PEOPLE OF THE LIE 1

PEOPLE OF THE LIE
PART 1 of 2

The evil do not serenely bear the trial of being displeasing to themselves. In fact, they do not bear it all...and it is out of their failure to put themselves on trial that their evil arises.

The varieties of people's wickedness are manifold. As a result of their refusal to tolerate the sense of their own sinfulness, the evil ones become uncorrectable grab bags of sin. They are, for instance, in my experience, remarkably greedy people. Thus they are cheap - so cheap that their "gifts" may be murderous... I suggested the most basic sin is laziness. [next] I suggest it may be pride - because all sins are reparable except the sin of believing one is without sin. But perhaps the question of which sin is the greatest is, on a certain level, a moot issue. All sins betray - and isolate us from - both the divine and our fellow creatures...

A predominant characteristic of the of those I call evil is scapegoating. Because in their hearts they consider themselves above reproach, they must lash out at anyone who does reproach them. They sacrifice others to preserve their self-image of perfection...

Scapegoating works through a mechanism psychiatrists call projection. Since the evil, deep down, feel themselves to be faultless, it is inevitable that when they are in conflict with the world they will invariably perceive the conflict as the world's fault. Since they must deny their own badness, they must perceive others as bad. They project their own evil onto the world. They never think of themselves as evil; on the other hand, they consequently see much evil in others...

Evil, then, is most often committed in order to scapegoat, and the people I label as evil as chronic scapegoaters... In The Road Less Traveled, I defined evil "as the exercise of political power- that is the imposition of one's will upon others by overt or covert coercion - in order to avoid spiritual growth." In other words, the evil attack others instead of facing their own failures. Spiritual growth requires the acknowledgement of one's need to grow. If we cannot make that acknowledgement, we have no option except to attempt to eradicate the evidence of our imperfection.

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. The fault, however, may not be so much that they life as that they do NOT hate the sinful part of themselves...


Dr. M. Scott Peck, MD
People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil
Pp. 71-77
1983, Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, NYC