Foundation for the Study of Political Pathology


Death as the Principle of Verification


Ideologies become real to the extent that people die for them. Any death will do—will serve the same purpose: enemy deaths, the deaths of one’s own soldiers, or civilian deaths.

Sacrificial death "gives witness" to the depth of devotion to a sacred ideal. Dying constitutes a principle of verification—testifying to the truth and power of the ideal.

Adolf Hitler during a visit to the WWI German cemetery at Langemark, near Ypres, Belgium, 1940.

Our foundation originates in Richard Koenigsberg’s acclaimed book, Nations Have the Right to Kill: Hitler, the holocaust, and war—where he argues that modern war is a state-sanctioned ritual of self-destruction.

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"Richard Koenigsberg is an intrepid generator and disseminator of novel ideas regarding the psychodynamics of human violence and destructiveness, ideas that are startling all the more for being self-evident once they have been absorbed. Koenigsberg's ideas cut trenchantly through conventional, rationalized notions about culture, the nation, and war, and enable us to see through the psychic machinations of human institutions in utterly new ways."

—Ruth Stein, Author, For Love of the Father: A Psychoanalytic Study of Religious Terrorism

Additional Amazon Reviews

Political Psychopathology

When a human being kills another human being, we are likely to call this murder, consider it a crime and may believe the murderer is suffering from a form of psychopathology. When leaders murder human beings in the name of nation-states, on the other hand, killing rarely is viewed in these terms. This Foundation will explore political mass-murder and the question of why killings performed under the rubric of nation-states are not conceived as abnormal. We investigate what may be considered the psychopathology of normality.


What our Special Colleagues have to say

"The nation-state can become a terrible idol. People will sacrifice everything— their reason, their individuality, their morality—for the sake of its imagined unity. It’s a kind of collective possession, where the group’s identity overrides all else, and you see this in the worst moments of history: wars, genocides, purges, all justified in the name of the nation-state’s sacred mission. That’s what happens when ideology replaces reality."
"The suicide bomber is not a lone, crazed individual but rather a product of a group dynamic, a collective fantasy that is deeply rooted in a culture of shame and honor. This act of self-destruction, fused with the destruction of others, is not merely a personal choice but a performance of a shared narrative that glorifies martyrdom and vengeance against a perceived enemy. The group’s ideology—whether religious, political, or cultural—provides the psychological scaffolding for such acts, making the unthinkable seem not only possible but obligatory. This is not just about individual pathology but about a collective mindset that transforms murder-suicide into a sacred duty."
"Humankind's strongest social bonds and actions, including the capacity for cooperation and forgiveness, and for killing and allowing oneself to be killed, are born of commitment to causes and courses of action that are "ineffable," that is, fundamentally immune to logical assessment for consistency and to empirical evaluation for costs and consequences. The more materially inexplicable one's devotion and commitment to a sacred cause — that is, the more absurd—the greater the trust others place in it and the more that trust generates commitment on their part."
— Scott Atran The Power of Absurdity

Special Colleagues


The Psychopathology of Normality

Warfare is about killing and dying. This much we know. We ordinarily emphasize the role of killing. But perhaps the essence of war is dying. Warfare as an institution produces corpses. Historians focus upon warfare in terms of who “wins” and who “loses.” But what if this way of looking at war is obsolete.

If warfare is not primarily about killing, nor about winning or losing, what is war all about? We hypothesize that the institution of warfare revolves around the issue or question of truth. That for which we die becomes true.

The truth emerges, not only by virtue of the death of our enemy, but by virtue of the death of our own soldiers. We wage war to demonstrate our sincerity. Death constitutes a testament or testimonial; a demonstration that we believe in our sacred ideals. The proof of the pudding is in the dying.

When a soldier is killed in battle, we say that he has “died for his country.” No one will argue about this way of saying things. The soldier has “given his life” for his nation. But let’s put this slightly differently: soldiers are sent into battle by nations so that they may die. Death is not an unforeseen event. We send soldiers to war so that they may die or be wounded—thus demonstrating the sincerity of our belief—the depth of our devotion to our nation’s sacred ideals.

Each nation has different ideals. So, warfare is not dying for this ideal or that ideal; for this or that nation. Death in warfare, rather, constitutes a methodology for determining the truth. The proof of the pudding is in the dying.

After a war (and sometimes during a war, as was the case in the First World War) nations build memorials to the dead—monuments to confer honor upon those who have died in the name of their nation’s sacred ideals. Warfare seeks to produce sacrificial victims. Each side produces sacrificial victims in order to prove the sincerity of its beliefs.

Our understanding of warfare grows out of research on Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust. What does the Holocaust have to do with war? More than anyone else, Hitler understood the deep structure of the ideology of warfare. SS-men were instructed to become “obedient unto death.” Although many embraced the Nazis’ view of themselves as “supermen,” Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels knew better. The objective of these men was to teach soldiers—as well as other Germans—how to die willingly.

British Officer and author General Sir John Hackett observed that the military makes demands that few if any other callings do. While emotionally disturbed people talk about being “trained to kill,” the whole essence of being a soldier is “not to slay but to be slain."

Adolf Hitler during a visit to the WWI German cemetery at Langemark, near Ypres, Belgium, 1940.

The Nazis called it the Final Solution. Historians and the general public call it the Holocaust. Whatever one calls it, the intent of Germany was to exterminate the Jewish people. This is clear. But a close reading of statements Hitler made—as the war against the Soviet Union began in mid-1942—reveals that he understood that warfare and the Final Solution were intimately related.

Hitler declared, “If I don’t mind sending the pick of the German people into the hell of war without the slightest regret over the spilling of precious German blood, then I naturally also have the right to destroy millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin.”

In short, Hitler said that if society gave him the “right” to send his own soldiers to die in battle, then why would he not also have the right—why would he regret—sending the Jewish people to die in concentration camps? The logic of genocide followed based on the logic of warfare.

A characteristic of war is that the death of the soldier on the field of battle is often hidden. The public does not like to know or think about what actually happens on the battlefield. The title of Rene Girard’s book, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, tells the story. The thing hidden, according to Girard, was the killing of a “scapegoat,” a human being who existed at the boundaries of society. But one might also view soldiers as human beings who exist at the border of society. They too become scapegoats.

“The stream of blood which flows for Germany is eternal—the sacrifice of German men for their Volk is eternal—therefore Germany will also be eternal.” — Rudolph Hess

Adolf Hitler during a visit to the WWI German cemetery at Langemark, near Ypres, Belgium, 1940.

Anyone who has viewed photographs or descriptions of a battlefield at the end of a war—knows that soldiers often die a miserable, pathetic death. The first victims of the Holocaust similarly suffered miserable, pathetic deaths. These occurred in the Soviet Union when the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) rounded up Jews from towns, then compelled them to stand or lie in ditches—where they were shot to death. Historians estimate that over a million Jews were killed in this manner. Later, concentration camps became the location of extermination.

From a purely physical perspective, viewing the bodies of those who have died there is little difference between the soldier’s death on the battlefield and the death of a victim of the Holocaust in a concentration camp. The difference is how we speak about these deaths. The death of a soldier is viewed as honorable and noble. The death of a Holocaust victim is never described in this manner. The Holocaust depicts death at the hands of the nation-state without sugar-coating, suffering and degradation stripped of words like duty, loyalty, and honor.

Paul W. Kahn says that looking at a field of battle after the battle has concluded, “strewn with severed limbs and broken bodies, men disemboweled and beheaded,” it is not clear who is the object of sacrifice. The enemy and the conscript “suffer the same threat and burden of physical destruction.”

We circle back to the question of what these men were dying for. Put simply, men in the Twentieth Century died for nations. But do we really know what “nations” are? What are these entities which generate death on such a massive scale? And why do human beings give nations the “right” to take human lives?

Ideologies become real to the extent that people die for them. Any death will do—will serve the same purpose: enemy deaths, the deaths of one’s own soldiers, or civilian deaths.

Sacrificial death "gives witness" to the depth of devotion to a sacred ideal. Dying constitutes a principle of verification—testifying to the truth and power of the ideal.

Adolf Hitler during a visit to the WWI German cemetery at Langemark, near Ypres, Belgium, 1940.

We know the names of the “leaders” who generated mass-death in the Twentieth Century. People like Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot. But the massive dying that occurred under the leadership of these men was possible only because they represented their nations. This is why these men had the “right” to kill.

People may be horrified by the actions initiated by these leaders, but once we evoke the idea of the nation, we are not mystified. People say to themselves, “This is what nations do. They sometimes engage in operations which result in the deaths of hundreds-of-thousands, even millions of people. What is to explain?”

The mission of the Foundation for the Study of Political Pathology is to explore the question, “What are nations and why do we assume these entities are entitled to bring about the deaths of human beings?” According to Rudolph Rummel, there have been well over two-hundred million deaths in the Twentieth Century resulting from wars and genocidal episodes. Rummel wonders why textbooks assigned to students rarely emphasize the fact that nations are killers.

Up to now, we have taken for granted the “normalcy” of mass-murder undertaken by nation-states. Our mission is to “bracket” the question of normalcy. What if we begin with the individual human being—who would rather live than die. Then we look at ideologies of destruction in a new way. We view that which ordinarily is viewed as normal—as abnormal. We investigate the psychopathology of normality.


Our Core Ideas

Richard Koenigsberg with David Gornoski: War as Sacrifice Things Hidden Ep 57

Host David Gornoski speaks with Dr. Richard Koenigsberg about the deeper psychology of war, suggesting it’s driven less by survival than by an ingrained ritual of sacrifice. Drawing from history, Koenigsberg shows how nations frame dying for one’s country as a noble, almost sacred act—binding citizens together through shared bloodshed. This ideology, dominant in the 20th century, has waned in recent decades as modern wars claim far fewer lives, hinting at a cultural shift away from mass human sacrifice.


Richard Koenigsberg with David Gornoski: Why do Nations Feel They Have The Right To Kill

Host David Gornoski and social psychologist Dr. Richard Koenigsberg dig into the psychology of war, arguing it’s less about survival and more about ritual sacrifice. Drawing on his studies of Nazi Germany and World War I, Koenigsberg explains that nations often glorify dying for one’s country as a sacred duty, turning war into a form of blood sacrifice that unites and defines the nation—much like ancient religious rituals. Leaders and soldiers alike have embraced this ideology, even when battles brought staggering losses and no real gains. While this mindset dominated the 20th century, Koenigsberg notes a sharp decline in recent decades, with modern wars claiming far fewer lives—hinting that humanity might slowly be moving away from mass human sacrifice as the foundation of warfare.


Richard Koenigsberg with Howard Bloom : Politics as Delusion

In this wide-ranging conversation, Howard Bloom and Richard C. Bock explore the psychology of leaders, the mechanics of nationalism, and the power of delusion in shaping history. They revisit past discussions comparing Trump’s rhetoric and tactics to Hitler’s, noting how repetition, scapegoating, and belief in one’s own narrative can bind groups together—even when rooted in falsehoods. The dialogue moves through historical examples from Hitler to St. Paul to modern geopolitics, emphasizing how sacrifice, perceived enemies, and collective myths forge social cohesion. Along the way, personal anecdotes and sharp humor bring warmth to an otherwise sobering examination of how dangerous ideas can be turned from “nonsense” into accepted common sense.


Richard Koenigsberg with Sulavon: S4 E11 Sulavon's SheShed featuring Dr. Richard Koenigsberg

Dr. Richard Koenigsberg recounts his path from academia to running a niche scholarly book marketing business. Drawing on decades of research, he compares Hitler’s scapegoating of Jews to Donald Trump’s rhetoric about immigrants, warning of the dangers of political fantasies. Advocating for “Awakening from the Nightmare of History,” he urges viewing certain historical events as collective psychoses. He also champions multiculturalism and moving beyond narrow ethnic or national identities.