People of the Lie

“Satan wants to destroy us. It is important that we understand this.” —M. Scott Peck, People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil

When I was in high school, I had a brief run as a motocross racer. I’d bought, with my own money, a small 125 cc Suzuki street motorcycle and stripped off both its head and tail lights to race on bumpy, winding, circular, dirt tracks in what I then considered to be the hinterlands of upstate New York and eastern Pennsylvania. I’d load the bike on a rack I’d attach to the back of my mother’s station wagon and, from our suburban Connecticut home, I would drive myself two or three hours to whatever race was happening on a particular weekend. There were a couple of friends of mine who were also on this small, low-budget racing circuit. America’s Cultur... Rufo, Christopher F. Check Amazon for Pricing.

I had started out with a bigger motorcycle for street riding. My parents and I repeatedly feuded over this until they ultimately gave in; I’d worn them down as only an eager and annoying teenager could do. After a year or so, when I told them I wanted to switch to motocross racing, I said it was safer than riding on the street. That actually made sense to me. On a dirt track, you’re not battling cars and trucks going this way and that, and where if you wandered or slid into oncoming traffic, or off the road, your death was almost certain. My parents believed me because I believed it myself.

At these races, I often saw a middle-aged man taking photographs of all the motorcyclists on the race course. He’d position himself at hairpin turns, or on a hill, to capture riders flying into the air or riding on just the rear wheel like horsemen breaking in wild stallions. Then, at the next race, he’d show up with hundreds of 8 x 10-inch black and white photos of the racers. You went through them and if you found one of yourself you liked, he’d sell it to you. It was a fun memento.

My time spent racing was brief. During one race my first summer, dozens of us were all speeding along on a muddy track made slick by a daylong drizzle and I fell in front of another motorcycle, whose front wheel rammed into my left rib cage. I was knocked close to unconsciousness and I could hardly breathe. An ambulance rushed me to the local hospital; one of my ribs had been broken and it nearly punctured my left lung. When I got home, I told my parents what had happened. I lifted my T-shirt to show them the elastic brace around my torso and my father cut in triumphantly, “That’s it. No more motorcycles for you.”

I sold my “dirt bike” but I still borrowed my mother’s car to drive to the race tracks to watch. I was an amateur photographer at the time and so I took photos of my friends. I had my own darkroom in the basement of our family’s home and gave my photos away. At one point I was approached by this same photographer—turned out he was from Queens, New York—who’d been coming to the races. I showed him my work and he asked me if I wanted to start shooting for him. He would pay me. Thrilled at the opportunity to make some money with my camera, I accepted. At each race, he’d give me a half-dozen or so rolls of black and white film, and I’d spend the day shooting hundreds of photos. I’d give the exposed film back to him, and then when he developed the photos I’d taken, he’d mail me a check for my work.

During my freshman year at college in New Hampshire, he called me to ask if I wanted to shoot a motorcycle rally in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. Again, I was thrilled. I started thinking I could have this side hustle taking photos of motorcycle races to help pay for my expenses at college.

The race took place over a weekend, so we had to spend a night in a cheap motel near the race course. After a day of shooting, we both went to bed early so we could get up at first light the next day and continue. Although the room had two double beds, I was not comfortable sharing a room with a stranger. I didn’t want to pay for my own room, however, and spend most of the money I was going to earn.

When I got out of the bathroom, the man was already in his bed near the window. I climbed into my bed and turned off the light. After I moment, he said into the darkened room, “Do you want to come over here?”

“No, I’m good,” I said nonchalantly. But I was alarmed. I had not seen this coming. It was the furthest thing from my mind, in fact. I kept calm.

“Why not?” he asked.

“Because I’m not interested,” I said.

Of all the emotions that ran through me, fear was not one of them. Having worked in construction throughout most of my high school years, I was very fit compared to the pudgy man in the other bed. He would not have dared to physically threaten me. If we came to blows, I could have—and would have—beaten him silly. What I did feel was surprise. And shock. And confusion. How did I end up here? Did I miss something in his manner that might have alerted me to what he really wanted from me?

He didn’t pester me any further. Did I get any sleep? I don’t recall. The next morning, he acted as if nothing had happened the night before. At the rally, he handed me a fistful of film rolls, I used them all, and at the end of the day I returned the rolls of exposed film to him and drove back to college. I was confident that I’d taken some really good photos.

Back at school, I waited for a check for my work to arrive in the mail. When it didn’t arrive after a few weeks, I called him. When he did not pick up, I left a message on his phone answering machine. A few more weeks passed and still no check arrived, so I called him again. This time he picked up.

“I’m not paying you because all of the photos you took are all black,” he said. “There’s nothing. You must have left the lens cap on.”

“That’s impossible,” I said. And he knew it was impossible. With an SLR (single-lens reflex) camera, which mine and his were, the viewfinder is through the lens so you can see exactly what you are photographing. If you have the lens cap on you see nothing. It’s like trying to see with your eyes closed.

“Then you must have overexposed all of the photos,” he said.

“That’s also impossible,” I said. He knew that, too. And we both knew he was lying.

I don’t recall what else we said. But I knew what was what: I’d been had. My photos were fine. He wasn’t going to pay me because I’d not climbed into bed with him that night in the Berkshires.

We never spoke again.

***

“This is a dangerous book,” M. Scott Peck begins People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil. “I have written it because I believe it is needed. I believe its over-all effect will be healing.”

I’ve had this book collecting dust on my shelf for many years. Recently, it caught my eye and I took it down, blew off the grime, and skimmed through its now-yellowing pages. It looked interesting. And in light of all the talk of “evil,” in the grip of which our nation appears to be, I decided to read it. I’m glad I did. I’d read his first book, the wildly popular The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth, many years after it was first published in 1978. At that time, I thought it was too way popular to be any good. But I’m glad I finally read that, too. It was transformative for me. These days we’d call it “a game changer.” I can say the same thing about People of the Lie.

The bulk of the book examines several cases that Peck supervised in his psychotherapeutic practice. In each case, he concluded that the patients were indeed evil. Or had been victims of evil people. In one such case, one of two sons (the older one was 16 years old) of a family had shot himself to death with his .22 caliber rifle. The parents had then regifted the rifle to the surviving son, Bobby, as a Christmas present. Bobby had told his parents he wanted a tennis racket. Peck first met the 15-year-old surviving son the day after he’d been admitted to a psychiatric hospital where Peck was in his first year of psychiatric training. Bobby had been behaving badly—”acting out,” is what we’d call it in today’s parlance—and he had been diagnosed with depression.

After months of consultation with Bobby and his parents, who seemed completely ignorant of the harm they had inflicted on their son with this “gift”—and then after the passage of 20 years to think and write about the case—Peck concludes: “I know now that Bobby’s parents were evil. I did not know it then. I felt their evil but had no name for it. My supervisors were not able to help me name what I was facing. The name did not exist in our professional vocabulary. As scientists rather than priests, we were not supposed to think in such terms.”

On evil people, he writes in People of the Lie:

“Utterly dedicated to preserving their image of perfection, they are unceasingly engaged in the effort to maintain the appearance of moral purity. They worry about this a great deal….

“While they seem to lack any motivation to be good, then intensely desire to appear good. Their ‘goodness’ is all on a level of pretense. It is, in effect, a lie. This is why they are the ‘people of the lie.’”

Cancel Culture Diction... Failla, Jimmy Check Amazon for Pricing. If The People of the Lie was needed, as Peck writes, when the book was published more than 40 years ago in 1983, then I believe it is needed even more now. For the book is not just about healing human evil; it is also about recognizing human evil and exposing it. This is what I want to focus on in this essay. This task is neither easy or rewarding. But it is important. As Peck writes, “We cannot begin to hope to heal human evil until we are able to look at it directly.” There is nothing more important that we can do now. Our survival—individually and collectively—depends on it. It is indeed a matter of life and death.

“Evil is in opposition to life,” Peck writes. “It is that which opposes the life force. It has, in short, to do with killing.” What’s more, he adds some pages later, is that “We brush up against evil not once or twice in a lifetime but almost routinely as we come in contact with human crises.”

Indeed, I now see evil now more than I want to, making me wish there are things I did not know. I wish I did not know how our government has aided and abetted the millions of illegal immigrants crossing our nation’s southern border, packing our cities and suburban communities and schools and hotels and warehouses with them and their children in an effort to destroy our urban economies and educational systems and flood our country with deadly drugs and sex-trafficking; I wish I did not know that our government has aided and abetted boys and men to play in girl’s and women’s sports, aided and abetted boys and men to go into women’s locker rooms and bathrooms; I wish I did not know how our government has aided and abetted what’s being called “gender dysphoria,” standing by and watching young girls try to become boys and young boys try become girls; has aided and abetted sex-change surgeries (euphemistically called “gender-affirming surgery”) and the use of puberty blockers, thereby destroying the lives of young people who are beginning to regret their naïve choices but now have no way back to being the children they had been or to the adults they might have become; I wish I did not know that our government has aided and abetted institutionalized pedophilia (the perpetrators of which are now euphemistically called “minor-attracted individuals”); that our government has aided and abetted our mainstream media outlets and two of our most popular social media platforms—Facebook and Twitter—to not only censor important and lifesaving information that was critical about the COVID-19 jabs, but also to cover up the heinous Hunter Biden laptop scandal while daily diverting our nation’s short attention span by fomenting widespread hatred for Donald Trump and his supporters (talk about “hate speech”); that our government has sent untold billions of our tax dollars to fund the Ukraine military in a proxy war against Russia (which itself is evil), while millions of our own people are going hungry and are homeless and the middle class are racking up so much debt just to stay afloat that many Americans have more credit card debt than they have in savings.

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