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M. Scott Peck

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Morgan Scott Peck (22 May 1936 – 25 September 2005) was was an American psychiatrist and best-selling author who was most well known for writing the book The Road Less Traveled, published in 1978. He wrote fifteen books in total.

Quotes

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The Road Less Travelled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth (1978)

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  • There is no virtue inherent in unconstructive suffering. The path of spiritual growth is a path of lifelong learning. If we can be open to learning from our pain, then we are truly growing; if we merely wallow in it, we are not.
    • M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth (New York: Simon & Schuster / Touchstone, 1998 ed. [orig. 1978]), Part I – “Discipline,” p. 63.
  • Although the act of nurturing another's spiritual growth has the effect of nurturing one's own, a major characteristic of genuine love is that the distinction between oneself and the other is always maintained and preserved.
  • By masochism I do not mean that they (masochists) get their sexual jollies out of physical pain, but simply that in some strange way they are chronically self-destructive.
  • Masochists are people who perpetually attempt to destroy themselves. They are always, in one way or another, trying to kill themselves. In the long run they almost always succeed. Our task in therapy is to help them empty themselves of their masochism so that life may fill them instead.
  • The problem of masochism is intimately tied up with the problem of responsibility. Masochists are people who, because they hate themselves, believe that they are worthless and deserve only punishment. They are self-destructive because they lack the capacity to assume responsibility for their own lives. Instead of taking care of themselves, they neglect themselves, abuse themselves, and in the end destroy themselves.
  • The genuinely disciplined person, on the other hand, is one who takes responsibility for his or her own life and well-being. Discipline is self-caring. Masochism is not. Discipline is love translated into action; masochism is love turned against the self.
    • M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth (New York: Simon & Schuster / Touchstone, 1998 ed. [orig. 1978], Part I – “Discipline,” pp. 61-63).
  • The successful resolution of the Oedipal situation permits the growth of love beyond the family; failure to resolve it results in dependency, narcissism, and immaturity in one’s capacity to love.
  • Laymen tend to associate sadism and masochism with purely sexual activity, thinking of them as the sexual enjoyment derived from inflicting or receiving physical pain. Actually, true sexual sadomasochism is a relatively uncommon form of psychopathology. Much, much more common, and ultimately more serious, is the phenomenon of social sadomasochism, in which people unconsciously desire to hurt and be hurt by each other through their nonsexual interpersonal relations.
  • Most people who seek psychotherapy are suffering from a sense of personal inadequacy. Yet there are always a few whose problem is just the opposite: they suffer because they cannot accept their greatness. Perhaps ten percent of my patients have had to come to terms not with their inferiority but with their superiority. To accept one's legitimate talents without guilt or fear is as much a responsibility as to accept one's faults.
    • M. Scott Peck (1978). The Road Less Travelled. Simon & Schuster. p. 63-66 depending on edition. 


People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil (1983)

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  • We should be aware of evil, but not fear it.
  • At their core is a terror so primitive that it can best be described as animal.
  • We must not be frightened of examining evil, but neither should we underestimate the danger it presents.
  • I believe that human evil is a real phenomenon, that it is common, and that it should be studied scientifically.
  • Evil is actively opposed to love. It is not laziness but militant refusal. It is anti-love.
  • Evil people are not to be despised; they are to be pitied.
  • The spirit of evil is one of unreality, but it itself is real. To think otherwise is to be misled.
  • The essential psychological problem of human evil, I believe, is a particular variety of narcissism.
  • Evil is the complete absence of self-development. It is the refusal to undergo the suffering required for growth.
  • Ordinary laziness is a passive failure to love. Evil, however, is an active failure to love. It is not merely a sin of omission but of commission.
  • The evil are people who refuse to acknowledge their own failures, who instead place the burden of their sins upon others and thereby destroy others in order to preserve their own self-image of perfection.
  • Evil originates not in the absence of guilt but in the effort to escape it.
  • Evil is anti-developmental. Evil people refuse to acknowledge their own limits, their own imperfections. They cannot submit to the discipline of truth; they will not suffer the pain of self-examination. In this way they fix themselves at the level of the spoiled child, incapable of growth.
  • Evil people are extraordinarily ordinary. They are, in fact, people of the lie — people who are unconscious. They are asleep while they are awake.
  • In theological language evil is not just a defect but a real spirit of unreality. It is that which refuses to acknowledge reality, to acknowledge truth; it is, therefore, a form of unconsciousness.
  • Evil originates in the refusal to acknowledge one’s own sin. The central defect of the evil is not the sin but the refusal to acknowledge it. It is this lack of awareness, this spiritual unconsciousness, that characterizes the evil.
  • The evil are people of the lie. They are extremely reluctant to consider that they might be wrong. Their greatest sin is their unconsciousness.
  • Evil may be thought of as a failure to complete the Oedipal process, a failure to develop humility in the face of authority.
  • Those who fail to resolve the Oedipal stage successfully are people who have never learned to submit their will to reality. They want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to be totally free and yet completely taken care of. They cannot tolerate authority, yet they demand to be saved from their own chaos.
  • This same ‘have-your-cake-and-eat-it’ attitude can be seen not only in individuals but in whole societies, institutions, and nations, all of which wish to enjoy the fruits of maturity without paying the price of discipline, responsibility, and sacrifice.
    • M. Scott Peck People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), around page 118–120.
  • Most people, because they have not successfully resolved the Oedipal stage, remain emotionally children; they are afraid to grow up, afraid to risk independence, afraid to risk real love.
  • Evil can be thought of as the exercise of political power — that is, the imposition of one’s will upon others by overt or covert coercion in order to avoid extending oneself for the purpose of nurturing spiritual growth.
  • My favorite definition of evil is that it is militant ignorance.
  • Evil is that force, residing either inside or outside of human beings, that seeks to kill life or liveliness. And because we are all to some extent lazy, and all to some extent narcissistic, we are all to some extent evil.
  • It has often seemed to me that those who are most dedicated to the light are the ones most subject to assault by the forces of darkness. Evil always hates the light. And yet these attacks are not necessarily destructive. In the long run they may serve the purposes of grace. For through them the servants of the light may become more firmly committed to their cause, their dedication tested and refined.
  • It is not the weak or the stupid who are most likely to be the targets of evil, but the strong and the good. Evil seeks to destroy the life force wherever it is most manifest.
  • Hannah Arendt has written of the ‘banality of evil.’ She was speaking of the Nazi bureaucrats who performed their monstrous duties with the same bland efficiency as they would any other job. It is a fitting phrase. Evil is banal. It is utterly unoriginal. It is simply the absence of love.
  • Evil has no depth. It is not creative. It is not even in the least bit interesting. It is boring. It is banal.
  • Most evil people know deep down that there is something wrong with them. It is precisely this awareness that they cannot tolerate and that leads them to project their evil onto others. Because they cannot admit to the imperfection within themselves, they must destroy it elsewhere.
  • Most of us are not consciously evil; rather we are more or less unconscious of our own evil. We hide it from ourselves through self-deception.
  • The observant and thoughtful among us will have noticed that evil is by far the more common phenomenon. Genuine goodness is rare.
  • Since the primary characteristic of evil is laziness, and since laziness is so common, it is obvious that evil is commonplace.
  • If masochism is as common as it seems to be, then it should not surprise us that human evil exists.
  • We must never forget that the evil are human beings like ourselves. Something terrible usually has happened to them.
  • It is not by accident that they have become evil. Somewhere along the line they have been terribly hurt, and out of their pain they have chosen to hate rather than to love.
  • Evil originates in failure to acknowledge one’s own pain and sin. When people deny the hurt within themselves, they inevitably project it outward.
  • I have come to suspect that many cases of schizophrenia may in fact be the result of evil being passed from parents to children ... it is possible that some children, faced with the choice of either becoming evil themselves or utterly losing their minds, choose the latter.
  • Evil is contagious. The children of the evil are often damaged for life.
    • M. Scott Peck, People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil (Simon & Schuster (U.S. 1983), p. 127-128 (approx.; edition-dependent).
  • Despite their pretence of sanity, the evil are the most insane of all.
    • M. Scott Peck People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), p. 134 (chapter 4).
  • While Eastern religions have a far more developed understanding of spiritual growth, they have paid comparatively little attention to the phenomenon of human evil.
    • M. Scott Peck (1983). People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983).
  • Lying is both a cause and a manifestation of evil.
    • M. Scott Peck (1983). People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil Chapter 2 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983).
  • The denial of evil is far more common than evil itself.
    • M. Scott Peck (1983). People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983).

The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace (1987)

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  • The only real route to peace is through self-purification. We must purge ourselves of our own pride, our need to control, and our unwillingness to suffer for the sake of others. Peacemaking begins inside each of us.
  • The problem of evil is perhaps the most fundamental of all human problems.
  • True community is always in a state of almost constant terror at the problem of human evil.
  • In any case, in Vietnam it was the extraordinary power of nationalism, not communism, that brought the United States to its knees. To oppose legitimate nationalism is to do so at our peril.
  • At one point I allowed myself to become involved in a project called the Peace Train. It started as a fine idea but soon began to acquire all the trappings of a cult. People were surrendering their critical judgment to the leaders and suppressing their differences for the sake of an emotional high. When I recognized what was happening, I pulled out. I had no desire to become a guru, nor to see community used as a means of control.
  • The Peace Train itself turned out to be terribly boring. What passed for excitement was mostly posturing. I found myself dreading the meetings and relieved when it finally came to an end.
    • M. Scott Peck, The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987 / Touchstone 1988), Chapter 10 “The Foundation and the Peace Movement,” pp. 271–273, ISBN 978-0-684-84858-7.

Further Along The Road Less Travelled: The Unending Journey Toward Spiritual Growth (1993)

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  • You may remember that The Road Less Travelled opened with the sentence "Life is difficult." And to that great truth, I will now add another translation:
  • Life is complex.
  • It occurred to him (Carl Jung) that it was perhaps no accident that we traditionally referred to alcoholic drinks as ‘spirits’, and that perhaps alcoholics were people who had a greater thirst for the spirit than others, and that perhaps alcoholism was a spiritual disorder or, better yet, a spiritual condition.
    • M. Scott Peck, Further Along the Road Less Traveled: The Unending Journey Toward Spiritual Growth. New York: Simon & Schuster (Touchstone), (1993). Section where Peck discusses Carl Jung and the origins of Alcoholics Anonymous – page number depends on edition.)
  • It is important to realize that cults are a dime a dozen and that a great many businesses are cults.
  • One issue where Christian theology and the New Age movement tend to part company radically concerns the issue of evil. Christian doctrine holds that evil is real. Eastern religions do not consider it to be real. They consider it to be illusion or false knowledge, what they call maya.
  • I do not claim there is nothing to this view. There is no doubt in my mind that by thinking of evil we can create it. If we read the demonic into everything with which we disagree – as many Stage Two religious folk are prone to do – then we will cause fragmentation and hostility rather than healing. Through the New Age movement, however, the simplistic idea has spread that if we could just change our thinking, we would realise there’s no such thing as evil in the world. It would all just go away, vanish. But the reality is that there really are people out there who like to maim, to torture, and to crush other people. There are people who want war because they profit from war. And you can get into serious trouble if you believe that there aren’t. Because sooner or later you will be accosted with real evil, and dealing with it will not be as easy as some New Age books imply.
  • The one New Age book that has attracted the most attention, and the one that I am most often asked about, is A Course in Miracles. It is a very good book, filled with a lot of first-rate psychiatric wisdom. But A Course in Miracles also denies the reality of evil, saying that evil is unreal, a kind of figment of our imagination. This is not all that far from the truth, because evil does have a great deal to do with unreality. In fact, in my book People of the Lie, I defined Satan as ‘a real spirit of unreality’. So evil does have a great deal to do with unreality — that is, with lies and untruth. But that doesn’t mean that it in itself doesn’t exist.
  • While A Course in Miracles purports to be Christian, it distorts Christian doctrine. It is not all the truth; rather, it is a half-truth, and in failing to deal with the problem of evil, it leaves out a major part of the picture. It runs with only one side of the ‘paradox’ of evil.
    • M. Scott Peck, Further Along the Road Less Traveled: The Unending Journey Toward Spiritual Growth (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), Part IV – “The Mystery of Evil,” pp. 148–149.

The Road Less Travelled and Beyond: Spiritual Growth in an Age of Anxiety (1997)

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  • We live in a profoundly mysterious universe, and it is a universe in which we are constantly being called to grow.
  • One of the major dilemmas we face both as individuals and as a society is simplistic thinking — or the failure to think at all. It is not just a problem, it is the problem.
  • If all the energy required to think seems troublesome, the lack of thinking causes far more trouble and conflict for ourselves as individuals and for the society in which we live.
  • I want to scream this from the rooftops: ‘All symptoms are overdetermined.’ Except that I want to expand it way beyond psychiatry. I want to expand it to almost everything. I want to translate it, ‘Anything of any significance is overdetermined. Everything worth thinking about has more than one cause.’ Repeat after me: ‘For any single thing of importance, there are multiple reasons.’ … Because we assume there is a reason for everything, we go looking for it when we should be looking for them.
    • M. Scott Peck (1997). The Road Less Traveled and Beyond: Spiritual Growth in an Age of Anxiety. New York: Simon & Schuster, p. 22.
  • Almost as horrific as evil itself is the denial of it, as in the case of those who go through life wearing rose-coloured glasses.
  • I have come to believe that most people are consciously evil and unconsciously good. I can explain why people are consciously evil, but I cannot explain why they are unconsciously good
  • The mystery of goodness is greater than that of evil.
  • Whenever someone is bold enough to ask me, ‘Dr. Peck, what is human nature?’ my first answer is likely to be ‘Human nature is to go to the bathroom in your pants.’
  • ... If there is a good relationship between the child and the parent, and if the parent is not too impatient or overcontrolling (and unfortunately, these favorable conditions are often not met, which is the major reason that we psychiatrists are so interested in toilet training), then something quite wonderful happens.
    • M. Scott Peck. The Road Less Travelled and Beyond: Spiritual Growth in an Age of Anxiety. p. 214. 
  • The individual with a secular consciousness essentially thinks that he is the center of the universe. Such people tend to be quite intelligent. They know full well that they are but one of six billion human beings scratching out an existence on the surface of a medium-sized planet that is a small fragment of a tiny solar system within a galaxy among countless galaxies, and that each of those other human beings also thinks that he is the center of the universe. Consequently, intelligent though they may be, people with a secular consciousness are prone to feel a bit lost within this hugeness and, despite their "centrality," to often experience a sense of meaninglessness and insignificance.
  • The person with a sacred consciousness, on the other hand, does not think of himself as the center of the universe. For him the center resides elsewhere, specifically in God — in the Sacred. Yet despite this lack of centrality, he is actually less likely to feel himself insignificant or meaningless than the secularist is, because he sees himself existing in relationship with that Sacred Other, and it is from this relationship that he derives his meaning and significance.
  • Sometimes people fall in between, with one foot planted in sacred consciousness and the other in secular consciousness...
  • Yet despite all the hype with which the candidates and the press and the networks attempt to create an entertaining spectacle out of politics, we must try to remember that politics is real. It should not be the drama of images. It is the drama of reality. Millions, billions of real lives are at stake.
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