Harrison Koehli
Editor of Political Ponerology and podcast host
Harrison Koehli edited the definitive edition of Andrzej Łobaczewski's Political Ponerology, the study of how psychopathic traits spread through institutions. On Beyond Gender he unpacks why ordinary professionals embrace dangerous ideologies - a lens British listeners can hold up to the Cass Review's findings on how conviction overrode caution at the Tavistock gender clinic.
Harrison Koehli is the editor of the revised edition of Andrzej Łobaczewski's Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes, the Cold War-era study of how psychopathic and otherwise disordered personalities rise within movements and bend healthy institutions toward their own ends. He is also a longtime co-host of the Mind Matters podcast, where ponerology, propaganda and the psychology of ideological capture are recurring themes.
Koehli joined Beyond Gender host Dr Bret Alderman for the episode The Psychology of Evil: Why Ordinary People Embrace Dangerous Ideologies, discussing how psychopathic traits can spread through social movements and capture institutions from within - not through a single villain, but through networks of ordinary people whose caution and judgement are gradually overridden by conviction.
For UK listeners, that framework lands close to home. The Cass Review's account of the Tavistock gender service described exactly this pattern: clinicians who suppressed doubt, dissent that went unheard, and an institution that kept affirming a model of care even as the evidence for it thinned. Koehli's work on ponerology offers a psychological explanation for how that kind of capture happens inside otherwise respectable bodies like the NHS, rather than treating it as one clinic's isolated failure.
His conversation with Alderman gives British audiences a wider framework for questions that UK policy debates - over NHS gender services, school guidance and the law - are still working through: how do well-meaning institutions lose their capacity for scepticism, and what does it take to get it back.
