The evil I - Executive Perspective - People of the Lie—The Hope for Healing Human Evil - Brief Article

School Administrator, June, 2002 by Paul D. Houston

As a minister's kid I grew up with a sense of certainty that the world is divided between the forces of good and evil. As I became older and wiser, I drifted away from this view and decided some people I might have thought were evil were really just misguided.

Lately we have heard the word "evil" used with greater frequency. We know evil acts are perpetrated by evil doers who are part of an evil axis. This realization made me think about something I would rather not think about and forced me to reassess what I think about it.

I'll never forget running into a school board member who, no matter how hard I tried to help, answered every kindness with hate and every overture of friendship with enmity. Someone recommended that I read a book by M. Scott Peck called People of the Lie--The Hope for Healing Human Evil. I did, and my views changed.

Toxic Protections

Peck asserts that evil is both moral and psychological. It is moral because of its impact on others and psychological because it dwells at the intersection of extreme willfulness and extreme narcissism. The evil one is bent on imposing his or her will and world view on others and is so self-absorbed he or she doesn't see, understand or even particularly care about the impact this has on other people. In this self-absorption, the evil one robs others of their lives or liveliness,

As a psychologist, Peck found it almost impossible to treat these folks because they are chronic liars and they lie most effectively to themselves--thus the title of the book. Never is anything wrong with them. It is always about the other person. I found Peck's book so helpful to understanding this situation that I put it on my "must read" list for school leaders. Sadly, when you are in the public arena, you will run across these folks and it is good to know how to insulate yourself from their toxic effect.

My intent here is not to get into a theological discussion but to point out the real danger of evil--for it is what we allow it to do to us that matters most. This takes me to something that really bothers me about our current climate. There is no doubt in my mind that whatever your definition, the acts of Sept. 11 were acts of an evil nature. But so, too, were the acts of the American army at My Lai or the Crusaders in slaughtering innocents or the thousands of other times individuals acted out of their own will to impose that will on others by robbing them of their lives or liveliness.

The fact is that we all carry the seeds of evil action inside of us. Every corrosive act, every self-centered thought, every negative labeling of another plants a seed of evilness. Ironically, the act of identifying another as evil is, in itself, a step toward that very evil we are so willing to pin on someone else.

Coercive Acts

The lesson here is caution. We should be mindful of how we think and talk. And we must be more sensitive to others in respecting their wills and lives. Leaders bear an awesome responsibility by the sheer act of leading others; we are, in effect, imposing on their lives. We must be careful to respect people's lives and dreams.

One reason I worry so much about our current efforts toward school reform is that too much of what we are doing is coercive. We are creating standards and assessments that will determine someone else's future, And then we tell them if they don't meet our standards, they might be held back to lose a year of their life by repeating an experience or that they cannot graduate to pursue their dreams. I am not suggesting that a certain degree of high expectations and accountability are not appropriate. I am suggesting that we be very, very careful in how we exercise our power over others, what we do to others and how we do it.

I think we also must be extra careful in how we choose to label others. It is evil to hang the tag of "evil doer" on anyone who disagrees with us. They might not be evil; they may just see the world through a different lens. Nietzsche, the 19th century German philosopher, said that when you label someone, you diminish them. That is particularly true when that label is a negative one.

Cautious Labeling

Now, in my view, there are evil people out in the world. One of our obligations is to protect our children from these people. But our task is also to help children not become those very folks themselves. We can't afford to broaden the zone of black and white to such a great extent that we have divided the world up between the good folks and the bad folks.

Some really nasty people are out there--Hitler, Stalin and Bin Laden come to mind. But mostly people are just like us with dreams, hopes, prejudices and shortcomings, and we have to be careful how we judge each other. We need to make certain that we reserve that four-letter word "evil" as a label for those who really deserve it, lest we risk diminishing its power of warning to cliche status.

Paul Houston is executive director of AASA.

E-mail: phouston@aasa.org