The Psychology of Evil: Why Ordinary People Embrace Dangerous Ideologies with Harrison Koehli
27 October 2026
With Harrison KoehliDr Bret Alderman sits down with Harrison Koehli, editor of the second edition of Andrzej Łobaczewski's Political Ponerology, to ask why ordinary, well-meaning people end up enforcing destructive ideologies. The conversation traces Łobaczewski's concept of pathocracy, societies effectively steered by psychopathic and otherwise disordered personalities, and applies it to today's gender-identity movement. Koehli and Alderman discuss how such systems attract believers, why psychopathy thrives once ordinary social rules erode, and how queer theory's ego-syntonic framing echoes older patterns of ideological capture. It's a dense, historically grounded hour for anyone trying to understand how a therapeutic trend hardened into unquestionable dogma.
Bret Alderman usually turns his psychologist's eye on archetypes and myth, but this episode he brings in a guest who studies something darker: how pathological personalities come to run entire movements and institutions. Harrison Koehli is a Canadian journalist and podcaster who edited the second edition of Andrzej Łobaczewski's Political Ponerology, a book written in the shadow of Soviet-bloc Poland that tries to explain, clinically, how psychopathy infiltrates and eventually dominates political systems. The two spend the first part of the conversation laying out Łobaczewski's core idea of pathocracy, a social order in which people with psychopathy and related personality pathologies rise to positions of influence and bend a movement's stated ideals to serve their own need for control. From there they walk through what Koehli calls the ponerization process, the gradual way a cause that starts with genuine grievances or good intentions gets colonised by people drawn less to the cause itself than to the power and cover it offers. What makes this episode distinct from a straightforward history lesson is where Alderman and Koehli take the theory next. They ask why certain movements are more vulnerable to this kind of capture than others, and what role the erosion of shared social rules plays in making space for disordered actors to operate unchecked. That question leads directly into a discussion of gender and human nature, and from there into queer theory, where the pair examine the distinction between ego-syntonic and ego-dystonic thinking, the difference between beliefs a person experiences as harmoniously their own versus beliefs that sit in tension with reality, and why that distinction matters when an ideology demands total identification with its claims. For listeners who have followed this podcast's broader argument that gender-identity ideology functions less like a medical consensus and more like a belief system enforced through social and professional pressure, Koehli's framework offers a vocabulary for something many have sensed but struggled to name. The episode does not claim that everyone involved in gender medicine or activism is disordered. Instead it offers a model for how a small number of such actors, operating within institutions that have lost their normal checks, can shape outcomes for far larger numbers of well-intentioned people, including clinicians, teachers and parents who go along because dissent has been made costly. The final stretch turns to indoctrination itself, how belief systems get transmitted and defended once they take hold. It's a fitting close for an episode that spends less time on policy specifics than most and more on the psychological machinery underneath them. For anyone wanting a deeper, more theoretical companion to the show's usual case-by-case reporting on youth gender medicine, this conversation with Harrison Koehli supplies the framework a lot of that reporting has been gesturing toward.
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