People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil Paperback – January 2, 1998

What a great book that I've always loved. I had a copy of it when it came out and seem to have loaned it out. So I bought another and it's as helpful today as it was back then. Yes, we have progressed into many more diverse and effective forms of therapy. But that doesn't invalidate what's going on here.Even if you don't agree with this treatise or it's conclusion, there is so much valuable information to ponder from real life cases. He's been criticized for being Freudian and that Freudianism has been debunked or that evil people can't be cured etc. etc. I don't think that's entirely fair. If you listen to the cases and where he lands with the patients, you'll see that he's getting to the bottom of real issues. There is hope for these people and he indicates that quite well.I think for me, looking back at this book and then looking at today's world, it seems that Peck's idea of evil can really be seen in just about any maladaptive behavior, organic illnesses notwithstanding. Some people are just ill because they have a chemistry problem or whatever. But the people he's dealing with in this book are definitely victims of malevolence and even have their own evil at work.So to consider this book useless and deny that he is onto something valid seems shortsighted and really missing a lot of what is being said. For anyone who didn't like it, I recommend reading it again with an open mind.

Great insight into how easily we don't see what we don't want to

At some point in life, some percentage of the population will have a confrontation with evil. They may, as was the case with me, previously have thought they understood the concept or even dismissed the idea entirely.Then, suddenly, when the confrontation occurs, one is left trying to understand what one has experienced, and looking for answers high and low—perhaps in books, perhaps in religion, perhaps in talk with friends and mentors.This is probably the most satisfying resource I've come across on the question of evil in human psychology. Peck doesn't avoid the question or the word; instead, he tackles them head on, proposing that if you've seen it, you understand that evil is real. He seeks to understand what the experience and the quality amount to when articulated through reason, rather than purely through theology.His definition of evil ends up being quite concise, rather than wandering and metaphysical and listless as is so often the case, and more than that, it's a satisfying definition; it rings true to to me, at the very least, as someone that was confronted with the question. The case studies that he provides are fascinating and run the gamut from the individual scale to the nuclear family scale to the social scale.While there isn't much in the way of actionable information presented, I suspect that most people reading on the topic of evil aren't looking for tips and tricks so much as they are trying to come to grips with their own thinking about the topic—to clarify their own experience and make sense of what they've learned and how it's changed the way that they look at the world.If this sounds like you, get this book and read it. I suspect it will take what is already a dim light somewhere in your consciousness and bring it to full brightness and understanding—in a way that is somehow a relief and a balm.

Peck had me intrigued when I read this from the book's introduction:"In labeling certain human beings as evil, I am making an obviously severely critical value judgment. My Lord said, "Judge not, that ye be not judged." By this statement - so often quoted out of context - Jesus did not mean we should never judge our neighbor. For he went on to say, "Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye." What he meant was that we should judge others only with great care, and that such carefulness begins with self-judgment."I sense that Peck is sincere in his writing and that he does take great care in offering his value judgments in the form of the cases he writes about in this book.This is not a pop psychology book although it is easy to read. It is a book that combines the psychological with the spiritual. Peck writes of two cases of exorcism. While some may be turned off by the idea of exorcism or don't believe that people can be possessed, the inclusion of these case studies suggests that Peck is willing to look at all angles when it comes to the study of evil.However, Peck irritated me when, in the next to last chapter, on page 239, while writing of evil in groups and the effects of the Vietnam war. He writes: "The problem, however, is that by a scant dozen years later there was a wealth of evidence that communism was not (if in fact, it had ever been) a force that was neither monolithic or necessarily evil."Communism not necessarily evil? To kill your fellow countryman in the name of a political ideology is not evil? Sorry. I disagree.Even after my disagreements with Peck's positions, I'd still recommend reading this book especially if evil is a subject you are interested in or believe exists.

Reading about how some people think is good. You never know somebody really!