Interesting book of how ordinary people develop hidden evil tendencies in their lives. ( )

Though this book is dated (1983) and shows it in its lack of the knowledge we have now in 2016, still its advice for understanding"people of the lie" is timeless and invaluable. I started this book looking for hope to stop hating people who have harmed me (a family member) and people who practice cognitive dissonance. I found through reading this book that they are more to be pitied than to be hated. ( )

Peck makes more sense of evil than anybody ( )

Poor George, what bad luck he had to find this therapist. George was clever. He played his OCD off itself, he played his core delusion that his thoughts had an effect on the world off itself so that the compulsions would self-destruct..

He said, ok, if I don't do my compulsion, I will die, but I am going to make myself believe that if I do my compulsion my SON will die, and he is so much more important, so I won't do the compulsion. And POOF the OCD tendencies self-destructed. I doubt it would work for everyone, but it seemed to work for him, and it worked precisely because he was a good person and loved his son.

It was very clever and then this EVIL GOOSE tells George he has an evil character because he made a deal with the devil to hurt his son...!? Makes him believe he is a bad person who wants harm to come to his son (Again, something people with OCD are vulnerable to believing, as Peck well knew)! And then, having made him feel terrible about himself and completely undoing his self-healing attempt, he charged him for 2 years of therapy and then took the credit for curing him, when more than anything what he'd done was to hurt him.

He also suggests that if someone is "evil" it's morally advisable to force treatment on them, regardless of whether they recognize they are sick or whether they have ever commit ed a crime. And, as you might expect in view of what I've written already, he believes in demonic possession and promotes exorcism, a type of torture for the mentally ill or non-conforming that kills hundreds of people per year.

Good business man, bad person. This guy is lecturing us on evil when he cheated on his wives? ( )

The author is most known for "The Road Less Traveled". In this book, he explores what he defines as "ordinary evil" as opposed to demonic possession which he covers in a different book. He gives several case histories of people he encountered in his psychotherapy practice which he labeled as evil. He discusses his desire to study evil scientifically and the problems that could arise if this were done. He caps off the book with a discussion of group dynamics and how group dynamics can lead to evil and discusses the famous Mylai massacre during the Vietnam War. ( )