By Lisa Van Dusen

November 20, 2025

Some years, words of the year don’t just capture the zeitgeist, they so sublimely sum it up, there’s simply no contest.

In 2016, for instance, the US presidential campaign that saw the field culled to what polls showed was the most off-putting choice in history generated a political narrative that made the word of the year — actually two words — the hands-down winner before the calendar had hit the summer solstice: “dumpster fire”.

Having spent, as an editor, much of that year foraging for “dumpster fire” synonyms based on overuse avoidance, I can attest that the American Dialect Society’s choice was a lock.

By 2024, when the dumpster fire of eight years earlier had spread with a vengeance into an inferno of Alighierian proportions, Oxford, of all sources, declared “brain rot” its word of the year, a choice that may have been less diagnostic than aspirational.

Long before 2025 unfurled its parade of anti-democracy, anti-Canadian, anti-humanity horribles from Donald Trump’s reclaimed White House, the word “pathocracy” had surfaced on my radar as an editor, writer, and witness. As it now hovers in that linguistics sweet spot between fringe lingering and mainstreaming-by-necessity, we declare it our Policy Word of the Year for 2025.

It’s neither a new word, nor one the kids are texting. It’s the sort of word that describes something sufficiently rare to be out of general circulation, but sufficiently possible given a ghoulish confluence of variables, to be undeniably appropriate under certain circumstances. Like “measles”.

Pathocracy is a straightforward word in that it combines the Greek root “pathos”, meaning suffering or disease, with the suffix “cracy” meaning rule or power. It was coined by psychologist Andrzej M. Łobaczewski, whose own experience in the Polish resistance in WWII and under brutal Soviet occupation informed his expertise on, and study of, autocratic regimes.

It describes a form of government in which individuals with psychological disorders, including the dark-tetrad “profile of doom” (sadistic, Machiavellian, narcissistic, psychopathic), consolidate and abuse power in a way that produces — quite literally for all intents and purposes — a contagion of lunacy (as with the morally distorted pathocracies of the Third Reich, Apartheid, and Slavery).

While there are many sources of Łobaczewski’s work, including his own book on evil and power, Political Ponerology, the AI-generated search results for the word “pathocracy” are both relatively concise and accurate. Here is that description, compiled from two AI search results, unedited, except for length:

The key characteristics of pathocracy:

• Rule by those with personality disorders: It is a government dominated by people with psychological disorders, such as psychopathy and narcissism.
• Infiltration and distortion: Pathocracies often start by secretly infiltrating and distorting existing systems, such as democratic ones, rather than announcing themselves overtly.
• Lack of empathy and morality: The leaders lack fundamental human capacities like empathy, guilt, or shame, which gives them an advantage in manipulating, lying, and cheating without consequence.
• Manipulation of ideology: Leaders twist ideologies to serve their need for control, even if the original intentions were good.
• Dismantling of democratic institutions: Pathocratic leaders detest democracy and will work to contain or abolish it, including constraining the press, because it restricts their power.
• Creation of a new elite: The leaders form a new elite that feels threatened by those with human decency and manipulates society to maintain dominance.
• Societal adaptation: Over time, the rest of society may adapt to the pathology by learning to accept lies and seeing domination as leadership.
• Psychological Warfare: Governance in a pathocracy becomes a form of psychological warfare designed to break down the public’s capacity to reason. It manipulates language and facts to control the populace.
• Rewarding Pathology: The system rewards the abnormal and punishes the moral, creating a society where “madness is the metric for success, delusion is doctrine, and chaos is currency”.
• Societal “Madness”: The concept suggests that an entire society can surrender to a collective derangement when led by lunatics, effectively opening the “asylum gates” and making the public complicit in its own manipulation.

Escalating paranoia and control 

Initially, pathocrats present a compelling, simplified ideology that promises future greatness while demonizing alleged enemies. Over time, this paranoia intensifies into a system of total control driven by deep-seated suspicion.

• Excessive and arbitrary legislation: The ruling elite uses and abuses the legal system to consolidate power and suppress the populace. They create inflexible laws that remove citizens’ decision-making power from their daily lives.
• Constant surveillance and propaganda: The government uses controlled media to constantly push propaganda while spying on its citizens. As its paranoia grows, the regime becomes increasingly secretive while demanding more transparency from its people.
• Violation of human rights: As the regime becomes more reactionary, it increasingly violates basic human rights, often involving torture, abuse, and restricting necessities like food and water to maintain control through fear.
• The promotion of incompetence: A key aspect of a pathocracy’s final stage is its destructive cycle of negative selection. As the government seeks to remove all threats to its power, it promotes those who are loyal and pathologically compliant, regardless of their talent or ability.
• Suppression of creativity and competence: The system systematically marginalizes and removes moral, empathetic, and competent individuals who are seen as a threat. These people are ostracized, silenced, or voluntarily step aside.
• Rising levels of corruption: Ruthless and amoral individuals are promoted, increasing corruption within the system. People are treated as a “resource” to be exploited for personal and institutional gain, rather than individuals with worth.
• Institutional decay: As the most capable people are replaced by the most pathological, the pathocracy becomes increasingly inefficient and dysfunctional. This ultimately makes it unsustainable and leads to its collapse.”

End quote.

We’ve provided this public service because being, by vocational necessity, on the front line of humanity’s perpetual quest for the right word, we’ve found this one coming up repeatedly for some time. Given the latest trends in anti-democracy degradation and abuse of power, we figured it best to flag it now.

Also — speaking of collective derangement — “6-7” was already taken by Dictionary.com.

You’re welcome.

Policy Editor and Publisher Lisa Van Dusen has served as Washington bureau chief for Sun Media, Washington Columnist for the Ottawa Citizen, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and as an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.