I remember I really liked this book in the early 1980's. Now I want to read it again in 2024 to see if I can learn some answers about the human evils that seem more abundant with more shameless perpetrators than I remember forty years ago.

Peck asserts that evil is a personality trait that can be diagnosed clinically. He is smart enough to realize on some level the fundamental absurdity of this assertion, and so (sigh) the book equivocates on this point endlessly. Adding to the static is a confusion between human evil and supernatural evil, complete with a glowing gloss-over of his observation of two exorcisms.

Considered out of the context of the rest of this drivel, the chapter "MyLai: An Examination of Group Evil" is insightful and worth reading.

“The purpose of this book is to encourage us to take our human life so seriously that we also take human evil far more seriously….”

Parenting
Attributed to Erich Fromm : “…the desire of certain people to control others—to make them controllable, to foster their dependency, to discourage their capacity to think for themselves, to diminish their unpredictability and originality, to keep them in line.” “whose aim it is to avoid the inconvenience of life by transforming others into obedient automatons, robbing them of their humanity” As opposed to “one who appreciates and fosters the variety of life forms and the uniqueness of the individual….”

Commenting on a sad case study: “Whenever there is a major deficit in parental love, the child will, in all likelihood, respond to that deficit by assuming itself to be the cause of the deficit, thereby developing an unrealistically negative self-image.”

Evil
Compares malignant narcissism (a defense against psychic harm) to evil. “The evil deny the suffering of their guilt—the painful awareness of their sin, inadequacy, and imperfection—by casting their pain onto others through projection and scapegoating. They themselves may not suffer, but those around them do. They cause suffering. The evil create for those under their dominion a miniature sick society.” “Think of the psychic energy required for continued maintenance of the pretense so characteristic of the evil! They perhaps direct at least as much energy into their devious rationalizations and destructive compensations as the healthiest do into loving behavior. Why? What possesses them, drives them? Basically, it is fear. They are terrified that the pretense will break down and they will be exposed to the world and to themselves. They are continually frightened that they will come face-to-face with their own evil. Of all emotions, fear is the most painful.” “…terror … [is] so interwoven into the fabric of their being, that they may not even feel it as such.” “ghastly old age” “surprisingly obedient to authority [Putin]” “evil.. [is] a kind of immaturity” “Evil [is] defined most simply as the use of political power to destroy others for the purpose of defending or preserving the integrity of one’s sick self.”
“What we call nationalism is more frequently a malignant national narcissism than it is a healthy satisfaction in the accomplishments of one’s culture.”
By Peck’s definition, Trump unambiguously fits the bill. We’re f#%*ed.
I’m undecided about evil. Once you apply it to another human, is there any recourse? Exorcism? I think of evil as a dangerous, dehumanizing moniker. At the extreme, Stalin was a person who was considered a god or an evil demon. The Terror was enabled by his supplicants. Stalin thought of himself, at least sometimes, in the third person, an ideal more than flesh and blood. He crafted an image beyond human. The myth helped him get away with murder On a much smaller, less violent scale, Trump parallels. His acolytes revere him to the point of accepting formerly intolerable behavior, crimes, instability and daily lies. The people surrounding him prevaricate, lie, make excuses and feed his enormous, fragile ego. Rules need not apply. People working for him are propping him up. But is he evil? Can he be stopped?

I love this book. I read it before The Road Less Traveled, but I'm glad I did. I was thrown right into a new perspective of looking at evil as a psychosis and not a spiritual affliction. I began to see people in such a new light, where ironically, I felt more love, tolerance, and slight pity for these people who otherwise would have caused me to fear them. As a very empathetic person, I like to walk in other people's shoes. Although i do not ever care to know or be an evil person, I have a much better understanding of how the disease of evil makes certain individuals think and act.

Just recently I have been able to understand when someone is trying to manipulate me or force me to feel sorry for them for their gain and I am able to avert these individuals quite quickly. Whereas years ago I would have been caught in their webs and would have been given a feeling of an obligation to do things that I couldn't see were selfishly asked of me.

I also have met people who fit the exact profile of someone who is on the dark side a little too deeply, and you'll be shocked to know that they will read this book and begin to use it as ammunition to label everyone as evil and will never see it in themselves. I feel safe in saying that I'm not one of those people because I recognize that everyone has some of these tendencies, myself included, and that this book is not like V glasses, where you can use it to point out everyone who is a demon or something...it's a tool to better your understanding of the psychological conditions that most people possess, some way more than others, to protect yourself from the damage they otherwise may have inflicted on you.

Read it. Now. You will look at people totally differently and hopefully, you'll look at yourself more thoroughly as well.

A great book on the concept of evil. Human evil is laziness. Describes how to diagnose evil in people & communities.

It's been a while since I read this book, but I thought it was very strong and insightful.

It explores the nature of narcissism and the people who inflict it on you.

Again, this sounds paranoid! But, people who do care about others can be hurt terribly by people who can only see the world from their own point of view.

Peck explains how people like this function, how to identify them, and he gives narratives about narcissists he has dealt with to help underscore the types of behavior that they commit. The narratives, are, of course, the easiest to remember - like the parents whose oldest son committed suicide. A year after his death, they gave their youngest son the gun the boy used to kill himself. They couldn't understand why that youngest son became depressed.

They couldn't because, as narcissists, they only thing they can understand is their own world, their own experiences, their own cares. They do not and will never truly empathize with another person, and there is -- surprisingly -- no saving them. There is no point in working with them; we must simply understand that they are incapable of anything besides feeling all and only what they feel.

Peck's descriptions of these people is different from what I expected. His chapter on exorcisms was strange for me, but I saw his point - it helped illuminate how people do care about what they do and about others even in the midst of evil.

This book helped me be able to identify people who could hurt me, and I appreciate that a great deal.

A strange book by the author of the much more well known 'The Road Less Well Travelled'. Although some of the case studies are interesting, the book veers between describing controlling, manipulative people as evil and discussing human evil on the one hand, and then going off on a tangent with a chapter about exorcism and how certain evil people are actually possessed by devils and even Satan on the other. Despite this supernatural element it does, however, fix on the idea that evil is a form of mental illness. As such, it attempts to come up with a psychology of evil and discuss how evil people should be treated in therapy with love, but then "bottles out" in the sense that the attempt to do so would be incredibly dangerous and most therapists wouldn't survive it with their sanity or spirituality intact. He freely admits that he found such people repellent and couldn't wait to get them out of the consulting room.

I also found it odd that he didn't class psychopaths/sociopaths as evil. They were looked on as disorganised individuals who couldn't cover up their crimes and were languishing in jail as a result (which is contradicted by killers who have successfully carried on as respectable citizens for years, and only been caught by luck or by their finally making a mistake - Dr Shipman being one obvious example who was caught only when he forged a deceased patient's will. Even when published there were surely such examples of high functioning serial murderers?) Instead, the author reserves the label of evil for those who crush the spirit of their children by not allowing them to go to the schools they would be happy to attend, or in an extreme case giving their son the same gun his depressed older brother had killed himself with.

One whole chapter is about a young woman who attended therapy for years with him and continually tried to seduce him, then finally quit when she realised it wouldn't succeed and he would only nuture her in a parenting role. Her behaviour - which was quite stalker-ish in that she would sit outside his house in her car at night - could just as easily be explained as her being a survivor of child abuse who had learned this behaviour as a young child and could only relate to a man in this way, rather than her being 'evil'. Other examples - such as the controlling wife and passive husband - would these days be seen as co-dependency, but the author diagnoses that they are both evil, the husband less so.

It is also jarring when he mentions child abusers - which he instead calls men who commit incest (which could wrongly imply consent on the part of the child) - and says that not all these people are evil. That certainly does not square with current attitudes, and given that abusers are very manipulative, e.g. grooming their victims or telling a child to keep quiet about it or they will be sent to prison as well, would surely qualify such individuals to be labelled as evil.

The chapter on the atrocities in Vietnam and the behaviour of groups especially in a hierarchical social structure was interesting, and his idea that the military should be drawn from all works of life with peaceful activities done for the community being the focus, rather than volunteers who want to fight had some merit, but there were some very outdated attitudes - for instance where he talks about the police force as exclusively male. That certainly would not have been the case even when the book was first published which I believe was in the 1970s.

So all in all, I can only rate this as a 2 star OK rating.

I think this book is really interesting. It was recommended to me a long time ago, but I never read it because I was intimidated by the premise. I thought it would be about the most awful and twisted things that people do, but it's really not like that at all. A psychiatrist examines (in a very logical and scientific way) the idea that evil is a measurable and real force in the world, and seeks to define it in a meaningful and useful way. Several case studies are examined- none of them grisly. It was actually really thought provoking, because the people he describes I feel like anyone might know. For me the first and maybe best take away was that you should clue into your intuition about people more, especially the ones who leave you feeling confused or repulsed. I feel like it's a worthwhile read for anyone who often finds themselves trying to understand people and their motivations, or in general are interested in theology or psychology.

This could be a dangerous book to some, if they are the type to believe everything they read. What matters is what your definition of evil is. Peck's definition of evil seems to entail people who are difficult, uneducated, lost, self-absorbed, personality-disordered, controlling and stuck. They have been wounded by other selfish people in their formative years and have become only what they know. It's a good book if you look at it as how to either deal with or avoid difficult people, if you are having a problem with that sort of thing. It's a dangerous book if you think that exorcism is a thing. Or that God penetrates you. It's an inconsistent, unscientific look at a concept that might not even exist.

I could not put this book down. It was fascinating. Do we really look at evil as a disease? Do Christians understand that it is and that we have insight into how it gets healed? Do we understand that truly evil people are perhaps sitting next to us in church, holding down good jobs, even maintaining their status in the community? What does evil really look like? We think we know what it looks like when we see violent crime or genocide, but evil has so many layers and we are blind to much of evil in its subtler forms.

Dr. Peck writes with insight and experience into evil people. Perhaps the most important thing I walked away with was his definitions of evil and good that make identification much clearer for any one. "Evil, then, for the moment, is that force, residing either inside or outside of human beings, that seeks to kill life or liveliness. And goodness is its opposite. Goodness is that which promotes life and liveliness."These definitions can help not only identify evil and good people and behaviors that we see and encounter, they also help us examine our own behaviors and motivations. Are we seeking to promote life and liveliness?

Peck's other major point that should send chills into us is this: "It is not their sins per se that characterize evil people, rather it is the subtlety and persistence and consistency of their sins. This is because the central defect of the evil is not the sin but the refusal to acknowledge it." Evil always has to do with a lie or lies. It scapegoats, attacks, and projects evil onto others and it always involves some lie. These are the people of the lie.

I recommend this book, but it is not for the fainthearted.

3.5

Mostly case studies. A bit long winded. Conclusions are the most valuable part of the book: confront and speak truth to the deceptions; but NEVER stop loving people. There are no guarantees that this will heal a person but it is the only hope.

This is a profound and scary book, at least for me, because it is convicting of the evil, the manipulation, the narcissism, and the lies that lie within me Read it with a repentant heart and it will transform your life and your relationships.