Book Review: People of the Lie

[osprey_archer]

I just read M. Scott Peck's People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, and you guys, this is a weird book. Peck's basic argument - he makes a whole lot of arguments, and I'm somewhat concerned I won't do them justice - but his basic argument is that evil is a mental illness: that it is, specifically, a malignant subset of narcissistic personality disorder, and that the distinguishing quality of the evil is "their absolute refusal to tolerate the sense of their own sinfulness."

The evil have egos that are simultaneously so vast that they believe they're basically perfect and so brittle that they have to destroy anyone who damages that self-image. Naturally this tends to leave a trail of destruction in their wake.

As Peck notes, this is a dynamic that describes quite a lot of evil doing: lots of people will lash out if their self-image is sufficiently threatened. The difference between the evil and the rest of us occasional evil-doers is that for the evil, this is their habitual mode of interacting with the world: you don't have to push them very far to activate their destructive response.

He goes on further to note that if we construct evil as a disease, we can at least hope to one day be able to heal it - although as Peck notes, people who fit this description generally don't think there's anything wrong with them (can you imagine Donald Trump going to a therapist? A spoonful of genuine self-insight might kill him), so this may be a chimerical hope.

It's an interesting theory; I waffle back and forth about whether I agree, or if I just agree with parts of it, and which parts those would be and how much.

I must confess that part of my reluctance to accept his thesis is a knee-jerk emotional reaction against it, although the fact that it is knee-jerk is also part of the reason I can't bring myself to dismiss the theory: "I don't like this" is not actually evidence that it's untrue. This is a good theory to explain, say, the Bronson Alcotts of the world, and goddammit, I do not want to have my pure and incandescent loathing of Bronson Alcott spoiled by the thought that the poor man must have been ill. Alcott wrote a list of Orphic Sayings, one of which was "Greater is he who is above temptation than he who being tempted overcomes," and you just know he thought that he was one of those who was above temptation. Christ could be tempted in the wilderness, but Bronson Alcott, well, he was better than that.

He edited his daughters' diaries (and not after they were dead, mind, but while they were alive and kicking and still writing them) to make himself look better. He wrote a book based on Socratic dialogues that he had with his students (and by "Socratic dialogues" I mean "he asked his students leading questions to get them to give him the answers he wanted"), and when even the most leading questions no longer elicited the right responses, he started doctoring the transcripts. He decided that most forms of labor were against his principles and then basically lived on his wife and daughters' labor for the rest of his life.

But the fact that finding compassion in my breast for Bronson Alcott goes against the grain does not necessarily mean Peck's thesis is wrong.

So anyway, Peck's been going along, exploring the ramifications of his argument, discussing some case studies - the couple who gave their younger son his older brother's suicide weapon as a Christmas present haunts me - and then.... DEMONIC POSSESSION.

Two-thirds of the way through the book, Peck has a chapter about demonic possession and exorcism as a type of psychotherapy - "psychotherapy by massive assault," he calls it. He notes that demonic possessions that can be healed by exorcisms are in fact partial possessions, that the host and the demon remain separate enough that the host can want the demon gone, and then flirts briefly with the idea that evil people are those who have been totally possessed. The demon and the host have fused into one, so the host would never seek an exorcism and it probably wouldn't work if they tried.

But then he pulls back from that and concludes that basic human sinfulness is probably enough to explain most evil without having to bring demons into it.

He doesn't reach peak crackpot levels: he argues that demonic possession is very rare and also generally afflicts the host alongside non-occult mental illnesses (so no using demonic possession as an escape hatch away from a mental illness diagnosis). But still. Dude. Demonic possession. Didn't see that coming.

(Years later, Peck wrote another book where he tells the tales of the two exorcisms that he took part in, which he only described vaguely in this book. Of course I have to read it. I already have it on interlibrary loan.)

I do think People of the Lie has the advantage over The Sociopath Next Door (another book that links evil to a specific mental disorder: sociopathy in that case) in that it's much less scapegoating. The Sociopath Next Door tends to suggest that the problem is them, those sociopaths, not you and me, dear reader; People of the Lie is aware that almost anyone can do evil under the right circumstances.

Comments

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

The book actually ends up offering three possible answers (at least three answer; I may have forgotten some more) to this question, because consistency isn't high on Peck's priorities.

The first is that free will is mostly an illusion: ultimately we're all serving either God or Satan. In fact a lot of people experience choosing evil as a moment of liberation: they're not doing what society or God or anybody expects of them, they're doing something just because they want to. But once they've started down that path, they get locked into it.

The second is that good people actually do have more freedom of choice than evil people, because they're not driven by the same compulsion to defend their self-image at all costs. People who aren't evil can strive to be saints, or they can devote their lives to playing Call of Duty - not helping anyone but not hurting them either.

But not a totally free range of choices because deciding to become a serial killer would turn them into an evil person.

The third is that Peck is drawing a distinction between people who sometimes do bad things (which is everyone) and people who do bad things so habitually that it's their basic mode of operation (and Peck would definitely put someone who habitually bullies the helpless in this category), and argues that the same basic mechanism is the same: our self-interest blinds us to what is actually right and just. He uses the Vietnam War as an example: the war was clearly unjust, but the anti-war movement remained pretty small until the draft gave everyone with any young male friends or relatives a direct personal interest in the war.

So most people do have a choice between good and evil, but the more often we choose to follow our evil impulses, the stronger they become and the harder to resist.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

In my own experience of myself and others, people fall down more often on sins of omission than sins of commission. That is, most of us can avoid kicking a puppy (sins of commission), but not as many of us are willing to, say, offer a hand to someone having trouble getting off the bus (sin of omission).

... I think sins of omission are a kind of trap, though, because there is an ocean of bad stuff out there, and we can't apply ourselves to all of it.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

The third one makes a lot of sense to me. Though I think that the same forces operate with good: the more you choose to do good, the harder it becomes to do evil.

I think the majority of people go with the flow. So you can set up things to make it easy and rewarding and convenient to behave well, and most people will behave well. Set up things to make it easy to be a dick, and most people will be dicks. It's the outliers who have very strong convictions and will go against the social flow - in either direction. Everyone's an asshole sometimes and some people are assholes most of the time but serial killers are rare. Similarly, most people are reasonably decent unless there's strong social pressure to not be decent, but if you happen to be in Nazi Germany, most people are not going to be Sophie Scholl. But some will be.

In terms of actual human interactions, I think it's pretty useless to conceptualize "good people" and "evil people" as opposed to "good actions" and "evil actions" because most people aren't just one thing. That being said, I have met some sociopaths and my policy is to stay the fuck out of their way, because it's a bit irrelevant whether they are evil or jus doing evil, because they will harm you either way.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Following on the "if you happen to be in Nazi Germany" thing, there's also the fine-grainedness of your goodness/badness to think of. Never mind Nazi Germany, think of the segregated South (or Boston during the period of enforced busing in the 1970s): people can be very kind, sweet, loving in one aspect of their life, or many, or most, and simply terrible in another. Your going-with-the-flow thing still applies; I guess what I'm thinking of is how many levels and areas of being good or bad there are. Hell, Sophie Scholl could have been routinely rude to shopkeepers (but probably wasn't).