People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil | M. Scott Peck

People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil | M. Scott Peck | a helpful primer on thinking about evil

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People of the Lie:...

	People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil M. Scott Peck Touchstone, 1998 - 276 pages average customer review:based on 146 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A description of the author's experience of psychiatric therapy with patients who appear manifestly evil which attempts to show that a spiritual or even religious dimension is required to aid in the understanding of human nature.

DANGER - This is a life-changing book

Twenty-five years ago Dr. M. Scott Peck (author of "The Road Less Traveled" series of books) threw down the gauntlet, challenging the psychological and scientific communities to subject human evil to the same rigorous study as other human behaviors. Only within the last very few years has anyone had sufficient courage to take up that challenge.

Ever been relentlessly lied to - or about - by someone? Ever been stunned to realize that someone in your life somehow behaves as though he's the center of the universe and everything and everyone else is somehow LESS? Ever come face to face with virulent narcissism? This book will help you understand. But beware: such knowledge comes at a cost. Gone forever will be any vestage of naivete.

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a helpful primer on thinking about evil

After reading, enjoying, and becoming inspired by The Road Less Travelled I had to take Dr. Peck's writing seriously. People of the Lie was a wrenching departure from his first book, a "nice book", as he says. Even tho I am no longer a Christian and in spite of the Christian overtones of POTL, I found it to be not just fascinating but helpful. It is a thought-provoking book, to say the least, and even "over the top" in parts. Still, to this day, perhaps 15 years after reading it, I think about evil in terms of Dr. Peck's principles. Whenever I encounter chronic confusion and pervasive lies I begin to think about the possibility of an evil personality. There are people I have known whose influences and actions struck me as evil, but their destructiveness was not evident at the time, when they seemed completely normal in every way. And that's one of his main points: we tend to think of evil as "back then and over there", not in the mother of three next door or the church deacon across the street, but that's exactly where it can be. And so often that destruction is visited upon children, so that the results are only apparent after years of awfulness, of crushed and crippled spirits, of destroyed souls. And he cautions us: it's all too easy to hate the evil person, but all of us are capable of evil. I believe he's right. This book is indeed an excellent beginning of a more scientific examination of the nature of evil.

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The Ability to Recognize Human Evil is Crucial for Self-Preservation

Psychiatrist, Dr. Scott Peck, defines human evil. After working with thousands of patients, Dr. Peck finds that there is a common thread between many of them; a life of lies along with complete & total self-absorption. To realize that there are people among us that are truly evil is unsettling, to say the least. However, the ability to recognize evil people is critical and crucial to human self-preservation. The reader must be careful, however, not to "diagnose" all liars and narcissistic people as evil. This is an eye-opening book, but "sheltered" readers may have trouble believing that their fellow humans can be capable of the evil that Dr. Peck identifies with such detail.

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