I read the book when I was treasurer and vestryman in an Episcopal parish whose rector who might have walked out of its pages. It was something of a lifeline because it showed that the senior warden and I were not alone. Other people had dealt with the same sort of person before and some of them had thought through what it meant.

Dealing with the guy had been an unbelievably shocking experience. Part of the problem was that people who weren't forced to deal directly with him simply refused to take in or believe what was going on. There's a human tendency to try to avoid unpleasantness and assimilate what you see around you to what's normal.

I have no idea how useful the book would be to someone without that special background. The author presents it as a general theory of human evil which probably isn't right. I'm sure there are other forms of extreme evil as well.
Jim Kalb | Homepage | 08.24.06 - 4:45 am | #

For those of us who haven't read it, would anyone care to provide a summary?
Kate B. | Homepage | 08.24.06 - 8:48 am | #

I read it a long time ago and was profoundly shocked, but I agreed with his conclusions.

I just read Peck's "Glimpses of the Devil" which is an in-depth study of two exorcisms, and I was impressed and unsettled.
Jane Lebak | Homepage | 08.24.06 - 8:52 am | #

It's been years since I read it, but it's about the clinical characteristics of evil, from the point of view of, say, a psychologist making a diagnosis. It is singular in even admitting the existence of evil, something the mental-health pros don't touch with a ten-foot pole.

I believe it was written after Peck had become a Christian but before he veered off into heresy in The Road Less Traveled, and one thing I remember is that it points out the ordinariness and shabbiness of evil. We generally think of "evil" people as great monsters; like Stalin or Castro, but there are equally evil people who simply lack the power and opportunity to indulge their malice on a grand scale.
kwerna | 08.24.06 - 9:57 am | #

Kwerna, the book was written after "The Road Less Traveled." Peck writes in the introduction that he wasn't baptized until 1980, two years after "The Road" came out.
Dawn Eden | Homepage | 08.24.06 - 10:01 am | #

Kate B., it's about people who (1) suffer from a radical personality disorder, malignant narcissism, (2) are cold stone evil in a profoundly disturbing way, or (3) both. (Pick your preferred form of explanation.)

Their basic problem is that everything about them is a lie. Their connections to other people are purely a matter of manipulation, domination and a need to invert moral reality. You can't trust anything at all about them. All your automatic reactions as to what you can count on in people will be wrong.

Actually, the situation's a bit hard to describe, since any description is incomplete and so requires the reader to fill in the blanks. With these people you'll fill them in wrong. Also, the particular points at issue may seem minor or bizarre to the point of being unbelievable. You have to be there. Failing that, you can read the book.
Jim Kalb | Homepage | 08.24.06 - 10:43 am | #

Thanks!
Kate B. | Homepage | 08.24.06 - 11:04 am | #

Dawn, I'm perhaps the worst sort of reader because I tend to jump around and read material out of sequence. But I'm reading it now too and must say that I think it's a profound book. Recognizing and acknowledging evil was an important step in leading Peck to God. Confronting the opposite is often a good path to the positive. And for anyone who has encountered Evil, you know it's far more real than secularists allow themselves to believe. It is self absorption and self importance to the extreme and to the exclusion of everything, even love.
Terry | 08.24.06 - 11:13 am | #

Kate B. -
A bit more about The People of the Lie: Peck was asked to participate in the investigation of the massacre in Mylai, Vietnam and the massive cover-up that followed. The investigators were charged with answering how such a thing could have happened. Peck cites Mylai as an example of group evil and wrote, “The cover-up was a gigantic group lie.”

For Peck, "[e]vil deeds do not make an evil person. Otherwise we would all be evil. [Then] ...how are we to define [evil people]? ...by the consistency of their sins. While usually subtle, their destructiveness is remarkably consistent. [They]...are characterized by their absolute refusal to tolerate the sense of their own sinfulness." Peck goes on to give characteristics of evil, and a number of case studies of ordinary evil, much of which is extremely subtle but remarkably effective. Most striking to me were the examples of parents who actively sought to destroy their children.

Dawn -

I first read The People of the Lie when I was in therapy trying to comprehend the treatment I had received from my foster-family. It had a profound effect on me. The conclusions are spot on and revolutionary in terms of psychotherapy. In terms of being conformed to Christ's image, much more development is needed, particularly in terms of loving those who have chosen evil.
Drusilla | 08.24.06 - 11:55 am | #

"And for anyone who has encountered Evil, you know it's far more real than secularists allow themselves to believe. It is self absorption and self importance to the extreme and to the exclusion of everything, even love."

I don't think this is actually too far off from certain secular concepts of evil as essentially selfishness. Evil as an active force or personification, that's a different matter (and one that most secularists* don't believe in)

* Secular- terms (secular, secularist, secularism) can be a problem, because they're often used in a way that blurs together two fairly different things: the belief that government shouldn't entangle itself in religious matters (ie, as an antonym for 'theocratists'), and a set of metaphysical beliefs (including atheism, agnosticism, and perhaps certain forms of theism).

"Their basic problem is that everything about them is a lie. Their connections to other people are purely a matter of manipulation, domination and a need to invert moral reality. You can't trust anything at all about them. All your automatic reactions as to what you can count on in people will be wrong."

This has some interesting overlap with people who have a high social dominance orientation, (based on Altmeyer's work and discussed at length in John Dean's new book Conservatives without Conscience).

Edited By Siteowner
Dan S. | Homepage | 08.24.06 - 12:39 pm | #

Rather than leading me to 'profile' people, reading this book helped me to see the subtlety of the Liar who is constantly, without pause, trying to get every person to point a finger at someone else. Peck uses the example of Adam pointing to Eve & Eve pointing to the serpent. This example is as current today as it was the day it was written.
GTB | 08.24.06 - 1:03 pm | #

From the forward (or prologue, or whatever) and what I'd heard about it, I expected it to be about something more along the lines of demonic possession. It didn't seem too clear what most of the cases had to do with his thesis (whatever that was, this was a few years ago). Just the other day I was trying to remember if his point was just that a little moralising can be an effective part of treatment for neurotics?
Dave Munger | Homepage | 08.24.06 - 3:56 pm | #

It's one you have to read, well worth it. But I'd also recommend as a companion volume Ray Baumgardner's "Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty."

They're two different ways of looking at the same thing.
Christina | Homepage | 08.24.06 - 5:47 pm | #

Haven't yet read the book but the comments have aroused my curiousity. Have just discovered your great site, best wishes, The Artist
The Artist | 08.24.06 - 6:20 pm | #

Sorry to veer off topic (although not off title), I just watched The Great Gatsby and am now into the book. The history of Long Island is so interesting. I had no idea watching the movie that the "valley of ashes" was a real place - Corona Dump, now Flushing Meadows Corona Park. Wow. New York and it's surrounds have such an interesting history.

I mean I guess all places do, it's just that living in New Zealand, New York is this kind of alien, foreign, exotic, movieland place that I don't know anything about.

In fact I used to wonder as a child if America even really existed except in movies :)

Anyways Dawn, enjoy Long Island and it's epressway for me!
Tess | 08.24.06 - 9:36 pm | #

Kwerna,KateB & Jim Kalb,

On the question of evil in those who are mentally ill...

Don't be too terribly hard on the social worker on their outlook.
The problem is that mental illnesses, which are true diseases of the brain structure and or imbalances of brain chemistry are not inherantly evil but because they truely mess up a person's ability to reason, they can allow evil.

I'm not a social worker but my youngest brother was severely mentally ill and he committed suicide on 9/11/1996.

There is a subtle evil though in the extreme refusal to see these diseases for what they really are and to treat them and to keep treating them and keep progressively finding better ways of helping them get better.

There is also the subtle evil or maybe not so subtle in the law's view that such a patient "Has the right to refuse treatment".

If anything killed my brother it was that one terrible statement for before he got sick he never,ever used illicit drugs of any kind.
P. Edward Murray | 08.24.06 - 10:04 pm | #

It provides a potential basis for arguing that evil is an objective reality, rather than a subjective judgment that can't survive many folks' obsession with relativism.

The one passage that sticks with me is his observation towards the end that one of his encounters with some sort of evil being in a possession environment -- that evil is, in the end, banal and boring, especially weighed against what it promises or threatens. I could almost hear ol' Screwtape say, "I told you so."
Brett | Homepage | 08.24.06 - 11:19 pm | #

I read it many years ago as well, but I remember thinking it was a "how to" on spotting evil even in the most ordinary of circumstances. I have always taken with me the idea that evil will do anything except acknowledge the truth. Evil people refuse to see or acknowledge the Lie even when it is presented to them on a silver platter. I will never forget the couple who gave their son the very same gun that his brother used to kill himself, then wondered why their son was also suicidal.
Rebecca Taylor | Homepage | 08.29.06 - 3:41 am | #