Making Evil: The Science Behind Humanity’s Dark Side

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He talks a lot about the fascination we have with these men, and in particular he talks about the moral issues we have when we struggle to understand them. ” But how typical was Eichmann? He was the arch-bureaucrat, sitting in his office, deciding how many ‘pieces’ (i.e. people) would be transferred to Auschwitz, on which train, on which day. That’s at quite a distance from the sorts of cruelty that were actually going on face-to-face in the camps. His evil might have been more banal because it was largely done at a distance. The book is written in a compelling way and should have been a novel, since the vast majority of it is fiction (as far as I understand the police investigation). Even if we overlook the blatant fabrication of facts and stories about the crime scenes and murders in New York, the book takes a nosedive in credibility as it goes into California. There's simply nothing to connect these two different murder sprees, no matter how much Terry tries to do it. The Arliss Perry case, that made such a chilling opening to the novel, was resolved and it was proven via DNA who was the perpetrator of such a crime. Don't get me started on Manson 2... Absolutely. But many of the evil acts that were performed relied on the Nazis recognising their victims’ capacity to feel human emotions, to feel shame or humiliation. That’s very different from thinking of someone as quite literally the equivalent of a rat. I think as well that a lot of the evil was rooted in seeing the Jews as moral agents—evil moral agents that deserved their fate—which again clashes with the idea that dehumanisation was at fault.

I think that enslaving someone is one of the worst things we can do to another human being, but calling slavery evil feels like letting slaveholders off the hook. It is greedy. It is selfish. It is harmful. But it's the result of broken systems and an individual's broken values rather than some fundamental and immutable aberration within the slaveholder. Her opponents are men-thieves and assassins and warriors from across the empire, each sponsored by a member of the king's council. If she beats her opponents in a series of eliminations, she'll serve the kingdom for four years and then be granted her freedom. Celaena finds her training sessions with the captain of the guard, Westfall, challenging and exhilarating. But she's bored stiff by court life. Things get a little more interesting when the prince starts to show interest in her ... but it's the gruff Captain Westfall who seems to understand her best. The Lord of the Rings tells of the great quest undertaken by Frodo and the Fellowship of the Ring: Gandalf the Wizard; the hobbits Merry, Pippin, and Sam; Gimli the Dwarf; Legolas the Elf; Boromir of Gondor; and a tall, mysterious stranger called Strider.Poorly researched, full of factual errors, ludicrous speculation not to mention outright lies, slander and hearsay.

Despite the bad rap the book gets from the skeptics - and the embracing of it by crazy fundies and crazy tin-foil hatters alike - Terry doesn't really focus hugely on so-called cults. While he refers to some (such as the notorious Process, the so-called Chingons, a cult centered around Yonkers, etc.) the book is more about dope than the Devil and if any cult is truly involved, it would appear to involve Scientology moreso than Satan. Stanley Cavell is a philosopher who has written a series of essays in this book on plays written by Shakespeare. At the centre of the book is an essay on King Lear called ‘The Avoidance of Love’. What I find so compelling about it is that it offers a reading of that play which really strikes at the core of everyday experience. He says the reason that King Lear rejects Cordelia in the first scene is not because she’s failed to give him the kind of showy demonstration of love that her sisters did, but that, in fact, she showed him real affection by being honest and clear.This is an extraordinary book that defies classification. He doesn’t have a single pitch or argument to make, but it is a beautiful exploration of evil, not just of what motivates the perpetrators, but also about how we see the perpetrators.

There’s a passive defence for everything from pedophiles and bestiality to the idea that words like “murderer” and “rapist” are hypocritical and heinous definitions we as a species label people unfairly with when really we’ve all made mistakes as humans.Man's Search for Meaning has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Between 1942 and 1945 psychiatrist Viktor Frankl labored in four different camps, including Auschwitz, while his parents, brother, and pregnant wife perished. Based on his own experience and the stories of his many patients, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose. Frankl's theory—known as logotherapy, from the Greek word logos ("meaning")—holds that our primary drive in life is not pleasure, as Freud maintained, but the discovery and pursuit of what we personally find meaningful. In the decades since its first publication in 1959, Man's Search for Meaning has become a classic, with more than twelve million copies in print around the world. A 1991 Library of Congress survey that asked readers to name a "book that made a difference in your life" found Man's Search for Meaning among the ten most influential books in America. At once a memoir, a meditation, a treatise, and a history, it continues to inspire us all to find significance in the very act of living. I read American Psycho all the way through but nearly fainted reading one of the scenes. I did get rid of it … thought of burning it but imagined a vision of some kind of devil in the flames, so consigned to a cardboard box and then the dump.” tribord