The Psychology of Evil: Why Ordinary People Embrace Dangerous Ideologies with Harrison Koehli
Dr Bret Alderman talks to Harrison Koehli, editor of Andrzej Łobaczewski's 'Political Ponerology', about how a small minority of psychopathic and character-disordered individuals can bend well-meaning movements towards totalitarian ends. For Irish listeners following the gender debate, it offers a framework for understanding how Irish schools, advocacy bodies and health institutions can become captured by ideological zealotry, why dissenting clinicians and parents get silenced, and why Stella O'Malley's therapeutic insistence on evidence and open debate is itself a safeguard against pathocratic drift.
This episode steps back from the day-to-day gender debate to ask a bigger question: how do reasonable institutions end up enforcing unreasonable ideas? Dr Bret Alderman is joined by 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'. Łobaczewski, a Polish psychologist who lived under communist rule, argued that a small number of psychopathic and otherwise character-disordered individuals can disproportionately shape a movement's direction, gradually turning a well-intentioned cause into something rigid, punitive and intolerant of dissent. Koehli and Alderman trace this process, which Łobaczewski called ponerization, from its origins in totalitarian states to its relevance for understanding ideological capture today. For Irish listeners, the value of this conversation is diagnostic rather than directly clinical. Ireland's gender services, school curricula and advocacy organisations have, like their counterparts elsewhere, absorbed a particular account of gender identity with remarkably little public scrutiny for a long period. The ponerology framework helps explain a pattern many Irish parents, teachers and clinicians have quietly noticed: how quickly disagreement within institutions gets recast as bigotry, how a handful of highly motivated and sometimes personality-disordered actors can set the tone for an entire organisation, and why moderate, evidence-minded voices often go silent rather than risk professional and social consequences. The discussion also covers how psychopathic traits interact with social rules more generally, why certain types of people are drawn to positions of influence within ideological movements, and how ego-syntonic versus ego-dystonic thinking shapes whether people within a system can even recognise that something has gone wrong. That last point matters directly for Stella O'Malley's work as an Irish psychotherapist. Clients who have internalised an ideology as part of their identity, rather than experiencing it as an external pressure, are far harder to help through ordinary therapeutic conversation, and clinicians in Ireland's own gender services face exactly this dynamic with young patients and, at times, with colleagues. Koehli and Alderman turn specifically to gender, human nature and queer theory in the episode's second half, examining how these ideas get transmitted and embedded through what they describe as indoctrination. For an Irish audience, this lands close to home: the Department of Education's relationship, school RSE programmes, and the HSE's gender services have all faced questions about how much independent scrutiny shaped their current approach. A historical and psychological lens on how ideologies capture institutions, rather than a direct critique of any one Irish body, gives parents, teachers and healthcare staff here a vocabulary for naming what they are observing. Ultimately the episode argues for the same remedy Beyond Gender has championed throughout: open debate, honest psychotherapy and a willingness to ask uncomfortable questions of institutions before they harden into orthodoxy. That is as relevant to an Irish school staffroom or HSE clinic as it is to the totalitarian states Łobaczewski originally studied.
