Evil is not committed by people who feel uncertain about their righteousness, who question their own motives, who worry about betraying themselves. The evil in this world is committed by the spiritual fat cats, by the Pharisees of our own day, the self-righteous who think they are without sin because they are unwilling to suffer the discomfort of significant self-examination. Unpleasant though it may be, the sense of personal sin is precisely that which keeps our sin from getting out of hand…It is a very great blessing because it is the one and only effective safeguard against our own proclivity for evil.
-M. Scott Peck, People of the Lie: The Hope for the healing of Human Evil (1983).
America’s Cultur…
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The bad habit of lying starts in childhood when we discover that lying may enable us to indulge in something forbidden, break a rule, or shirk a responsibility without getting into trouble for it. Growing up is the difficult and often painful process of recognizing that there are no free lunches—that everything has to be earned and nothing can be gained without a corresponding sacrifice.
Throughout history, the ruling class has always lied to the people it governs. What seems to make our current era in the West somewhat peculiar is the avidity with which large swaths of the population embrace the practice of constantly lying in the most obvious way about everything.
The ease with which our political class lies about everything has apparently been made possible by the shallowness and sentimentality of our popular culture and the impoverishment of our education.
Recently I listened to Jordan Peterson give lectures on two fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm—Hansel and Gretel and Show White.
I’d long known that the ancient stories collected by the Brothers Grimm revealed the dark side of human nature, and the struggle that all of us must undertake to overcome it. However, I didn’t appreciate the true depth of the horror that Peterson explicates.
His interpretation of these stories made me wonder if Herman Melville had been influenced by them when he wrote Moby Dick—the story of a comfortable young man from New York who, by joining a whaling expedition into the Pacific, has an encounter with the dark side of human nature that most people never recognize because they flatter themselves that they are entirely civilized.
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The shallower and less self-aware we become, they less we are able to recognize that many of the people who now direct our institutions are animated by Satanic pride and greed. Many of the most influential people in the West mask their ruthless ambitions in the language of benevolence and virtue signaling. Some of them, like Bluebeard and Queen Grimhilde, seem archetypal in their villainy.
I’m often asked by readers of this newsletter why we aren’t seeing greater and more persistent resistance to the “People of the Lie” who dominate our institutions. The reason, I believe, is that the majority of our citizens is still unable to spot the obvious perfidy that is perpetrated in the public forum every day.
They can’t quite grasp that many of those who occupy leadership positions are terrible people who do terrible things to actual people while convincing themselves they are pursuing their ambitions for the greater good of “humanity” in the abstract.
This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse.
