The Psychology of Evil: Why Ordinary People Embrace Dangerous Ideologies with Harrison Koehli
27 October 2026
With Harrison Koehli
Europe
A Canadian editor of Andrzej Łobaczewski's 'Political Ponerology' joins the podcast to examine how psychopathy and other personality pathologies can come to dominate social and political movements. For European readers tracking how gender-identity ideology embedded itself in clinics, schools and courts, this framework offers a lens on how dissent gets suppressed and conformity enforced within institutions long before any evidence review catches up.
This episode steps back from clinical protocols and legal rulings to ask a structural question: how do ideologies that override ordinary reasoning and evidence take hold inside institutions, and why do reasonable people go along with them? The guest is Harrison Koehli, a Canadian journalist and podcaster who edited the second edition of Andrzej Łobaczewski's Political Ponerology, a study of how psychopathy and related personality pathologies can come to shape political and social movements from within. Łobaczewski's original work, written under Soviet-era censorship in Poland, described how a small proportion of people with psychopathic or otherwise disordered personalities can disproportionately influence a movement's direction once it loses its grounding in open inquiry and self-correction. Koehli's conversation with Bret Alderman applies that framework to contemporary social justice movements, tracing what the episode calls a ponerization process: the gradual capture of a well-intentioned cause by individuals drawn to its moral certainty and its intolerance of dissent. For a site tracking the European evidence base on youth gender medicine, this matters because the pattern described is institutional, not merely ideological. Across the UK's Cass Review, Sweden's and Finland's shifts toward caution, and France's Académie de Médecine statement, a recurring theme has been the suppression of internal doubt: clinicians who raised concerns about rushed diagnoses or irreversible interventions describe being sidelined rather than heard. A psychological account of how dissent gets punished and conformity rewarded inside institutions offers a plausible explanatory layer for why evidence-based caution took so long to surface in some countries, even as systematic reviews accumulated. The episode also addresses how psychopathy relates to social rules more broadly, and how ego-syntonic versus ego-dystonic experience shapes whether a person's own disordered traits feel like a problem to them or feel entirely normal. The hosts connect this to queer theory and to what they describe as indoctrination within educational and cultural institutions, extending the ponerology framework from its original Cold War context into present-day debates about gender identity, sex and human nature. Listeners should note this is an interpretive, historically grounded lens rather than a clinical diagnosis of any specific movement or individual, and the hosts' application of it to gender-identity debates reflects their own analytic framework rather than a peer-reviewed finding. Still, the underlying question, how do institutions lose the capacity for self-correction, bears directly on why national health bodies, medical colleges and courts across Europe have had to revisit youth gender services years after frontline concerns were first raised. Understanding the social psychology of institutional capture gives parents, clinicians and policymakers a vocabulary for recognising when professional consensus has drifted away from the underlying evidence, and why restoring that evidence base often requires outside scrutiny rather than internal reform alone.
