A Certain Slant of Light

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.