The evil that men do

Carl Olsen looks at what Dr. Theodore Dalrymple has to say about Anders Breivik, the infamous Norweigan who in cold blood killed unarmed teenagers and those who were barely twenties. He draws a parallel between the mind of such a killer and how he perceives himself by comparing him to a man who threw acid in the faces of two of his girlfriends.

"Most people," Dr. Dalrymple says, "now have a belief in the inner core of themselves as being good. So that whatever they've done, they'll say, 'That's not the real me.'" He recalls an inmate he once encountered: "I remember one particular chap who'd thrown ammonia at his girlfriend's face because he was jealous. He denied he'd done it. And the evidence was overwhelming that he had done it. So I said, 'Why did you say you didn't do it?'"

He delivers the convict's response in a convincing working-class English accent quite different from his own, more refined, speech: "Well, I'm not like that," the man told him. "I don't do them things." Dr. Dalrymple explains that "for him, his core was more real than what he'd actually done." It turned out that the man had been to prison before—"and it was for throwing acid in his girlfriend's face."

Dr. Dalrymple suggests that a similar self-detachment could have been at work in the mind of Anders Breivik. As the world now knows, courtesy of his 1,500-page manifesto, Breivik "did actually have, perverse as it was, a political purpose." He had a worldview and a vision, however deranged, of what was needed to achieve it. And, says Dr. Dalrymple, "I assume that when he was shooting all those people, what was in his mind was the higher good that he thought he was doing. And that was more real to him than the horror that he was creating around him."

Olsen then takes where Dalrymple has gone with this to say that

The sick and tragic irony is that the more man attempts to use purely material, scientific (or scientistic) means to "liberate" himself from (take your pick) poverty, hunger, oppression, illness, bigotry, death, the more he distorts and destroys his true nature as a creature created for good and for God. Put another way, he merely furthers the Fall by falling even further, if that is possible.

In my reading of the evils the Nazi's perpetuated before and during WWII, I came to the conclusion that man can logic his way to any position and call it good. Men who want to be independant of God will always lead to evil, be that evil big or seemingly small. They will refuse to recognise what they do as evil because no one wants to think of themselves as that way - even when their actions are truly diabolical.

The only way to counter evil is personal repentance, suffering on behalf of others and prayer. God rewards this with streamloads of grace to counter the evil in the world. It's the only way.

Evil and the empty soul ~ Insight Scoop