People of the Lie

Evil flourishes in a world grown comfortable with constant lying.

Evil is not committed by people who feel uncertain about their righteousness, who question their own motives, who worry about betraying themselves. The evil in this world is committed by the spiritual fat cats, by the Pharisees of our own day, the self-righteous who think they are without sin because they are unwilling to suffer the discomfort of significant self-examination. Unpleasant though it may be, the sense of personal sin is precisely that which keeps our sin from getting out of hand…It is a very great blessing because it is the one and only effective safeguard against our own proclivity for evil.

-M. Scott Peck, People of the Lie: The Hope for the healing of Human Evil (1983).

The bad habit of lying starts in childhood when we discover that lying may enable us to indulge in something forbidden, break a rule, or shirk a responsibility without getting into trouble for it. Growing up is the difficult and often painful process of recognizing that there are no free lunches—that everything has to be earned and nothing can be gained without a corresponding sacrifice.

Throughout history, the ruling class has always lied to the people it governs. What seems to make our current era in the West somewhat peculiar is the avidity with which large swaths of the population embrace the practice of constantly lying in the most obvious way about everything.

There was time not so long ago that being an effective deceiver required a considerable amount of skill. I was reminded of this a few days ago when I had coffee with an old Serbian friend here in Vienna who told me the story of how—sometime around the year 2007—she had gotten to know an older gentleman with long hair and a long beard who was always dressed in a manner that resembled that of an Orthodox priest. He didn’t claim to be a priest, and the black suit he often wore wasn’t a priest’s vestments—it was just a strong impression he conveyed.

He seemed to know the Bible well, expressed profound interest in spiritual matters, and claimed to be an “energy healer.” Once, at the apartment of a close friend, she saw him perform energy healing therapy on a friend suffering from rheumatoid arthritis. Though probably just a placebo effect, the therapy did seem to give her friend some relief.

All the same, my old Serbian friend sensed that there was something off about the man. While he spoke Serbian like a native Bosnian Serb, he claimed to be a citizen of Croatia, which struck her as odd, as did his name—Petar Glumac. In Croatian the word “glumac” means “actor.” Once, at a gathering a fellow Serb’s apartment, she told him in a joking manner, “Why do I get the funny feeling that you aren’t who you say you?” He replied with a smile and said something like, “You seem like a very perceptive woman, but I don’t know why you think that.”

About a year later, she saw in the news that the former Bosnia Serb president, Radovan Karadžić, had been arrested in Belgrade for multiple charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. In that instant, she realized that the energy healer Petar Glumac was Radovan Karadžić. Indeed, it had even crossed her mind that—without the long hair and beard—Peter Glumac looked just like Karadžić.

Radovan Karadžić was in fact a brilliant actor who came off as a man of great education and culture. In many respects, he was a man of considerable education and culture. It’s strange for me to contrast him with the current bumper crop of liars who infest politics and the media, who constantly lie in the most artless and patently ridiculous way.

The following video is a perfect illustration of what I mean. In it, we see innumerable, high-profile politicians and media figures telling the most obvious, preposterous lie about who was responsible for blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline in September 2022. Anyone who still possesses a shred of common sense and logic could see that their passionate and vehement assertions made no sense. And yet, like an elite legion of professional liars, they all read from the same mendacious script with extraordinary aplomb and esprit de corps.

These are our current “People of the Lie” whom M. Scott Peck described in his 1983 book. I doubt that any of them ever intended to be evil, but their self-righteousness has blinded them to their capacity for participating in evil enterprises. They are moral imbeciles. A world that has grown this comfortable with lying is a world in which evil can easily flourish with little opposition.