform. Finally, we must admit to noticing something within us which is a result of supra-sensory causation.

 

This path may be the most laborious of all, but it will nevertheless lead to the most material certainty regarding the existence of what all the major religious systems talk about. Attaining some small piece of truth via this path brings us to respect for some of the teachings of the ancients regarding the existence of something beyond the material universe.

If we thus wish to understand mankind, man as whole, without abandoning the laws of thought required by the objective language, we are finally forced to accept this reality, which is within each of us, whether normal or not, whether we have accepted it because we have been brought up that way, or have achieved such gnosis on our own, or whether we have rejected it for reasons of materialism or science. After all, invariably, when we analyze negative psychological attitudes, we always discern an affirmation which has been repressed from the field of consciousness. As a consequence, the constant subconscious effort of denying concepts about existing things engenders a zeal to eliminate them in other people.

Trustfully opening our mind to perception of this reality is thus indispensable for someone whose duty is to understand other people, and is advisable for everyone else as well. Thanks to this, our mind is rendered free of internal tensions and stresses and can be liberated from its tendency to select and substitute information, including those areas which are more easily accessible to naturalistic comprehension.

The human personality is unstable by its very nature, and a lifelong evolutionary process is the normal state of affairs. Some political and religious systems advocate slowing down this process or achieving excessive stability in our personalities, but these are unhealthy states from the point of view of psychology. If the evolution of a human personality or world view becomes frozen long and deeply enough, the condition enters the realm of psychopathology. The process of personality transformation reveals its meaning thanks to its own creative nature which is based on the conscious acceptance of this creative changing as the natural course of events.

Our personalities also pass through temporary destructive periods as a result of various life events, especially if we undergo suffering or meet with situations or circumstances which are at variance with our prior experiences and imaginings. These so-called disintegrative stages are often unpleasant, although not necessarily so. A good dramatic work, for instance, enables us to experience a disintegrative state, simultaneously calming down the unpleasant components and furnishing creative ideas for a renewed reintegration of our own personalities. True theater therefore causes the condition known as catharsis.

A disintegrative state provokes us to mental efforts in attempts to overcome it in order to regain active homeostasis. Overcoming such states, in effect, correcting our errors and enriching our personalities, is a proper and creative process of reintegration, leading to a higher level of understanding and acceptance of the laws of life, to a better comprehension of self and others, and to a more highly developed sensitivity in interpersonal relationships. Our feelings also validate the successful achievement of a reintegrative state: the unpleasant conditions we have survived are endowed with meaning. Thus, the experience renders us better prepared to confront the next disintegrative situation.

If, however, we have proved unable to master the problems which occurred because our reflexes were too quick to repress and substitute the uncomfortable material from our consciousness, or for some similar reason, our personality undergoes retroactive egotization,¹⁸ but it is not free of the sensation of failure.

 

The results are devolutionary; the person becomes more difficult to get along with. If we cannot overcome such a disintegrative state because the causative circumstances were overpowering or because we lacked the information essential for constructive use, our organism reacts with a neurotic condition.

18 Similar to narcissistic withdrawal. [Editor’s note.]

The diagram of the human personality presented herein, summarized and simplified for reasons of necessity, makes us aware of how complex human beings are in their structure, their changes, and their mental and spiritual lives. If we wish to create social sciences whose descriptions of our reality would be capable of enabling us to rely on them in practice, we must accept this complexity and make certain that it is sufficiently respected.

 

Any attempt to substitute this basic knowledge with the help of oversimplifying schemes leads to loss of that indispensable convergence between our reasoning and the reality we are observing. It behooves us to reemphasize that using our natural language of psychological imaginations for this purpose cannot be a substitute for objective premises.

Similarly, it is extremely difficult for a psychologist to believe in the value of any social ideology based on simplified or even naive psychological premises. This applies to any ideology which attempts to over-simplify psychological reality, whether it be one utilized by a totalitarian system or, unfortunately, by democracy as well. People are different. Whatever is qualitatively different and remains in a state of permanent evolution cannot be equal.

The above-mentioned statements about human nature apply to normal people, with a few exceptions. However, each society on earth contains a certain percentage of individuals, a relatively small but active minority, who cannot be considered normal.

We emphasize that here we are dealing with qualitative, not statistical, abnormality. Outstandingly intelligent persons are statistically abnormal, but they can be quite normal members of society from the qualitative point of view. We are going to be looking at individuals that are statistically small in number, but whose quality of difference is such that it can affect hundreds, thousands, even millions of other human beings in negative ways.

The individuals we wish to consider are people who reveal morbid¹⁹ phenomena, and in whom mental deviations and anomalies of various qualities and intensities can be observed. Many such people are driven by internal anxieties: they search for unconventional paths of action and adjustment to life with a certain characteristic hyperactivity. In some cases, such activity can be pioneering and creative, which ensures societal tolerance for some of these individuals.

19 Diseased; caused by or altered by or manifesting disease or pathology. [Editor’s note.]

Some psychiatrists, especially Germans, have praised such people as embodying the principal inspiration for the development of civilization; this is a damagingly unilateral view of reality. Laymen in the field of psychopathology frequently gain the impression that such persons represent some extraordinary talents. This very science, however, then goes on to explain that these individuals’ hyper-activity and sense of being exceptional are derived from their drive to overcompensate for a feeling of some deficiency. This aberrant attitude results in the obscuration of the truth: that normal people are the richest of all.

The fourth chapter of the book contains a concise description of some of these anomalies, their causes, and the biological reality, selected in such a way as to facilitate comprehension of this work as a whole. Other data are distributed throughout many specialized works that will not be included here. However, we must consider the overall shape of our knowledge in this area, which is so basic to our understanding of, and practical solutions to, many difficult problems of social life, is unsatisfactory.

 

Many scientists treat this area of science as being peripheral; others consider it “thankless” because it easily leads to misunderstandings with other specialists. As a consequence, various concepts and various semantic conventions emerge, and the totality of knowledge in this science is still characterized by an excessively descriptive nature. This book therefore encompasses efforts whose purpose was to bring to light the causative aspects of the descriptively known phenomena.

The pathological phenomena in question, usually of a sufficiently low intensity which can be more easily concealed from environmental opinion, merge without much difficulty into the eternal process of the genesis of evil, which later affects people, families, and entire societies. Later in this book, we shall learn that these pathological factors become indispensable components in a synthesis which results in wide scale human suffering, and also that tracking their activities by means of scientific control and social consciousness may prove to be an effective weapon against evil.

For the above reasons, this scope of psychopathological science represents an indispensable part of that objective language we have dealt with before. Ever-increasing accuracy in biological and psychological facts in this area is an essential precondition for an objective comprehension of many phenomena which become extremely onerous for societies, as well as for a modern solution to age-old problems.

 

Biologists, physicians, and psychologists who have been struggling with these elusive and convoluted problems deserve assistance and encouragement from society, since their work will enable the future protection of people and nations from an evil whose causes we do not as yet sufficiently understand.

 

Society

Nature has designed man to be social, a state of affairs encoded early, on the instinctual level of our species as described above. Our minds and personalities could not possibly develop without contact and interaction with an ever-widening circle of people. Our mind receives input from others, whether consciously or unconsciously, in regard to matters of emotional and mental life, tradition and thought, by means of resonant sensitivity, identification, imitation, and by exchange of ideas, and permanent rules.

 

The material we obtain in these ways is then transformed by our psyche in order to create a new human personality, one we call “our own”. However, our existence is contingent upon necessary links with those who lived before, those who presently make up our society, and those who shall exist in the future. Our existence only assumes meaning as a function of societal bonds; hedonistic isolation causes us to lose our selves.
 

It is man’s fate to actively cooperate in giving shape to the fate of society by two principal means: forming his individual and family life within it, and becoming active in the sum total of social affairs based on his – hopefully sufficient - comprehension of what needs to be done, what ought to be done, and whether or not he can do it. This requires an individual to develop two somewhat overlapping areas of knowledge about things; his life depends on the quality of this development, as does his nation and humanity as a whole.

If, say, we observe a beehive with a painter’s eye, we see what looks like a crowding throng of insects linked by their species-similarity. A beekeeper, however, tracks complicated laws encoded in every insect’s instinct and in the collective instinct of the hive as well; that helps him understand how to cooperate with the laws of nature governing apiary society. The beehive is a higher-order organism; no individual bee can exist without it, and thus it submits to the absolute nature of its laws.

If we observe the throngs of people crowding the streets of some great human metropolis, we see what looks like individuals driven by their business and problems, pursuing some crumb of happiness. However, such an oversimplification of reality causes us to disregard the laws of social life which existed long before the metropolis ever did, and which will continue to exist long after huge cities are emptied of people and purpose. Loners in a crowd have a difficult time accepting that reality, which – for them - exists in only potential form, although they cannot perceive it directly.

In reality, accepting the laws of social life in all their complexity, even if we find initial difficulties in comprehending them, helps us to come, finally, to a certain level of understanding that we acquire by something akin to osmosis. Thanks to this comprehension, or even just an instinctive intuition of such laws, an individual is able to reach his goals and mature his personality in action. Thanks to sufficient intuition and comprehension of these conditions, a society is able to progress culturally and economically and to achieve political maturity.

The more we progress in this understanding, the more social doctrines strike us as primitive and psychologically naive, especially those based on the thoughts of thinkers living during the 18th and 19th centuries which were characterized by a dearth of psychological perception. The suggestive nature of these doctrines derives from their oversimplification of reality, something easily adapted and used in political propaganda.

 

These doctrines and ideologies show their basic faults, in regard to the understanding of human personalities and differences among people, all rather clearly if viewed in the light of our natural language of psychological concepts, and even more so in the light of objective language.

A psychologist’s view of society, even if based only on professional experience, always places the human individual in the foreground; it then widens the perspective to include small groups, such as families, and finally societies and humanity as whole. We must then accept from the outset that an individual’s fate is significantly dependent upon circumstance. When we gradually increase the scope of our observations, we also gain a greater pictorial specificity of causative links, and statistical data assume ever greater stability.

In order to describe the interdependence between someone’s fate and personality, and the state of development of society, we must study the entire body of information collected in this area to date, adding a new work written in objective language. Herein I shall adduce only a few examples of such reasoning in order to open the door to questions presented in later chapters.

Throughout the ages and in various cultures, the best pedagogues have understood the importance, regarding the formation of a culture and a person’s character, of the scope of concepts describing psychological phenomena. The quality and richness of concepts and terminology²⁰ mastered by an individual and society, as well as the degree to which they approximate an objective world view, condition the development of our moral and social attitudes.

20 Lobaczewski’s emphasis on language is very important. Semiotics is the study of language or any other symbol system that conveys meaning. One of the great philosophical discussions that has continued for centuries relates to that of the alphabet giver and “namer” of things. In the monotheistic world, Adam is, of course, the one we think of when we think of the “giving of names” to things. In terms of the study of Semiotics, the question is: did he name things based on what they were, in essence, or did he simply create a convention, and arbitrarily name them whatever appealed to him?

 

The theories of Semiotics propose that there are two levels, or “planes of articulation”. At the level of any given language, such as Greek, English, Chinese, or whatever, there is what they call the “Expression plane” that consists of a lexicon, a phonology and syntax. In other words, the Expression Plane is the selection of words that belong to that language, the sounds that the selection of words produce, and the way they are arranged to convey meaning. That is the first plane. The second plane is called the Content Plane. This is the array of concepts that the language is capable of expressing. This last is rather important because, as we have all heard at least once in our lives, Eskimos have many words for snow while people who do not live in an environment where snow and ice are the dominant features may only have one or two words for these phenomena.

So it is that the “Content Plane” of a language becomes crucial to what can be discussed in that language. In order for the sounds of speech to be meaningful, the words formed out of these sounds must have a meaning associated with them. In other words, the sounds relate to the Content. The Content Continuum represents the Universe or reality to which our words relate as we are capable of conceiving it.

Lobaczewski is rightly pointing out that the normal person (not to mention psychology as a whole, though to a lesser extent) has an extremely psychological vocabulary of limited understanding because the content continuum of understanding has been artificially truncated, repressed, or otherwise diminished. [Editor’s note.]

The correctness of our understanding of self and others characterizes the components conditioning our decisions and choices, be they mundane or important, in our private lives and social activities.

The level and quality of a given society’s psychological worldview is also a condition of realization of the full socio-psychological structure present as a potential in the psychological variety within our species. Only when we can understand a person in relation to his actual internal contents, not some substituted external label, can we help him along his path to proper adjustment to social life, which would be to his advantage and would also assist in the creation of a stable and creative structure of society.

Supported by a proper feel for, and understanding of, psychological qualities, such a structure would impart high social office to individuals possessing both full psychological normality, sufficient talent and specific preparation. The basic collective intelligence of the masses of people would then respect and support them.

And so, in such a society, the only pending problems to be resolved would be those matters so difficult as to overwhelm the natural language of concepts, however enriched and qualitatively ennobled.

However, there have always been “society pedagogues”, less outstanding but more numerous, who have become fascinated by their own great ideas, which might, sometimes, even be true, but are more often constricted or contain the taint of some hidden pathological thought processes. Such people have always striven to impose pedagogical methods which would impoverish and deform the development of individuals’ and societies’ psychological world view; they inflict permanent harm upon societies, depriving them of universally useful values. By claiming to act in the name of a more valuable idea, such pedagogues actually undermine the values they claim and open the door for destructive ideologies.

At the same time, as we have already mentioned, each society contains a small but active minority of persons with various deviant worldviews, especially in the areas treated above, which are caused either by psychological anomalies, to be discussed below, or by the long-term influence of such anomalies upon their psyches, especially during childhood. Such people later exert a pernicious influence upon the formative process of the psychological world view in society, whether by direct activity or by means of written or other transmission, especially if they engage in the service of some ideology or other.

Many causes which easily escape the notice of sociologists and political scientists can thus be broken down into either the development or involution of this factor, whose meaning for the life of society is as decisive as the quality of their language of psychological concepts.

Let us imagine that we want to analyze these processes: we would construct a sufficiently credible inventory method which would examine the contents and correctness of the area of world view in question. After subjecting the appropriate representative groups to such testing, we would then obtain indicators of that particular society’s ability to understand psychological phenomena and dependencies within their country and other nations.

 

This would simultaneously constitute the basic indicators of said society’s talent for self-government and progress, as well as its ability to carry on a reasonable international policy. Such tests could provide an early warning system if such abilities were to deteriorate, in which case, it would be proper to make the appropriate efforts in the realm of social pedagogy. In extreme cases, it might be proper for those countries evaluating the problem to take more direct corrective action, even to isolating the deteriorating country until the appropriate corrections are well under way.

Let as adduce another example of a congenial nature: the development of an adult human’s gifts, skills, realistic thought, and natural psychological world view will be optimal where the level and quality of his education and the demands of his professional practice correspond to his individual talents. Achieving such a position provides personal, material, and moral advantages to him; society as whole also reaps benefits at the same time. Such a person would then perceive it as social justice in relation to himself.

If various circumstances combine, including a given society’s deficient psychological world view, individual’s are forced to exercise functions which do not make full use of his or her talents. When this happens, said person’s productivity is no better, and often even worse, than that of a worker with satisfactory talents. Such an individual then feels cheated and inundated by duties which prevent him from achieving self-realization. His thoughts wander from his duties into a world of fantasy, or into matters which are of greater interest to him; in his daydream world, he is what he should and deserves to be.

 

Such a person always knows if his social and professional adjustment has taken a downward direction; at the same time, however, if he fails to develop a healthy critical faculty concerning the upper limits of his own talents, his daydreams may “fix on” an unfair world where “all you need is power”. Revolutionary and radical ideas find fertile soil among such people in downward social adaptations. It is in society’s best interests to correct such conditions not only for better productivity, but to avoid tragedies.

Another type of individual, on the other hand, may achieve an important post because they belong to privileged social groups or organizations in power while their talents and skills are not sufficient for their duties, especially the more difficult problems. Such persons then avoid the problematic and dedicate themselves to minor matters quite ostentatiously. A component of histrionics appears in their conduct and tests indicate that their correctness of reasoning progressively deteriorates after only a few years’ worth of such activities.

 

In the face of increasing pressures to perform at a level unattainable for them, and in fear of being discovered as incompetent, they begin to direct attacks against anyone with greater talent or skill, removing them from appropriate posts and playing an active role in degrading their social and professional adjustment. This, of course, engenders a feeling of injustice and can lead to the problems of the downwardly adapted individual as described above. Upwardly-adjusted people thus favor whip-cracking, totalitarian governments which would protect their positions.

Upward and downward social adjustments, as well the qualitatively improper ones, result in a waste of any society’s basic capital, namely the talent pool of its members. This simultaneously leads to increasing dissatisfaction and tensions among individuals and social groups; any attempt to approach human talent and its productivity problematics as a purely private matter must therefore be considered dangerously naive. Development or involution in all areas of cultural, economic and political life depend on the extent to which this talent pool is properly utilized. In the final analysis, it also determines whether there will be evolution or revolution.

Technically speaking, it would be easier to construct appropriate methods that enable us to evaluate the correlations between individual talents and social adjustment in a given country, than to deal with the prior proposition of the development of psychological concepts. Conducting the proper tests would furnish us a valuable index that we might call “the social order indicator.”

 

The closer the figure to +1.0, the more likely the country in question would be to fulfill that basic precondition for social order and take the proper path in the direction of dynamic development. A low correlation would be an indication that social reform is needed. A near-zero or even negative correlation should be interpreted as a danger-sign that revolution is imminent. Revolutions in one country often cause manifold problems for other countries, so it is in the best interests of all countries to monitor such conditions.

The examples adduced above do not exhaust the question of causative factors influencing the creation of a social structure which would adequately correspond to the laws of nature. Our species-instinct level has already encoded the intuition that the existence of society’s internal structure, based on psychological variations, is necessary; it continues to develop alongside our basic intelligence, inspiring our healthy common sense. This explains why the most numerous part of populations, whose talents are near average, generally accepts its modest social position in any country as long as the position fulfills the indispensable requirements of proper social adjustment and guarantees an equitable way of life no matter at what level of society the individual finds their proper fit.

This average majority accepts and respects the social role of people whose talents and education are superior, as long as they occupy appropriate positions within the social structure. The same people, however, will react with criticism, disrespect, and even contempt, whenever someone as average as themselves compensates for his deficiencies by flaunting an upwardly-adjusted position. The judgments pronounced by this sphere of average but sensible people can often be highly accurate, which can and should be all the more remarkable if we take into account that said people could not possibly have had sufficient knowledge of many of the actual problems, be they scientific, technical, or economic.²¹

An experienced politician can rarely assume that the difficulties in the areas of economics, defense, or international policy will be fully understand by his constituency. However, he can and should assume that his own comprehension of human matters, and anything having to do with interpersonal relations within said structure, will find an echo in this same majority of his society’s members.

 

These facts partially justify the idea of democracy, especially if a particular country has historically had such a tradition, the social structure is well developed, and the level of education is adequate. Nevertheless, they do not represent psychological data sufficient to raise democracy to the level of a moral criterion in politics. A democracy composed of individuals of inadequate psychological knowledge can only devolve.

21 Very often false opinion polls are used to attempt to manipulate a society’s perception of its officials. This never works for very long as, eventually, incompetence is revealed to all. [Editor’s note.]

The same politician should be conscious of the fact that society contains people who already carry the psychological results of social maladjustment. Some of these individuals attempt to protect positions for which their skills are not commensurate, while others fight to be allowed to use their talents. Governing a country becomes increasingly difficult when such battles begin to eclipse other important needs. That is why the creation of a fair social structure continues to be a basic precondition for social order and the liberation of creative values. It also explains why the propriety and productivity of a structure-creation process constitute a criterion for a good political system.

Politicians should also be aware that in each society there are people whose basic intelligence, natural psychological world view, and moral reasoning have developed improperly. Some of these persons contain the cause within themselves, others were subjected to psychologically abnormal people as children. Such individuals’ comprehension of social and moral questions is different, both from the natural and from the objective viewpoint; they constitute a destructive factor for the development of society’s psychological concepts, social structure, and internal bonds.

At the same time, such people easily interpenetrate the social structure with a ramified²² network of mutual pathological conspiracies poorly connected to the main social structure. These people and their networks participate in the genesis of that evil which spares no nation.

 

22 Showing one or more branches. In mathematics, ramification is a geometric term used for “branching out”. It is also used from the opposite perspective (branches coming together). [Editor’s note.]
 

This substructure gives birth to dreams of obtaining power and imposing one’s will upon society, and is quite often actually brought about in various countries, and during historical times as well. It is for this reason that a significant portion of our consideration shall be devoted to an understanding of this age-old and dangerous source of problems.

Some countries with a non-homogeneous population manifest further factors which operate destructively upon the formation of social structure and the permanent developmental processes of a society’s psychological world view. Primarily among these are the racial, ethnic, and cultural differences existing in virtually every conquest-engendered nation. Memories of former sufferings and contempt for the vanquished continue to divide the population for centuries. It is possible to overcome these difficulties if understanding and goodwill prevail throughout several generations.

Differences in religious beliefs and the moral convictions related thereto continue to cause problems, albeit less dangerous than the above, unless aggravated by some doctrine of intolerance or superiority of one faith above others. The creation of a social structure whose links are patriotic and supra-religious has, after all, been demonstrated as possible.

All these difficulties become extremely destructive if a social or religious group, in keeping with its doctrine, demands that its members be accorded positions which are in fact upward-adjusted with relation to these people’s true talents.

A just social structure woven of individually adjusted persons, i.e. creative and dynamic as a whole, can only take shape if this process is subjected to its natural laws rather than some conceptual doctrines. It benefits society as a whole for each individual to be able to find his own way to self-realization with assistance from a society which understands these laws, individual interests and the common good.

One obstacle to the development of a society’s psychological world view, the building of a healthy societal structure, and the institution of proper forms for governing the nation, would appear to be the enormous populations and vast distances of giant countries. It is just precisely these nations which give rise to the greatest ethnic and cultural variations. In a vast spreading land containing hundreds of millions of people, individuals lack the support of a familiar homeland and feel powerless to exert an effect upon matters of high politics. The structure of society becomes lost in wide-open spaces. What remains is narrow, generally familial, links.

At the same time, governing such a country creates its own unavoidable problems: giants suffer from what could be called permanent macropathy (giant sickness), since the principal authorities are far away from any individual or local matters.

The main symptom is the proliferation of regulations required for administration; they may appear proper in the capital but are often meaningless in outlying districts or when applied to individual matters. Officials are forced to follow regulations blindly; the scope of using their human reason and differentiating real situations becomes very narrow indeed. Such behavioral procedures have an impact upon the society, which also starts to think regulations instead of practical and psychological reality. The psychological world view, which constitutes the basic factor in cultural development and activates social life, thus becomes involuted.

It thus behooves us to ask: Is good government possible? Are giant countries capable of sustaining social and cultural evolution?

 

It would appear, rather, that the best candidates for development are those countries whose populations number between ten and twenty million, and where personal bonds among citizens, and between citizens and their authorities, still safeguard correct psychological differentiation and natural relationships. Overly large countries should be divided into smaller organisms enjoying considerable autonomy, especially as regards cultural and economic matters; they could afford their citizens a feeling of homeland within which their personalities could develop and mature.

If someone asked me what should be done to heal the United States of America, a country which manifests symptoms of macropathy, inter alia, I would advise subdividing that vast nation into thirteen states—just like the original ones, except correspondingly larger and with more natural boundaries. Such states should then be given considerable autonomy. That would afford citizens a feeling of homeland, albeit a smaller one, and liberate the motivations of local patriotism and rivalry among such states. This would, in turn, facilitate solutions to other problems with a different origin.

Society is not an organism subordinating every cell to the good of the whole; neither is it a colony of insects, where the collective instinct acts like a dictator. However, it should also avoid being a compendium of egocentric individuals linked purely by economic interests and legal and formal organizations.

Any society is a socio-psychological structure woven of individuals whose psychological organization is the highest, and thus the most variegated. A significant scope of man’s individual freedom derives from this state of affairs and subsists in an extremely complicated relationship to his manifold psychological dependencies and duties, with regard to this collective whole.

Isolating an individual’s personal interest as if it were at war with collective interests is pure speculation which radically oversimplifies real conditions instead of tracking their complex nature. Asking questions based on such schemes is logically defective, since it contains erroneous suggestions.

In reality, many ostensibly contradictory interests, such as individual vs. collective or those of various social groups and substructures, could be reconciled if we could be guided by a sufficiently penetrating understanding of the good of man and society, and if we could overcome the operations of emotions as well as some more or less primitive doctrines. Such reconciliation, however, requires transferring the human and social problems in question to a higher level of understanding and acceptance of the natural laws of life. At this level, even the most difficult problems turn out to have a solution, since they invariably derive from the same insidious operations of psychopathological phenomena.

 

We shall deal with this question toward the end of this book.

A colony of insects, no matter how well-organized socially, is doomed to extinction whenever its collective instinct continues to operate according to the psychogenetic code, although the biological meaning has disappeared. If, for instance, a queen bee does not affect her nuptial flight in time because the weather has been particularly bad, she begins laying unfertilized eggs which will hatch nothing but drones. The bees continue to defend their queen, as required by their instinct; of course, and when the worker bees die out the hive becomes extinct.

At that point, only a “higher authority” in the shape of a beekeeper can save such a hive. He must find and destroy the drone queen and insinuate a healthy fertilized queen into the hive along with a few of her young workers. A net is required for a few days to protect such a queen and her providers from being stung by those bees loyal to the old queen. Then the hive instinct accepts the new one. The apiarist generally suffers a few painful stings in the process.

The following question derives from the above comparison: Can the human hive inhabiting our globe achieve sufficient comprehension of macrosocial pathological phenomenon which is so dangerous, abhorrent, and fascinating at the same time, before it is too late? At present, our individual and collective instincts and our natural psychological and moral world view cannot furnish all the answers upon which to base skillful counteractive measures.

Those fair-minded people who preach that all we have left is to trust in the “Great Apiarist in the sky” and a return to His commandments are glimpsing a general truth, but they also tend to trivialize particular truths, especially the naturalistic ones. It is the latter which constitute a basis for comprehending phenomena and targeting practical action. The laws of nature have made us very different from one another. Thanks to his individual characteristics, exceptional life-circumstances, and scientific effort, man may have achieved some mastery of the art of objectively comprehending the phenomena of the above-mentioned type, but we must underscore that this could only occur because it was in accordance with the laws of nature.

If societies and their wise people are able to accept an objective understanding of social and sociopathological phenomena, overcoming the emotionalism and egotism of the natural world view for this purpose, they shall find a means of action based on an understanding of the essence of the phenomena. It will then become evident that a proper vaccine or treatment can be found for each of the diseases scourging the earth in the form of major or minor social epidemics.
 

Just as a sailor possessing an accurate nautical map enjoys greater freedom of course-selection and maneuvering amid islands and bays, a person endowed with a better comprehension of self, other people, and the complex interdependencies of social life becomes more independent of the various circumstances of life and better able to overcome situations which are difficult to understand.

 

At the same time, such improved knowledge makes an individual more liable to accept his duties toward society and to subordinate himself to the discipline which arises as a corollary. Better informed societies also achieve internal order and criteria for collective efforts. This book is dedicated to reinforcing this knowledge by means of a naturalistic understanding of phenomena, something heretofore comprehended only by means of excessively moralistic categories of the natural world view.

In a wider perspective, a constantly improving grasp of the laws governing social life, and its atypical secluded recesses, must lead us to reflect upon the failings and deficiencies of those social doctrines expounded to date, which were based on an extremely primitive understanding of these laws and phenomena. The distance is not far between such considerations and a better understanding of the operations of these dependencies in former and existing social systems; the same applies to substantive critiques thereof. A new idea is about to be born based upon this ever-deepening comprehension of natural laws, namely the building of a new social system for nations.

Such a system would be better than any of its predecessors. Building it is possible and necessary, not just some vague futuristic vision. After all, a whole series of countries is now dominated by conditions which have destroyed the structural forms worked out by history and replaced them with social systems inimical to creative functioning, systems which can only survive by means of force. We are thus confronted with a great construction project demanding wide-ranging and well-organized work.

 

The earlier we undertake the job, the more time we will have to carry it out.

 

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