The Psychology of Evil: Why Ordinary People Embrace Dangerous Ideologies with Harrison Koehli
Dr Bret Alderman talks to Harrison Koehli, editor of Andrzej Lobaczewski's Political Ponerology, about how psychopathic traits can spread through social movements and capture institutions from within. For listeners who followed the Cass Review's account of how ideological conviction overrode clinical caution at the Tavistock, the conversation offers a wider psychological lens on that failure: why dissenting doctors were frozen out, why evidence got shouted down, and how a well-meaning cause can harden into something closed and punitive. It is a framework for understanding how gender-identity orthodoxy embedded itself in the NHS and in British schools, and why it proved so hard to challenge from inside.
Dr Bret Alderman is joined by Harrison Koehli, a Canadian journalist and podcaster who edited the second edition of Andrzej Lobaczewski's Political Ponerology, a study of how psychopathy and other personality disorders shape political and ideological movements. Lobaczewski, a Polish psychologist who lived under both Nazi occupation and communist rule, argued that disordered individuals are drawn to revolutionary causes because such causes let them act on impulses that ordinary social rules would otherwise restrain. Koehli and Alderman trace how a movement can tip from idealism into what Lobaczewski called pathocracy, a system run on fear, conformity and the suppression of dissent. Much of the discussion applies this lens directly to gender politics: how movements attract people with little regard for consequence or contradiction, how psychopathic traits exploit social rules rather than follow them, and how queer theory's rejection of fixed categories can function less as liberation than as a tool for dismantling the checks that normally stop bad ideas from spreading. The hosts also discuss ego-syntonic versus ego-dystonic thinking, the process by which people come to experience an imposed belief as their own, which bears directly on how children and young adults absorb gender-identity claims presented to them as settled fact. None of this is abstract for Britain. The Cass Review described a Tavistock gender service where affirmative ideology, not evidence, drove clinical practice for years, and where clinicians who raised concerns were marginalised rather than heard. Koehli's framework offers a way of understanding that pattern beyond individual culpability: an environment where challenge is treated as bigotry rather than as ordinary scientific scrutiny is exactly the kind of closed system ponerology describes, one in which the most certain voices crowd out the most careful ones. That matters for the NHS as it rebuilds children's gender services under Cass's recommendations, and for schools still working out how to handle gender questioning pupils under guidance that many teachers found slow to arrive and hard to apply. It also speaks to the wider British debate about free speech on gender, in universities, in the civil service and in the press, where accusations of transphobia have often done the work that reasoned disagreement should have done. For British listeners, the value of this episode lies less in any single policy conclusion than in the diagnostic tool it offers: a way of asking, of any institution that suddenly insists on total agreement, whether what looks like moral clarity is in fact a warning sign.
