Book Review: People Of The Lie

In this society, everyone is narcissistic to a degree. A narcissistic person is not necessarily a destructive, evil person. Narcissism may be a phase someone is going through, a growth spurt.

This book, by M. Scott Peck though, posits that evil does exist and should be considered a psychiatric disorder.

In some circumstances, I do believe it is better to call a person evil. It's rare to encounter a person that is truly such..woe to you if you ever do. Evil is a sequence...let's pretend it is a sequence of binary. Each byte, equals a binary act of evil. Let's think of the human brain as what it is, a computer. If a person executes a byte and sees that the consequences do harm, and does not readjust, then they do that say megabytes of times in their life, then one becomes a sequence of evil that is hard to reprogram. Others can become pulled into this sequence, these people have a gravitational pull like a black hole.

Adolf Hitler was an evil sequence. He hated his lineage, hated his parents - really, hated his father who was an abusive drunk...he hated himself. All that hatred, all those things within himself that he hated, he projected onto those he considered weak & inferior - Jews, Romani ("gypsies"), the mentally ill, the handicapped, homosexuals (which is ironic, since some Nazis were obviously homo to the max), dissenters, communists, libertines, etc. Pretty much all life within and without the borders of the Fodderland. When they'd run out of people to kill, they started turning on each other. The movie Downfall does a good job of showing the rats either leaving the ship or trying to take as many down with them as possible.

People Of The Lie is about a form of pathological narcissism called "Malignant Narcissism". An MN can be a dictator, an MN can be someone of much lower status, yet have similar charisma. Wherever an MN is, though, there will be disorder, chaos, corruption & a climate of fear. Enron is a good example of a company run by malignant narcissists.