We in the 21st Century can't come to grips with evil; it's not scientific enough for us. This, it seems to me, gives purchase to the roots causists and apologists for terror: These people aren't committing these acts because they're in the grip of an evil, murderous ideology; there's a motive behind their madness.
Anyway, Masson, isn't buying it.
Evil is real, just as good is; you cannot have one without the other. It doesn't come with horns and a tail, not usually - it can be brutish or charming, thick or intelligent, cruel or violent, banal or extravagant, and it can be clothed in any human hide. But true evil is always conscious, it is never a product of mental illness or brain disease or circumstances - though it is usually quite opportunistic. It is always narcissistic, but it can be a negative, or passive one - i.e. the person is incapable of imagining others' suffering or independent existence, which is usually the definition of a psychopath (or, literally, 'soul-sick' - just clothe an old concept in scientific-sounding words and you're right as rain!); or it can be a positive, even more dangerous sort - perfectly capable of imagining others' pain and suffering, and going ahead anyway, because it's pleasurable, because the evildoers love power, because they consider themselves above all laws, whether man-made or divine. Often, such people can be charming, even charismatic. A combination of the two expressions of evil can be devastating - as in the case of the Moors Murderers, for instance, where the charismatic Brady dominated the more passive Hindley; or in the case of what happens in regimes such as Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia and Saddam's Iraq, where a regime is in itself criminal and a charismatic Adversary gives permission to its followers for all normal rules, and the normal preference for good over evil, to be suspended.
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