For more than 2,000 years, as far back as Plato and Socrates, people have likened evil to an infectious disease, but none thought the analogy to be anything more than a metaphor. What if evil is a disease? What kind of a disease is it? What causes it? How do we stop it, heal from it, and prevent it?
Psychic illness-evil-is an infectious disease that reproduces through social behavior. Ending Evil offers ten proofs that evil is caused by an infecting, metabolizing, reproducing, disease-causing organism. Hijacking the enormous power of culture, behavior-borne viruses can be far more dangerous than biological viruses. They alter our thinking, emotions, beliefs, and behavior, turning them against us, and we are in a pandemic of infectious misbehavior.
This disease is spreading. Its problems are intensifying. It has infiltrated our culture, our institutions, our media, and our minds. This is the issue of our age, and if we don't come to terms with it, it will destroy us.
Culture and psyche are software, and we are programmable. Evil is not baked into our souls. It is a parasite latched onto us that can be starved and shed. Recognizing this as an infectious disease allows us to use the tools of science to combat it. Suddenly we can diagnose, research, prevent, and treat many of our oldest and worst problems. The disease model allows us to reveal its operations, disrupt its life cycle, and heal using existing, off-the-shelf epidemiological methods, public health strategies, and psychological treatments. Evil is weaker, and we are more powerful, than we ever dreamed.
GREGORY SWEITZER, MSW, MA, Psy.D., C.Psych., is a clinical and rehabilitation psychologist with over 40 years of psychotherapy experience. He began writing about psychic illness in 1988. His first book on this subject, Psychic Illness: The Rise and Fall of Evil on Earth, was published in 2000. The revised second edition of Psychic Illness is in preparation.
