The Psychology of Evil: Why Ordinary People Embrace Dangerous Ideologies with Harrison Koehli
27 October 2026
With Harrison Koehli
UK
Dr Bret Alderman talks to Harrison Koehli, editor of the new edition of Andrzej Łobaczewski's Political Ponerology, about how disordered individuals capture sincere movements and entrench institutional doctrine. The theory isn't a verdict on any UK body, but its account of dissent being discouraged and scepticism being treated as suspect echoes what Dr Hilary Cass's 2024 NHS England review found inside the Gender Identity Development Service, where an affirmative model reportedly outran its evidence base while clinicians felt unable to raise concerns. Useful as a psychological framework for readers already following the UK's gender medicine record, not as a replacement for it.
Harrison Koehli is a Canadian journalist and podcaster who edited the new edition of Andrzej Łobaczewski's Political Ponerology, a mid-twentieth-century psychological study of how totalitarian systems form. In this episode Dr Bret Alderman questions him on Łobaczewski's central claim: that movements are not captured by bad ideas alone, but by a disproportionate number of psychologically disordered people who find a given ideology a useful cover for cruelty and rule-breaking. Koehli walks through the stages of what Łobaczewski called ponerization, the process by which a sincerely held cause is gradually taken over, and explains why certain institutional cultures prove more hospitable to that takeover than others. None of this is presented as a diagnosis of any UK institution, and listeners should treat it as a general psychological theory rather than a finding about gender services specifically. But the pattern Koehli describes, an ideology entrenching itself by making dissent costly and ordinary scepticism look suspect, is one that UK readers have already seen documented independently. Dr Hilary Cass's 2024 independent review for NHS England found that clinicians inside the Gender Identity Development Service described an atmosphere where normal clinical caution was discouraged, and where an affirmative model took hold faster than the evidence supporting it. The review's account of staff who felt unable to raise concerns sits alongside the institutional capture Koehli discusses, even though the two analyses were produced through entirely different methods and traditions. The conversation also covers psychopathy's relationship to social rules, and moves into queer theory and what Koehli and Alderman call ego-syntonic acceptance of transgressive claims, where ideas that would once have triggered scrutiny are instead absorbed as self-evidently virtuous. For readers tracking how gender ideology became embedded in British institutions, that segment is useful less as a verdict and more as a vocabulary: a way of naming the gap between what NHS England's own review found about evidence and practice at GIDS, and the confidence with which affirmative claims were advanced regardless. Readers should come away treating Political Ponerology as a framework worth testing against the UK record, not a substitute for it. The Cass Review, the subsequent NHS England service redesign, and the ongoing restriction on puberty blockers remain the primary evidence base for anyone assessing what went wrong in gender medicine for under-eighteens. Koehli's theory offers a psychological account of how institutions arrive at that kind of failure in the first place, which is why an episode about communism and social justice movements still has something to say to anyone following the UK's gender medicine reckoning.
