The Psychology of Evil: Why Ordinary People Embrace Dangerous Ideologies with Harrison Koehli
A Canadian researcher and editor of Andrzej Łobaczewski's 'Political Ponerology' joins Dr Bret Alderman to explain how pathological personalities rise to shape movements and institutions. For European listeners, the conversation lands close to home: Łobaczewski's framework was forged under Soviet-era totalitarianism, and the episode's questions about ideological capture, conformity and dissent-suppression speak directly to how gender-identity policy has moved through Dutch, Nordic, French and German institutions and EU bodies with little open debate.
This episode of Beyond Gender turns to a less familiar but increasingly cited body of work in gender-critical circles: political ponerology, the study first developed by Polish psychologist Andrzej Łobaczewski to explain how psychopathy and other personality pathologies can come to dominate social and political movements. Dr Bret Alderman hosts Harrison Koehli, a Canadian journalist and podcaster who edited the second edition of Łobaczewski's book Political Ponerology, to discuss what this theory can tell us about ideological capture more broadly, and about gender-identity movements specifically. Łobaczewski developed his ideas while living under communist rule in Poland, observing how certain personality types gravitate toward positions of ideological and institutional power, and how movements can become vehicles for people with limited empathy or conscience. Koehli and Alderman trace this process, from how disordered individuals are drawn to causes that reward conformity and punish dissent, through to what they describe as the psychology of ego-syntonic belief systems, where destructive ideas feel natural and unquestionable to those who hold them. The conversation also turns to queer theory and indoctrination, asking why some ideological frameworks resist scrutiny so forcefully. For European readers, the relevance is not abstract. Łobaczewski's work emerged from direct experience of a continent-wide totalitarian system, and the questions the episode raises, about how institutions lose the capacity for open debate and how dissenting clinicians or researchers get sidelined, echo concerns already raised about gender medicine's path through European healthcare systems. Sweden and Finland shifted policy after their own evidence reviews found the research base wanting, while institutions in the Netherlands, France and Germany, along with EU-level health and equality bodies, have been slower to revisit established protocols despite similar questions being raised by clinicians and journalists. The episode does not claim that European gender services are run by psychopaths, nor does it offer a diagnosis of any specific institution. What it does offer is a framework for thinking about how ideological movements sustain themselves even when evidence shifts, a question with obvious bearing on why guidance in some European countries has been so slow to change despite mounting clinical doubt elsewhere on the continent. For therapists, researchers and policymakers across Europe who have watched gender medicine debates stall inside professional bodies and health ministries, the ponerology framework offers a vocabulary for naming that institutional inertia. Listeners should treat the episode as a conceptual lens rather than a verdict on any particular country or clinic. Its value for a European audience lies in the questions it prompts about institutional behaviour: why do some professional and political bodies resist correcting course even as new data emerges, and what role does personality, rather than just ideology, play in sustaining that resistance. Those are questions European clinicians, regulators and journalists are still working through.
