(this page is found in the chapter Pathology & assessment)
The record of the European Union is catastrophic. How did we get here? Several explanations are possible. Ideological blindness? A crisis of capitalism? The incompetence of leaders? An accumulation of mistakes? Or a deliberate intent? This last hypothesis is less often explored. It is the one we will develop here.
Psychiatry describes an antisocial personality disorder, sometimes called sociopathy. Its main traits: manipulation, cynicism, superficial charm, lack of remorse, arrogance, lack of empathy, violation of other people's rights, disregard for rules, transgression of social norms. In extreme cases, this disorder can escalate to criminal behavior, including enjoyment of others' suffering.
Building on this mental disorder, Dr. Lobaczewski published a book on pathocracy (translated in the West in 1984). In a pathocracy, leaders are driven by a will to power, predation, a spirit of revenge, a desire to harm. The national interest no longer counts. Laws are circumvented. The leaders impose their law on society to satisfy a desire for power. The country is used as a source of plunder. A pathocratic system does not hesitate to resort to fear, or even war. There is no longer any consideration for human life.
A pathocracy takes hold in a materialistic, carefree, individualistic society — a society that has lost its values and its bearings.
It is difficult to admit that a political system seeks to harm the population. Denial is added to civic apathy. Entertainment and consumer society reinforce this denial. This is linked to a cognitive blindness.
A pathocracy can bypass democracy and the result of a referendum (2009). It can organize rigged referendums and illegible treaties (Maastricht, the European Constitutional Treaty, Lisbon). It can put in place social control (Covid-19). It can generate massive debt or financial plunder (2008, then Cyprus in 2013). It can destroy a country (Greece). It can develop a russophobia with the risk of a third world war.
Lobaczewski's book dates from 1984 (its publication in the West). Since then, several essays have addressed this theme:
The book The Fourth Turning (Strauss and Howe, 1997) describes a cyclical evolution of societies. Each cycle lasts about 21 years, with 4 phases. The last one is dangerous. It can lead to a regeneration of society and its institutions. Or it can trigger a catastrophe that may go as far as civilizational collapse. According to the authors, this 4th phase began around 2005 in the United States. This thesis is not necessarily validated. It can nonetheless be applied to the European Union, to observe the intensification of a process of destruction:
The European pathocratic system explains the catastrophic record of the European Union. It rests on several pillars:
These components form a closely intertwined system. Regarding Russia, the EU, NATO, finance, the military-industrial complex, and media propaganda reinforce one another:
Since 1984, and more strongly since 2008, three sets of facts converge toward the same observation.
The first concerns democracy. The Spinelli project is set aside in favor of the Single Act. The European Constitutional Treaty, rejected by referendum in France and the Netherlands in 2005, returns almost unchanged in the form of an intergovernmental treaty: the Lisbon Treaty. Public consultation is thus deliberately bypassed. The most structural economic choices are constitutionalized. They escape democratic debate and are entrusted to unelected institutions. Colin Crouch calls this "post-democracy": the appearances of universal suffrage are maintained, but the substance of political choice is confiscated. This goes far beyond a simple democratic deficit.
The second concerns the European economic architecture. With Maastricht and then Lisbon, member states give up their monetary sovereignty. Forced to borrow on financial markets, they progressively lock themselves into a logic of structural debt. At the same time, tax optimization and evasion are tolerated, even organized, within the Union itself. Countries such as Luxembourg or Ireland serve as legal platforms for fiscal plunder estimated at several hundred billion per year (Zucman). The result: asphyxiated public revenues, debt presented as a technical constraint rather than a political choice, and social cuts imposed as the only possible way out. Some call this "starve the beast."
The third concerns geopolitics. Between 1991 and 1999, a historic window opens to build a common security architecture between Europe and Russia. This window closes methodically: NATO's war against Serbia, successive NATO enlargements toward Russia's borders, instrumentalization of the Ukrainian conflict to the detriment of European economic and security interests. The result: a Europe engaged in a logic of confrontation, bearing most of the cost, for the benefit of interests that are not its own.
These three sets of facts could be explained separately, by ideological blindness, incompetence, or capture by private interests. But their convergence since 1984, with constant beneficiaries and constant losers, calls for a broader hypothesis. Is this system the result of a coordinated intent, or of a convergence of interests progressively institutionalized? The question is difficult to settle, and difficult to hear for part of the population. But the effects, the beneficiaries, and the system's capacity to neutralize any internal resistance are, themselves, observable and documented. This is what the concept of pathocracy allows us to name.
Chinese-style social control represents the most complete and explicit form of pathocracy applied to the governance of populations. In the West, equivalents exist: digital surveillance, management through fear. They produce comparable effects, in less visible forms, which makes them harder to identify and contest.
There is an additional hypothesis, of a psychological and collective order: a correspondence between the cognitive blindness of a population and its political translation.
The mind remains imprisoned as long as it does not recognize its shadow (Jungian vision), or as long as it remains in ignorance (Buddhist vision). It is this cognitive prison that generates suffering, at the individual level.
Europe was built in opacity. Its dimension has remained purely economic and materialistic, driven by technocratic rules. It has not defined a purpose in terms of human values. It has maintained a democratic façade, a loss of meaning, and a geopolitical drift. It is a construction devoid of meaning, which conceals the human dimension. It lacks historical lucidity regarding its own past: pride in past hegemony, a sense of moral superiority, fear of decline. It remains unable to question itself: structural flaws, democratic façade, drift toward social control, ignorance of interdependence in international relations. Its shadow therefore acts covertly. It projects itself outward, through the construction of an enemy: Russia. The result is a prison generating collective suffering: the deterioration of living conditions for European populations, a drift toward war.
This prison produces real crises. And at the same time, this deviant Europe is nothing other than the giant projection of our own inner prison, individual, onto the European map. A European project needs a virtuous purpose, one that goes beyond mere accounting logic. It needs historical lucidity to confront its past and integrate its shadow. It needs cooperation, comprehensive security (the Helsinki Accords, the Charter of Paris, the Istanbul agreements), a living democracy, and a humanization of our societies through the valuing of an ecology of the mind.
A society that refuses to see, out of fear, denial, or comfort, creates the conditions favorable to the emergence of a system that organizes and perpetuates this blindness.
No collective blindness, no pathocracy.
It is in this sense that political transformation is inseparable from an inner transformation, individual and collective. The outer world reflects the collective inner state. A lasting transformation must therefore act on both levels at once.
To Change: this is the inner work, Jungian individuation, the transformation of the self — breaking free of one's own cognitive and emotional blindnesses.
To Humanize: this is the collective and political translation of this transformation, a Europe that embodies human values rather than a pathocratic system.
The aim, then, is to contribute to the emergence of a conscious minority, sufficiently lucid to prepare for a broader transformation, when the crisis makes it inevitable.
Imagine a war breaking out against Russia, and elections being suspended. If the following conditions were to come together:
then we would tip into a totalitarian system. This tipping point would happen insidiously, through gradual steps. We can already observe a gradation of this kind: the ostracism toward opponents of the mandatory vaccination linked to mRNA injections, which were not tested over the long term, during the Covid-19 crisis. At the scale of the phenomenon, it starts with a simple desire to sideline or ostracize opponents of these new gene-based injections. It could end with the criminalization of opponents of the war and their imprisonment, with state violence then being exercised openly against the dissenting civilian population. History shows that this tipping point is built step by step, up to the point where turning back becomes difficult.