The Psychology of Evil: Why Ordinary People Embrace Dangerous Ideologies with Harrison Koehli
27 October 2026
culture-and-ideology
A Canadian journalist and editor of Andrzej Łobaczewski's 'Political Ponerology' joins Dr Bret Alderman to ask a question that sits behind every episode of the podcast: why do reasonable people, institutions and whole professions adopt ideas that evidence doesn't support and refuse to reconsider them? The conversation uses the psychology of psychopathy and totalitarian movements to explain how gender-identity ideology took hold, why dissent gets treated as heresy rather than disagreement, and how understanding the mechanics of ideological capture helps make sense of what's happened in clinics, schools and universities.
Harrison Koehli is a Canadian journalist, podcaster and the editor of 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 both Nazi occupation and Soviet rule, spent decades trying to explain a specific puzzle: how do movements built on genuine grievances end up producing cruelty, rigidity and the suppression of dissent. His answer was that psychologically disordered individuals are drawn to such movements and gradually reshape them in their own image, a process he called ponerization. That framework is the spine of this conversation. Koehli and Dr Bret Alderman work through how a pathocracy forms: not through a single dramatic takeover, but through an incremental process in which people with certain personality traits are disproportionately attracted to movements that promise moral clarity and righteous cause, and disproportionately successful at rising within them. The discussion looks at why psychopathy in particular interacts badly with social rules, and why institutions that pride themselves on compassion and inclusion can be the easiest ones to capture. What makes the episode relevant beyond its historical subject is the second half, where the conversation turns to gender and human nature. Alderman and Koehli apply the ponerology framework to contemporary social justice movements, asking what happens when ideas about sex, identity and biology are treated as beyond question rather than as claims that should be tested against evidence. This is where the episode connects most directly to the concerns the podcast keeps returning to: a shift from empirical inquiry to ideological assertion, and the institutional reluctance to correct course even when the evidence points elsewhere. The discussion of ego-syntonic versus ego-dystonic thinking is particularly useful for understanding why this resistance to evidence feels, from the inside, like conviction rather than defensiveness. An ego-syntonic belief is experienced as simply true, a part of the self, rather than as a position that could be wrong; this helps explain why believers in a totalising ideology often cannot recognise internal contradictions that are obvious to outsiders. Applied to queer theory and the broader project of indoctrination, the conversation suggests why certain ideas spread through schools, universities and clinical training without being subjected to ordinary scrutiny, and why those who raise doubts are treated as a threat rather than a colleague with a different read of the evidence. For anyone trying to understand why gender medicine, in particular, proved so resistant to self-correction even as the evidence base weakened, this episode offers a psychological vocabulary rather than a political one. It reframes the debate away from left versus right and toward a older, more uncomfortable question: what personality types thrive inside institutions that stop asking whether they're right, and what does it take for an institution to start asking again.
