A Psychological Analysis of Evil

This is a summary of the book The People of the Lie by Scott Peck. In this book the author writes about his definition of evil and what creates it. Unlike my other book summaries, this will be more a book review and analysis as the concepts are something I consider extremely important, but there isn't enough material in the book to summarize it in the way I traditionally do. While I don't agree with every position the author takes in the book, he brings up many salient points that are worth deep consideration.

As a psychiatrist the author encountered many severely unhealthy people, some of which he came to categorize as evil. Among these experiences were two parents who chose to give their only remaining son the gun his sibling used to kill himself within the same year the incident occurred (not that it makes a difference really) for some celebratory experience (Christmas or birthday I can't remember), parents who consciously deprived their child of everything their child expressed enjoyment in and did so by twisting the author's words to justify their actions even though they did exactly what he told them not to do, or a mother who refused to let her daughter become independent by use of emotional manipulation. He used these examples to give light to the subtlety of evil, the type of evil which can go easily unnoticed and often does in our society. In my personal experience as a therapist I've come across an infinite spectrum of such subtle acts that could be defined as evil and far more glaring and grotesque acts the likes of which include a parent who attached razor blades to belts and whipped their kids with it, children who were forced by their parents to have sex with older men or siblings, a mother who attempted to burn her son alive for stealing less than a dollar from her purse, and other insidious and perverse acts the likes of which changed my perspective of human suffering and the depths of callousness humanity is capable of. These acts are both performed on an individual and societal level with humanity's history being littered with genocides, ethnic cleansings, unconscionable massacres of innocent people, war crimes, slavery, and more recently targeted economic destruction on international scales, economic slavery and manipulation, monetary greed, prevention of wealth accumulation of racial groups, intentional poisoning of food and water, targeted addictions of opioids and social media platforms, and the list goes on.

With such a wide variety of manifestations, how can evil be defined? The author notes that "evil" is "live" spelled backwards and defines evil as anything that prevents another person from living. So what then is living? If you asked one of the many billionaires of our world, most say by their actions that living is not being dead, a "living wage" being the manifestation of their definition which restricts a person from doing anything other than worry about how they will survive the next day or week on an income that is widely recognized as unsustainable. Can a person realistically call that living? To the author, and to myself, the answer is no. Living for me is allowing a person the freedom and opportunity to live their life according to how they want, a life that allows them to follow their dreams and passions uninhibitedly as long as it doesn't impinge on another person's right to do the same. Anything that seeks to control or prevent a person from doing this is evil. With such a definition, the world is unfortunately, and sadly, defined by its propensity towards evil.

What, then, creates evil? The author says the defining characteristics of evil are narcissism and laziness, a position that I largely agree with. Narcissism is characterized by a refusal to take accountability for oneself, a position the author defines as scapegoating and, therefore, evil people are chronic scapegoaters. These scapegoaters use projection, the subconscious misplacement of internal psychology onto the outside world, to justify their own misconception of faultlessness, feeling like if they are in conflict with the world, then the world is at fault, not themselves. "The evil do not serenely bear the trial of being displeasing to themselves." Their internal absolution is, in their own minds, absolute. "Strangely enough, evil people are often destructive because they are attempting to destroy evil. The problem is that they misplace the locus of the evil. Instead of destroying others they should be destroying the sickness within themselves. As life often threatens their self-image of perfection, they are often busily engaged in hating and destroying that life - usually in the name of righteousness." Nearly all people in the world are guilty of this to one degree or another, which is why the world is currently sadly defined by its propensity towards evil, a propensity towards maintaining one's self image.

Laziness is defined by the refusal to change attitudes and beliefs, clinging on to old patterns for the sake of convenience and moral abdication of responsibility to adopt new truths when the flaws of old truths are made manifest. Or, as the author puts it, "individuals and nations cling to obsolete and outworn ideas not simply because it takes work to change them but also because, in their narcissism, they cannot imagine that their ideas and views could be wrong. They believe themselves to be right." That is why the speech from the protagonist, Cardinal Lawrence, in the movie The Conclave is so powerful.

"Over the course of many years in the service of our mother the Church, let me tell you, there is one sin I have come to fear above all others: certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end. “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” he cried out in his agony at the ninth hour on the cross. Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith. Let us pray that God will grant us a pope who doubts."

Certainty is manifested laziness and that laziness bears and upholds evil as its standard and battle cry. In essence, "evil arises in the refusal to acknowledge our own sins," the primary sin of which, in my mind, is certainty. Or defined in a different way, certainty is the inability to come to terms with one's own limitations, one's flawed perspectives and imperfect understandings, one's conscious or subconscious harmful actions, one's pious, holy, and dogmatic self image, and one's refusal to be wrong. In essence, evil is the inability to tolerate internal suffering in any form, an unwillingness to desecrate the shrine we've built unto ourselves, a refusal to consider anything outside of what we've deemed sacred and beyond reproach, primarily within ourselves. Our god is our belief in our own certainty and as such, our own evil is made manifest.

For this reason the author said "one measure - and perhaps the best measure - of a person's greatness is the capacity for suffering." As a self-identified recovering narcissist, I cannot agree more with this statement. As my capacity for suffering within myself has grown, so has my inclination to take accountability for myself to change which has inevitably resulting in an increased capacity for love and care for those outside of myself. Suffering has been the ultimate godsend in what I'd consider the transformation of my soul.

My internal transformation has led me to my core disagreement with the author's take on evil. I don't believe there is such a thing. Can people commit what are considered evil acts? Of course! The world is rife with them, and even defined by them throughout history, as I stated earlier. But I don't believe that these acts can be characterized by the word evil if at its core evil is just an avoidance of pain and those who are perpetuating evil are doing so because they think it's righteous. At worst I would label it as cowardice, a fear of facing the suffering that comes from metaphorically undressing one's soul and taking a good hard look in the mirror, the cowardice of avoiding internal suffering and taking moral responsibility for it. We all have things we feel self-righteous about, a psychological defense mechanism to avoid conscious suffering, defenses that ultimately manifest as what the author calls "evil." To me, in the end, it's all fear. Fear isn't evil. Fear is scary, even terrifying and horrifying by definition, but it's something that we can all empathize with. Fear is a sickness, a disease, in which the manifestation of evil calls home but it's not something beyond understanding. It's just fear, and the worse the fear, the more evil takes a tangible form.

In my practice as a healer I am always surprised by people's refusal to heal themselves. I teach all of my clients how to heal themselves as quickly as they are capable, yet all of them come to my office week after week to heal themselves, neglecting to do so without someone to hold them accountable. Even when my clients can demonstrably show themselves that they need not live in fear, they don't take accountability to rid themselves of it. Instead, they spend their time scrolling Tiktok, watching true-crime shows, working endlessly, or otherwise abdicating their personal ability to find peace within themselves by eliminating their fears instead choosing to spend their time in literally any other endeavor. People plead and cry that they want their life to be better, but when given the tools to do so, they wait until they are in my office to take action. Fear is an incredibly powerful deterrent, one that plagues humanity like a soul-sucking parasite, and yet even when the way out is clear, fear still intimidates and controls. Fear is the plague of humanity's existence yet we as a species choose not to face it time and time again.

On an individual level we are accountable for our own manifestations of evil, our own refusal to face uncertainty and the consequent suffering of both ourselves and those around us, yet it doesn't stop there. We are collectively responsible for the ultimate manifestations of evil within our society. The Hitlers, Pol Pots, and Idi Amins of our world did not grow up in a vacuum. We, as a society, created them. They are a reflection of our collective refusal to take accountability for ourselves on an individual level as well as the ultimate reflection of what our society and world subconsciously esteems as a result of our moral celebration of fear as not only acceptable, but laudable. We don't view billionaires as self-obsessed narcissists who grow their wealth by economically enslaving and disenfranchising humanity of its right to life, we applaud them for allowing their self-righteous fear to grow and develop unrestrained. We don't emphasize and encourage mental health, we stigmatize getting help by calling our fear biology, fixed psychology, or the badge of honor of self-reliance. Instead of teaching and commending flexible and critical thinking, we label those that adapt and change their beliefs as weak minded, stupid, or sinful. We don't abhor evil, we celebrate it openly. We have built a world that views the avoidance of fear as our most esteemed value and thus have cast our vote for a society in which fear and evil dominate without contest.

To create a world devoid of evil, we must start with the healing of fear within ourselves. Only then can our society reflect our collective choice to see fear as the disease it is, the root cause of evil.