PEOPLE OF THE LIE 2

PEOPLE OF THE LIE
PART 2 of 2

What is the cause of this failure of self-hatred, this failure to be displeasing to oneself, which seems to be the central sin at the root of scapegoating behavior of those I call evil? The cause is not, I believe, an absent conscience... This is hardly the case with those I call evil. Utterly dedicated to preserving their self-image of perfection, they are unceasingly engaged in the effort to maintain the appearance of moral purity. They worry about this a great deal. They are acutely sensitive to the social norms and what others might think of them...

The words "image," "appearance," and "outwardly" are crucial to understanding the morality of the evil. While they seem to lack any motivation to BE good, they intensely desire to appear good. Their "goodness" is all on a level of pretense. It is, in effect, a lie. This is why they are the "people of the lie."

Actually, the lie is designed not so much to deceive others as to deceive themselves. They cannot or will not tolerate the pain of self-reproach... We lie only when we are attempting to cover up something we know to be illicit...there is no need to hide unless we first feel that something needs to be hidden.

We come know to a sort of paradox. I have said that evil people feel themselves to be perfect. At the same time, however, I think they have an unacknowledged sense of their own evil nature. Indeed, it is from this very sense from which they are frantically trying to flee. The essential component of evil is not the absence of a sense of sin or imperfection but the unwillingness to tolerate that sense. At one and the same time, the evil are aware of their evil and desperately trying to avoid the awareness. Rather than blissfully lacking a sense of morality, like the psychopath, they are continually engaged in sweeping the evidence of their evil under the rug of their own consciousness... The problem is not a defect of conscience but the effort to deny the conscience its due. We become evil by attempting hide ourselves from ourselves. The wickedness of evil is not committed directly, but indirectly as a part of this cover up process. Evil originates not in the absence of guilt but in the effort to escape it.


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