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What I Learned From My Encounters With Evil People
Can they be saved? I’m not so sure.
I had a conversation with someone this week that reminded me of M. Scott Peck, M.D., and his book, People of the Lie. I read the book years ago and didn’t understand what he was talking about in regards to evil until recently.
This week’s interaction brought to mind Peck’s description of evil people. I wish I could go back to being ignorant about such things.
What is evil?
Dr. Peck was a psychiatrist and author most famous for his work, The Road Less Traveled. In People of the Lie, he identified a unique group of individuals who are not mentally ill, but evil. He called what they suffer a spiritual sickness.
As a trained clinical psychologist, my education and work experience didn’t prepare me for this type of problem. I learned to assess clients by using the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V). If the difficulty wasn’t listed there, then that condition didn’t exist.
I now consider that thinking too narrow. How can the DSM-V capture all the complexity of human nature? There’s much we have yet to discover. If the manual is the last word, then autism appeared for the first time in 1980.
