Making Evil: The Science Behind Humanity’s Dark Side

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In The Ultimate Evil we find a lot of such descriptions. But not only that, we find – if we do choose to believe in it – a whole theory about serial killers. Maury Terry, journalist, wrote this book originally in 1987 but it’s reprinted now with an introduction from Joshua Zeman. Joshua Zeman is a producer and director with several titles on his name that deal with urban legends and conspiracies. He calls The Ultimate Evil one of the most terrifying books he’s ever read. When it got to the bit where he inserts a tube into a woman’s vagina and then runs a rodent up it I found myself suddenly inexplicably weeping. That was 20 years ago and I haven’t reread it since, so don’t know how I’d react now.” noush This book has definitely started some interesting discussions in our household....my husband and I are still debating what we think about the nature of evil and what situations might lead us to make an "evil'' choice. We had a long discussion this morning about how we perceive those who commit evil acts...do we see them as a person who committed an evil act...or do we judge them as an intrinsically evil person. Are there levels of evil? Are there really "evil'' people...and can "evil'' people have portions of themselves that are good? I think this book is going to be spurring debate in my household for some time to come. Healthy debate is a good thing!

Other chapters, however, are filled w 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. The Lucifer Effect explains how—and the myriad reasons why—we are all susceptible to the lure of “the dark side.” Drawing on examples from history as well as his own trailblazing research, Zimbardo details how situational forces and group dynamics can work in concert to make monsters out of decent men and women. But isn’t it true that in many of the worst acts of cruelty in the Holocaust, for example, dehumanisation was a crucial part of the process? Propaganda portrayed Jews as vermin, camps replaced names with numbers, and so on. Vera’s novel draws on and strikingly articulates the well-documented effects of those who suffered from and survived the worst kinds of evil actions. We know that the victims of genocide, torture, and rape, never fully recover. We also know that evil leaves a residue of moral pollution for the perpetrator and deep shame for the victim, which is never washed away. Our horror and visceral disgust in the face of evil actions and persons is a testimony to this. Vera’s novel is a masterpiece at expressing this facet of the concept. Honourable MentionsClassic piece of sensationalist trash that falls under the category of 'Satanic Panic'literature, an hysterical craze that swept most of the US and other Western countries in the late 1980s that was based on the premise that a vast network of Satanic cults had infiltrated all levels of modern society. 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. Yes. And in general, the same accusation could apply to experimental moral psychology. Philosophers and psychologists both like sanitised cases, clean examples. It’s not surprising that the trolley problem caught on so much in our field—it is simple, easy to understand, you can modify it in systematic ways, you don’t upset the undergraduates. But it might be too far from reality.

Shots rang out in Savannah's grandest mansion in the misty, early morning hours of May 2, 1981. Was it murder or self-defense? For nearly a decade, the shooting and its aftermath reverberated throughout this hauntingly beautiful city of moss-hung oaks and shaded squares. John Berendt's sharply observed, suspenseful, and witty narrative reads like a thoroughly engrossing novel, and yet it is a work of nonfiction. Berendt skillfully interweaves a hugely entertaining first-person account of life in this isolated remnant of the Old South with the unpredictable twists and turns of a landmark murder case. Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein when she was only eighteen. At once a Gothic thriller, a passionate romance, and a cautionary tale about the dangers of science, Frankenstein tells the story of committed science student Victor Frankenstein. Obsessed with discovering the cause of generation and life and bestowing animation upon lifeless matter, Frankenstein assembles a human being from stolen body parts but; upon bringing it to life, he recoils in horror at the creature's hideousness. Tormented by isolation and loneliness, the once-innocent creature turns to evil and unleashes a campaign of murderous revenge against his creator, Frankenstein.

The School for Good and Evil books in order by Soman Chainani

By trying to understand paedophilia we are not dismissing the realities of child sexual abuse, nor are we condoning or normalising the issue. Instead, we can work towards a world where we are in a better position to deal with the reality of the issue. Paedophilia has always existed, and always will. Flippantly dismissing it as an aberration helps no one. Agreed! This is a very timely book in the light of the current ‘Me Too’ movement. She describes sexual harassment and sexual assault, and she has a moving chapter on strangulation. She spends a lot of time on the case of Eliot Rogers, this man who felt he was always rejected by women, and then went on a shooting spree, killing many people, and finally killing himself. She describes these cases in some depth, and provides a really interesting analysis. I see this analysis as the mirror image of David Livingstone Smith’s, although they could both be right for different cases. Do I believe everything Terry sets out to prove? Absolutely not. Of course there was a lot of hippy-dippy hocus-pocus horseshit going on in the 70's and occult murders do happen. I could not help but recall that this book was published in 1987 at the height of the Satanic Panic, the same year the McMartin preschool trial started. And yet, far more of this book is sensible and grounded than you might expect. Terry is incredibly meticulous, serious, had an encyclopedic knowledge and doesn't sensationalize. I think he fully believed what what he put in this book, I just believe he saw many connections which were tenuous or false. I don’t give many books 1* as I can usually find a thing or two about a book that I enjoyed. Ultimately, I found Julia Shaw’s book so frustrating I’m surprised I even finished it.

Jess has been charged with finding and terminating the creature who's assassinating Dark-Hunters. The last thing he expects to find is a human face behind the killings, but when that face bears a striking resemblance to the one who murdered him centuries ago, he knows something evil is going on. He also knows he's not the one who killed her parents. But Abigail refuses to believe the truth and is determined to see him dead once and for all.

Now that we told you the order for the Good and Evil books, don’t miss these series

Evil: The Science Behind Humanity's Dark Side hits on some rough subjects -- sadism, murder, deviance, group violence, terrorism, effects of technology/the internet and others. Yes. And he’s appropriately cautious about that. These stories have been told many times, and they’ve become sanitised in the retelling. What’s interesting is that sometimes new things emerge. He’d have these discussions, and at the beginning he’d ask, ‘Have you ever killed a child?’ And the person would say, ‘No. Never….I would never kill a child.” Then they would talk a bit more, and the old man would add: “But, well…there was this one time when a woman was holding a child, and she wouldn’t put him down, and she ran away, and then we shot and killed them both. But besides that one time, no! Well, maybe one other time…’ What’s revealed in this sort of conversation is fascinating and at the same time horrible. The question concerning the nature of evil is a longstanding one but I would go so far as to say that in this profound book, the philosopher Paul Kahn has gone a very long way in answering it. He argues that in our secular age we have given reason such a dominant place in our understanding of modern politics that we can only understand evil acts by individuals or nations as deficits of rationality. If the Hutus were simply rational, they wouldn’t have killed the Tutsis, and so forth. Thus, our response to what we see as evil takes an essentially pedagogical form. We first try therapy to increase the malefactor’s rational capacity, and when that fails, we turn to legal punishment. But this leaves us with no conceptual framework for distinguishing between the simply bad act and the evil one. In short, secularism has no explanation of evil. Native American Notchininga, also known as No Heart, a leader of the Iowa people. Photograph: Buyenlarge/Getty Images ‘This book destroyed me for weeks’: non-fiction and novels about real history

All of Hubert Selby Jr’s output is hard going, but for sheer bleakness, Last Exit to Brooklyn comes out top (or should that be bottom?) Why I read it a second time, I’ll never know. The film introduces a happy ending where there isn’t one in the book, if memory serves - Tra La La survives the gang rape/torture. Some happy ending. Bleakbleakbleak.” musicforpleasure Generally, the people who discuss this book are either conspiracy nuts who believe the government is spying on them through their cereal or something equally crazy, fundamentalist Christians who are eager to prove that Satan is out to get everyone or professional skeptics who have an axe to grind against the former two and a desire to look very smart and very clever on top of it. 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. ” Your final book is Kate Manne’s Down Girl, which does engage with specific real-life cases of the consequences of misogyny, many of which occur in the context of relationships. She’s not just interested in the abstract question of what misogyny is. She has a very interesting line on what misogyny is. Russell’s book is a paradigm case of what a good philosophical text ought to do when examining a difficult and essentially contested concept. Russell offers a careful, thorough, and closely argued case for the existence of evil actions and evil persons and defends what he calls ‘a restricted pluralist view of evil’. His strategy is to use the method of conceptual analysis which considers a broad range of actual and possible cases of evil to establish necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of the concept of evil. This is not a view taken by many writing on evil, since a historical, metaphysical, or religious lens is often preferred. However, Russell’s approach is deeply attractive to those who seek to understand the notion of evil in its 21 st century context, and how it is used by largely secular persons in societies where the previous religious notions are no longer seen as credible.They are all places where, particularly with those last three, the power of the corporations is larger and more organised than the structure of governance. It shows the way in which business of that scale, even if practised under what passes for law in those countries, ends up as corruption. So there is this evil of greed and disequilibrium of one substance taking over an entire economy and the effects that has on the possibility of any other kind of development.