More Evil

Once one is started on the path of evil, it is difficult to stop. So I continued. Last night, I read three other articles on evil. The first is "Healing Human Evil" by M Scott Peck. The second is "Redeeming Our Devils and Demons" by Stephen A Diamond. The third is "The Basic Dynamic of Human Evil" by Ernest Becker. What follows is what I found.

To Peck, the problem of evil is "a very big mystery" which does not submit itself easily to reductionism because the pieces of the puzzle are so interlocking that it is both "difficult and distorting to pry them apart." Morever, the size of the puzzle is so grand that we cannot hope to obtain more than "glimmerings of the big picture". Therefore, in our exploration, we shall end up with more questions than answers. To him, the problem of evil can never be separated from the problem of goodness. He says, " Were there no goodness in the world, we would not even be considering the problem of evil.". He is surprised by that fact that in his many years of practice as a psychiatrist, whilst many have asked him why there is evil in the world, no one has ever asked him why there is good in the world. Everyone simply "assumes" that this is a naturally good world which has "somehow been contaminated by evil". To him, it is far easier to explain why there is evil because it is just in the nature of things that they should decay with time. We all know the second law of thermodynamics: that entropy increases with time, that the world will naturally disintegrate from a state of order into chaos with the passage of time. He says, "that children generally lie and steal and cheat is routinely observable..that sometimes they grow up to become truly honest adults is what seems the more remarkable. Laziness is the rule rather than diligence...The mystery of goodness is even greater than the mystery of evil."

We must distinguish between evil and ordinary sin. Peck says that it is not sins per se that charactize evil people but the "subtlety and persistence and consistency of their sins" because the central defect the evil is not the sin but the refusal to acknowledge it. Evil people may be rich or poor, educated or uneducated and more often than not, they will be regarded as "solid citizens": Sunday school teachers, policemen or bankers and active PTA members. Peck has been working in prisons with criminals and was told by the latter that they were caught precisely because they are "honest criminals" and that the truly evil ones always elude jail. He thinks that whilst such claims may be self-justifying, they are "generally accurate". He also distinguishes between evil people and evil deeds. "Evil deeds do not an evil person make. Otherwise we should all be evil, because we all do evil things.". Sin is simply falling short of perfection. Because it is impossible for us to be continually perfect, we are all sinners. We routinely fail to do our very best that we are capable of. For this reason, we all sin against our God, our neighbors and ourselves.

To Peck, it is wrong to think of sin or evil as a matter of degree. There may be differences between defrauding a business, claiming a false deduction on our income tax return, using a crib sheet in exams, telling your wife that you have to work late when you are unfaithful or telling your husband or yourself that you didn't have time to pick up his clothes at the cleaners when you spent an hour on the phone on some gossip or other but they are all lies and betrayals nonetheless. Whether we admit it or not, we are all sinners! To Peck, what distinguishes evil from ordinary fault or sin is evil doer's refusal to acknowledge that he is doing evil. All sins or faults are reparable except pride because then one believes that one has not and cannot be wrong! Consistent with this, the evil doer cannot tolerate the thought that he might be wrong. Because in his heart of hearts, he believes that he is right, he lashes out against any one who accuses him of the contrary. He therefore resorts to scapegoating: he projects his own evil on to what he regards as his enemy. Because of cognitive dissonance, under which contrary views cannot both be true, he chooses to put the blame on the world and on others: he projects his own evil on to the world and the others. Jesus too have expressed the same idea when he said that there are many who see the needle in other's eyes but not the beam in their own. The Chinese have an equivalent saying that some have "bad mouths only for the others but not for themselves.".

In his book, The Road Less Travalled, he defined evil as " the exercise of political power-...the imposition of one's will upon others by overt or covert coercion--in order to avoid...spiritual growth". They attack others so that they need not grow or become better persons hence the need to eliminate, to eradicate, to deny the justice of other's criticism of themselves. Because the others threaten their own self-image of perfection, they busy themselves with hating and destroying other lives. But to Peck, their fault lies not so much in that they hate life as that they refuse to hate the sinful part of their own lives. Peck makes a distinction between the conscienceless psychopaths who are not aware that what they are doing is wrong and the truly evil people because the latter do have a conscience, only that they commit evil for the purpose of "maintaining the appearance of moral purity", only that their "goodness" exists on the level of "appearance", of "image". Their "goodness" is therefore a pretense, a lie and hence they are called by him "people of the lie.". But the lie is intended not so much to deceive the others as to deceive themselves: "they cannot and will not tolerate the pain of self-reproach." They must maintain the "appearance" of their outward "self-respect", their "reputation", their "good name" . Had they been, like the psychopaths, who in a sense almost "innocently" fail to have developed a meaningful "conscience", it would not have been necessary for them to attack those who criticize them. Their "frantic" attempt to attack and to make scapegoats of others occur precisely because they do have an "unacknowledged" sense of their own evil nature from which they "frantically" try to flee! Therefore to Peck, 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 are desperately trying to avoid that awareness. They are constantly engaged in sweeping the evidence of their evil under the carpet of their own consciousness. The problem is "not a defect of conscience but the effort to deny the conscience its due." Peck says: "We become evil by attempting to hide from ourselves. The wickedness of the evil is not committed directly but indirectly as part of this cover-up process. Evil originates not in the absence of guilt but in the effort to escape it."! We see the smile that hides the hatred, the smooth and oily manner that masks the fury, the velmet gloves that cover the fists. Their disguise is usually impenetrable but Peck says that we can catch glimpses of  that "uncanny game of hide-and-seek in the obscurity of the soul, in which it, the single human soul, evades itself, avoids itself, hides from itself.". They leave nothing unturned to avoid one particular kind of pain: the pain of their own conscience, the pain of the realization of their own sinfulness and imperfection, the pain of self-exmination, the pain of self-awareness. To Peck, the evil hate the light--"the light of goodness that shows them up, the light of scrutiny that exposes them, the light of truth that penetrates their deception." Therefore, truly evil people will seldom seek psycho-therapy because "submission to the discipline of self-observation required by psychoanalysis does, in fact, seem to them like suicide".

I like Peck's distinction between ordinary evil as motivated by ignorance of what is right and wrong or a weakness of the will in resisting what one considers wrong and demonic evil as a deliberate attempt by the ego to annhilate the pains of actually knowing the difference between what is right and what is wrong and thereafter to consciously choose ordinary evil over good and moreover to try to obliterate the perceived difference between what one perceives to be right and what one perceives to be wrong. There is an element of deliberation, of stubbornness, of ostinate refusal to change, a persistent bull-headedness to choose what is harmful to others and to oneself over the what it beneficial to oneself and others, a kind of stiff-necked tenacity to choose destruction over construction, an unbending will to choose death over life, to choose darkness over light and above all to choose deceit over honesty and to persist in lies rather the truth which is particularly perverse, pernicious and objectionable. Instead of being a matter of weakness of one's emotion and one's will, there is a steely intellectual quality which drives those possessed by demonic evil to choose with full knowledge with the clearest perception of what is needed to redeem oneself by forever closing that door to any possibility of redemption.

I shall have to leave to another blog what I found in the other two articles. Perhaps enough writing for one day.