Jacob Rees-Mogg attends a fringe event to discuss Brexit during the Conservative Party annual conference in Birmingham in 2018. Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire/PA Images. All rights reserved.
The American social psychologist Philip Zimbardo has defined evil as exercising power to intentionally harm, hurt, destroy, or commit crimes against humanity. Clearly this definition relates to a range of human behaviour from the merely nasty to the historically atrocious.
In 1983 the American psychiatrist and writer M Scott Peck published the book People of the Lie, which found a common factor linking ‘evil’ behaviour. Drawing on his experience in clinical psychiatric practice as well as in the US military and government, he argued that lying needed to be given a central place in any understanding of the psychology of evil.
