By Liam De Boer | BlendrNews.com

“All governments suffer a recurring problem: power attracts pathological personalities.” ~Frank Herbert

That isn’t a punchline, it’s a law of political gravity.

The problem isn’t that power corrupts, it’s that it seduces the already corruptible. Andrew Lobaczewski, a psychiatrist who lived through multiple totalitarian regimes, spent decades trying to warn us. Some people don’t want power to serve the public. They want it to dominate, humiliate, and destroy.

And when the conditions are right, they rise to the top.

In Political Ponerology, Lobaczewski lays out the chilling thesis. Modern tyranny isn’t just about bad ideas; it’s about disordered minds weaponizing those ideas. Pathological individuals, psychopaths, narcissists, and sadists aren’t like you and me. They lack empathy, they crave control, and they know exactly how to manipulate language and ideology to get it.

They speak in double-speak. To the average person, words like equity, liberation, or safety sound like compassion. But to insiders, they carry different meanings: tools of control and repression. The public hears “inclusion”; the regime hears “compliance.” This is totalitarianism’s magic trick—morality used as a mask for domination.

And the scariest part, these people are really good at what they do. Psychopaths are social chameleons. They know how to read people, push emotional buttons, say the right thing, and wear whatever mask the moment requires. Lobaczewski calls it the Mask of Sanity. Robert Hare, the world’s top psychopathy researcher, once said if he didn’t study psychopaths in prison, he’d study them on Wall Street. Lobaczewski found them in the Politburo, and increasingly, you’ll find them in politics, media, academia, and tech.

But here’s the crucial part.

Once they gain authority, they don’t need everyone to support them. They only need 6–12%—the true believers, opportunists, and petty tyrants who are all too eager to enforce the regime’s will. The rest of the population falls into line. Not because they believe, but because they’re afraid. Afraid of saying the wrong thing, afraid of losing their jobs, afraid of becoming the next target.

That’s how tyranny functions in the modern world. Not with mass approval, but with mass submission enforced by a vocal and vicious minority.

Lobaczewski warned that the inability to recognize this psychological dynamic leads to immense suffering, mass terror, and the decay of civilization itself.

This isn’t just history. It’s a warning. If we don’t start recognizing the masks these people wear, and call them what they truly are, we’ll keep handing them the keys to civilization, and they’ll keep burning it down from the inside.

Originally published on Instagram @liam_out_loud