“The elephants in the room are that the U.S. and the World have big problems that neither party is going to do anything about.”

Collective Delusional Processes in U.S. Society

It was Andrew Lobaczewski, author of Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes, who first presented the concept that, throughout history, pathological personalities have taken over societies and caused unimaginable destruction. Needless wars have caused untold millions of needless deaths and trillions of dollars in destruction. He characterized this process as political and macro-social evil in a scientifically measurable way.

Lobaczewski presented a process that begins with visionaries whose ideas are corrupted by a cascade of personalities, all deficient in character, ending in psychopaths taking the helm and guiding the society to war, destruction, and eventual collapse. Most of us think of psychopaths as being mostly criminals who end up in jail, but Lobaczewski shows that they actually are capable of leading us, at least when they are born into privilege.

Lobaczewski also describes how the rest of society largely goes along with this, and this is the subject of this article.

Throughout history societies have acquiesced, rationalized, and actually participated in the process of placing and supporting evil people in control of societies ultimately resulting in collapse. He used the term “hysteria,” meaning irrational and even delusional thought processes to describe this process, and he often used the example of Europe during the first half of the 20th century to illustrate this. The outright denial of the Holocaust by much of German society even while it was going on illustrates his point.

Examples of what can be termed the “ponerization process” in the U.S. go way back. While writing the words to the Declaration of Independence which contained phraseology such as “All men are created equal with certain inalienable rights…,” Thomas Jefferson owned over 200 slaves; but to this day you will not find this fact in public school history books. It is an inconvenient truth, so it is ignored, denied, and largely not believed. When confronted with irrefutable proof, many Americans will rationalize this fact. These sorts of irrational acts and thoughts cannot go on without the illogical buy-in of the people of a society. This is an example of mass hysteria that is with us today and permeates the entire society.