On Scott Peck

Thanks to an article by Greg Johnson, almost a decade ago I got to know the work of M. Scott Peck (1936-2005). I even wrote a post on this site about it, ‘My evil parents’ which, over time, I changed the status from a public article to a private article. Peck, who also had abusive parents—and also when he was in his middle teens—tried to define evil scientifically. He didn’t make it, as we’ll see at the end of this post.

I would like to quote what Wikipedia says about Peck’s philosophy to illustrate something I say in one of my books in Spanish: it is useful to understand abusive parents to know why the white race commits suicide.

Peck discusses evil in his book People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, and also in a chapter of The Road Less Traveled. Peck characterises evil as a malignant type of self-righteousness in which there is an active rather than passive refusal to tolerate imperfection—sin—and its consequent guilt.

This attitude is the Leitmotif of the phenomenon I analyse in the sixth of my eleven books, titled Padre. But it is also typical of those anti-Semites who, not wanting to repudiate their parents’ religion, continue to obey the New Testament commands of the god of the Jews. The self-righteousness of my late father and those anti-Semites who see nothing wrong in Judeo-Christianity is limitless.

This syndrome results in a projection of evil onto selected specific innocent victims, often children; which is the paradoxical mechanism by which the People of the Lie commit their evil.

Interestingly, in his article Johnson uses this observation from Peck to talk about another topic, the self-righteous Jews. But Peck used it when talking about abusive parents.

Peck argues that these people are the most difficult of all to deal with. He describes in some detail several individual cases involving his patients. In one case which Peck considers as the most typical because of its subtlety, he describes Roger, a depressed teenage son of respected, well-off parents. In a series of parental decisions justified by often subtle distortions of the truth, they exhibit a consistent disregard for their son’s feelings, and a consistent willingness to destroy his growth.

I rarely translate intimate passages from my autobiographical books, but this willingness to stop the growth of a lad reminds me of the very first page of the first of my eleven books. On the other hand, by repudiating National Socialism, white nationalists also show a willingness to stop their growth because WN is merely a stepping-stone that helps us cross the psychological Rubicon, from Normieland to NS.

With false rationality and normality, they [the parents] aggressively refuse to consider that they are in any way responsible for his resultant depression, eventually suggesting his condition must be incurable and genetic.

In my research of psychiatry I found academic studies of millions of kids on Ritalin to force them to study stupid subjects. Pseudoscientific psychiatry blames the genes of Aryan boys who rebel against the traditional school program. Similarly, as I said in ‘Christmas Eve’, it is abhorrent for some nationalists to blame their genes for pathological altruism rather than the religion of their parents: where the problem lies.

Peck makes a distinction between those who are on their way to becoming evil and those who have already crossed the line and are irretrievably evil… Those who have crossed the line and are irretrievably evil are described as having malignant narcissism.

It was my parents’ malignant narcissism that rendered them incapable of seeing what they were doing to me and my sister (the subject of my first, sixth, seventh and eighth books). But there is also evil narcissism in those American nationalists who don’t want to see that the axes on which their nation was founded, capitalism and a branch of Protestantism that admired the Old Testament, would have devastating consequences on their history.

Evil is described by Peck as ‘militant ignorance’… Peck argues that while most people are conscious of this, at least on some level, those that are evil actively and militantly refuse this consciousness. Peck considers those he calls evil to be attempting to escape and hide from their own conscience through self-deception.

This reminds me very strongly of my essay on ‘God’ that I have linked several times on this site. But most white nationalists also militate in their ignorance by not wanting to ponder on what we say on the masthead of this site.

According to Peck, an evil person is consistently self-deceiving, with the intent of avoiding guilt and maintaining a self-image of perfection; deceives others as a consequence of his own self-deception and projects his or her evils and sins onto very specific targets—scapegoats—while being apparently normal with everyone else; maintains a high level of respectability, and lies incessantly to [conceal] his or her sins.

What better portrait of my parents when they were abusive towards us! But aren’t anti-Semites fooling themselves with their scapegoats while at the same time they, the anti-Semites, bend their knees to the god of the Jews?

An evil person is characterised not so much by the magnitude of their sins, but by their consistency of destructiveness; is unable to think from the viewpoint of their victim (scapegoating), and has a covert intolerance to criticism and other forms of narcissistic injury.

Once again, what a perfect description of what I wrote about my father in my sixth book (or about my mother in my first and eighth books)! But why don’t American nationalists back down and recognise that their nation started wrong; in the words of Sebastian Ronin, predestined to become New Zion?

Most evil people realise the evil deep within themselves, but are unable to tolerate the pain of introspection, or admit to themselves that they are evil.

It’s amazing how Peck’s psychological insights continue to perfectly describe what I wrote in my sixth book, which recounts several of my confrontations with my father à la Toxic Parents. But can those nationalists who exclusively blame the kikes tolerate enough introspection and receive my Christmas present?

Thus, they constantly run away from their evil by putting themselves in a position of moral superiority and putting the focus of evil on others. Evil is an extreme form of what Peck, in The Road Less Traveled, calls a character and personality disorder.

Indeed: my parents used to project the evil of the family on me and my late sister. Similarly, some American southern nationalists use terms like WN 101 and WN 102 as if their repudiation of Rockwell’s neo-Nazism were an advance (‘moral superiority’), not a regression.

Though the topic of evil has historically been the domain of religion, Peck makes great efforts to keep much of his discussion on a scientific basis, explaining the specific psychological mechanisms by which evil operates. He was also particularly conscious of the danger of a psychology of evil being misused for personal or political ends. Peck considered that such a psychology should be used with great care, as falsely labelling people as evil is one of the very characteristics of evil.

In the Letter to Mother Medusa (see sidebar) we read that my mother began to see the devil in me when I reached puberty, but my only sin was that I had started to transvalue my Christian values. There are still some people in the racialist right who falsely label Nazi Germany as evil: the only European nation that had begun to transvalue Judeo-Christian values.

He argued that a diagnosis of evil should come from the standpoint of healing and safety for its victims, but also with the possibility, even if remote, that the evil themselves may be cured.

My father died unredeemed but in theory nationalists may be cured as they’re still alive. But this would require that they swallowed their pride by recognising they are stuck in the middle of the psychological Rubicon, and that Uncle Adolf’s way was and is the only way.

Ultimately, Peck says that evil arises out of free choice. He describes it thus: Every person stands at a crossroads, with one path leading to God, and the other path leading to the devil.

Peck was another American who got stuck in the middle of the river until he died. He never realised that the religion of his Quaker parents was inherently perverse. For his ‘scientific’ definition of sin to be truly scientific, the word devil would have to be replaced by evil. Always keep in mind my article ‘God’ linked above, which also appears in Day of Wrath.