M. SCOTT PECK, WAR AND EVIL

To understand what M. Scott Peck means by evil, it is helpful to understand what he means by mental health and how theology and morality are the foundations that support his entire thesis. We all fall short in our striving for mental health, but only a small number are able to undertake the effort and to see it through to conclusion. To be effective as a facilitator, the therapist must have a relationship based on love with the patient. This is not romantic love as in “falling in love,” but agape, love as in compassion.

Because “entropy” or the tendency of systems, mental and physical, to run down and cease to work is so pervasive in the universe, the person who is motivated to undertake the quest for self improvement and mental health must be viewed as unusual. Those who have the “discipline” for such a difficult undertaking do so because they are touched by grace, that is, a power that is not understandable in terms of strict rationality but must be explained as an example of a manifestation of the divine in human affairs, as Peck sees it.

Laziness in the Human Psyche

Those who refuse to acknowledge personal failure and refuse to embark on any kind of path of self improvement do so out of “laziness,” simply another example of entropy at work in the psyche. However, when this laziness is reinforced by the armaments of self absorption and self righteousness, “narcissism,” those so afflicted become prime candidates for evil. “The evil deny the suffering of their guilt—the painful awareness of their sin, inadequacy, and imperfection—by casting their pain onto others through projection and scapegoating,” says Peck in People of the Lie (page 123).

When evil people take control of the apparatus of government, then we have a replication of what took place in Germany, in Russian, in China, in Cambodia and in so many other places in the lifetime of this writer. Is evil as expressed through political structures restricted solely to the actions of a ruthless dictator? No, says Peck. Is a democracy such as that in the United States immune from evil? No once again, says Peck, and the example of political evil that he cites in People of the Lie is the War in Vietnam, the lowest moment out of many very low moments of which was the massacre at MyLai.

MyLai Massacre, Example of Group Evil

This in abbreviated form is how Peck recounts this flagrant example of group evil in People of the Lie (pages 212-214). “On the morning of March 16,1968, elements of Task Force Barker moved into a small group of hamlets known collectively as MyLai in the Quang Ngai province of South Vietnam… Army intelligence had indicated that the Vietcong were currently being harbored by the villagers of MyLai…All troops were supposed to be familiar with the Geneva Convention, which makes it a crime to harm any non-combatant or, for that matter, even a combatant who has laid down his arms because of wounds or sickness…

“Although essentially all elements of the Task Force were involved one way or another in the operation, the primary element of ground troops directly involved was C Company, 1^st Batallion, 20^th Infantry of the 11^th Light Infantry Brigade. When ‘Charlie’ Company moved into the hamlets of MyLai they discovered not a single combatant...No one fired on them. They found only unarmed women, children and old men…Some of the things that then happened are unclear. What is clear, however, is that the troops of C Company killed …somewhere between five and six hundred of those unarmed villagers.”

Chairman of Psychiatrists Committee

Scott Peck was one of a committee of three psychiatrists and served as chairman of the committee who in the spring of 1972 was appointed by the Army Surgeon General “to make recommendations for research that might shed light on the psychological causes of MyLai, so as to prevent such atrocities in the future.” However, once the committee described the research it wanted to do, the whole effort “was rejected by the General Staff of the Army reportedly on the grounds that it could not be kept secret and might prove embarrassing to the administration…” (p. 215)

In People of the Lie, Peck then proceeds to look at the nature of groups in general and military groups in particular to describe why they so easily become the perpetrators of evil. The roots lie in “specialization.” Specialization is a function of groups and one of their greatest advantages, but with respect to responsibility and individual conscience groups lead all too easily to the fragmentation of responsibility and from that to a sense of no responsibility at all. This is classic “passing the buck.”

Beware of Specialization

Peck writes, “…I am thoroughly convinced that much of the evil of our time is related to specialization and that we desperately need to develop an attitude of suspicious caution toward it… Specialization contributes to the immaturity of groups and their potential for evil through several different mechanisms. For the moment I will restrict myself to the consideration of only one such mechanism: the fragmentation of conscience.” (p. 217)

Fragmentation of responsibility or conscience was a major problem at MyLai and helped to explain the MyLai coverup that came after the series of ugly events themselves. In the current War in Iraq debacle we have already seen this problem at work in the Abu Ghraib travesty—another case of evil personified—where the higher ups in this Bush Administration disgrace escaped all responsibility.

War Parallels Are Overwhelming

Peck makes no direct reference to the War in Iraq in People of the Lie, but the contemporary reader of the book can’t help but be overwhelmed by the parallels. The War in Iraq is the War in Vietnam all over again. It needs to be pointed out that Peck died in 2005 at the age of 69. At the time he was suffering from Parkinson’s Disease and pancreatic cancer and presumably had been sick for a long time. I should also take this opportunity to point out that People of the Lie first came out in 1983.

The reasons that groups serve so effectively as breeding grounds for evil, according to Peck in People of the Lie, is that they encourage so many to assume the role of follower. The group can have only one leader or in any event only a small number in that role. Everyone else is a follower. Everyone in the group is expected to be loyal to the group and to do what he is told in order to continue his standing in the group. Specifically participation in the group encourages the follower to be “immature,” and as Peck points out throughout the book one of the characteristics of immaturity is narcissism, that is, self absorption, a building block of evil.

Of the possibility for still other wars like the War in Vietnam, Peck points several times to the warning signs. Peck writes, “For the reality is that it is not only possible but easy and even natural for a large group to commit evil without emotional involvement simply by turning lose its specialists. It happened in Vietnam. It happened in Nazi Germany. I am afraid it will happen again.”

Dangers of an Army of Mercenaries

He continues, “…I am not arguing that we should do without specialty groups entirely; that would be to throw out the baby with the bath water. But we must realize the potential danger, and structure our specialty groups in such a way as to minimize it. We are not yet doing so…Our response to the antiwar sentiment engendered by Vietnam has been to opt for an even more thoroughly specialized military, overlooking the danger involved. Abandoning the concept of the citizen soldier in favor of the mercenary, we have placed ourselves in grave danger.” (p. 231-232)

In the next installment of Mind Check, I will be tackling a quite different subject, namely mental energy, also known as spirit, soul or charisma.

ABOUT MIND CHECK

Thank you for tuning into Mind Check, a biweekly effort to prove that we are what we think and that clear thinking leads to effective action and to a better world. Mind Check is intended to serve as a bridge between the realm of the human spirit, that center of our energy, mental and physical, and our rationality, of which the scientific method is an excellent example. Mind Check is also intended to prove that the ideas of right and wrong are innate, not exclusively inherent in the situation or the whim of the moment.

To communicate with the author of Mind Check, please write to stephen.saft@gmail.com. For examples of the writer’s other writings, see the website http://www.iwillmeanpoetry.com.

Copyright © 2007 by Stephen Alan Saft