The Psychology of Evil: Why Ordinary People Embrace Dangerous Ideologies with Harrison Koehli
27 October 2026
With Harrison Koehli
Global
Dr Bret Alderman talks to Harrison Koehli, Canadian journalist and editor of the new edition of Andrzej Łobaczewski's Political Ponerology, about how psychopathy and personality disorder can come to drive ideological movements rather than merely ride along with them. The conversation covers Łobaczewski's theory of "pathocracy", why disordered individuals are drawn to causes built on moral certainty, and how the framework gets applied to gender ideology, queer theory and group indoctrination. For Irish readers, it is a psychological lens worth weighing alongside the HSE's own record on gender services and the Cass Review, not a substitute for either.
This episode is a conversation between psychologist Dr Bret Alderman and Harrison Koehli, a Canadian journalist and podcaster who edited the second edition of Andrzej Łobaczewski's Political Ponerology: The Science of Evil, Psychopathy, and the Origins of Totalitarianism. Koehli writes on these themes at his Substack, ponerology.substack.com, and the discussion sets out Łobaczewski's central claim: that psychopathy and other personality disorders are not incidental to oppressive political movements but a driving force within them, producing what he termed a "pathocracy". The pair trace the stages Łobaczewski described, from the slow "ponerization" of an otherwise ordinary movement to the point where disordered individuals rise to its leadership because the movement's own rules stop functioning as a check on them. A recurring theme is why such people are drawn to ideological causes in the first place, and how movements built on moral certainty and suppressed dissent make it harder, not easier, for ordinary members to notice when something has gone wrong internally. Later chapters turn to gender and human nature, queer theory, and what the hosts describe as the difference between ego-syntonic and ego-dystonic experience, before closing on how indoctrination operates in groups more broadly. None of this is presented as clinical research into gender dysphoria; it is a framework for thinking about group psychology, borrowed from a Polish psychiatrist writing under and about Soviet-era totalitarianism, and then applied by the hosts to the ideological movements they see around them today. For readers in Ireland, the value of this is as a lens rather than as a dataset. The questions Łobaczewski's work raises, about how institutions lose their capacity for internal correction, how dissenting voices get pushed out, and how certainty can substitute for evidence, map onto debates that have played out here in concrete form. The HSE's own review of its gender services, the shift away from the Tavistock-modelled approach following the UK's Cass Review, and the professional disagreements within psychology and psychotherapy bodies over the evidence base for paediatric gender medicine are all, at root, arguments about whether an institution revised its position when the evidence said it should. None of that is addressed directly in this episode, and Political Ponerology is not an evidence base for clinical practice. But the episode is a useful companion piece to coverage of the HSE's clinical programme documents and the Irish professional guidelines, which describe what institutions did; this conversation offers one theory, contested and debated in its own right, about why institutions sometimes fail to correct course even when the evidence is in front of them. Readers should treat Koehli and Łobaczewski's framework as a psychological argument to weigh, not as established Irish fact.
