Reading the news, it would seem that the world is filled with senseless harm and destruction, enormously degrading our quality of life. Is this inevitable, or are we living below our potential? Is it human nature for people to take advantage, exploit, abuse, and wreck each other? Is this normal? Is this who we are? Or are there identifiable influences that foster and encourage such behavior, influences that can be modified, reduced, and eliminated? Is it possible to develop a science of good and evil?
For more than 2,000 years, as far back as Plato and Socrates, people have likened evil to a disease, but none thought the analogy to be anything more than a metaphor. What if evil is a disease? What causes it? How does it work? How do we stop it, heal from it, and prevent it?
Psychic illness-evil-is caused by a mind virus transmitted through social behavior. The Other Pandemic offers ten proofs that this is 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.
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 arrest its operations, heal, and disrupt its life cycle 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, Psy.D., C.Psych., is a clinical and rehabilitation psychologist with over 40 years of psychotherapy experience. He began writing about infectious misbehavior in 1988. His first book on this subject, Psychic Illness: The Rise and Fall of Evil on Earth, was published in 2001. The revised second edition of Psychic Illness is in preparation.
