Evil: The Science Behind Humanity's Dark Side

Product Information

And I'm not arguing against that: slavery used to be normalised in the West and is still practised here by the “greedy” and “selfish” in the shadows; but can't "greedy" and "selfish" still be evil? It was more challenging for me (in a very large section on sexuality) to think of pedophilia as a sexual orientation instead of an active choice, and Shaw urges us to see it as natural (and unharmful if not acted on) so that pedophiles can feel safe to open up about their urges and seek help.

Man's Search for Meaning has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Between 1942 and 1945 psychiatrist Viktor Frankl labored in four different camps, including Auschwitz, while his parents, brother, and pregnant wife perished. Based on his own experience and the stories of his many patients, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose. Frankl's theory—known as logotherapy, from the Greek word logos ("meaning")—holds that our primary drive in life is not pleasure, as Freud maintained, but the discovery and pursuit of what we personally find meaningful. In the decades since its first publication in 1959, Man's Search for Meaning has become a classic, with more than twelve million copies in print around the world. A 1991 Library of Congress survey that asked readers to name a "book that made a difference in your life" found Man's Search for Meaning among the ten most influential books in America. At once a memoir, a meditation, a treatise, and a history, it continues to inspire us all to find significance in the very act of living.

The basic problem of the book is probably that the concept of "evil" is so broad and partly subjective (what would you consider as evil, what merely as bad?) that Shaw is busy covering a lot of ground at the expense of depth: She talks about the concept of "evil" in the context of technology, power, the office, sexuality, murder, rape culture, the Nazis, terrorism, paedohpilia, slavery, sadism... and yes, she herself states that this exploration is based on her own interests regarding the concept of "evil". While there are some scientific studies that I had never heard of and that I found very interesting, many cases she refers to are already well-known (how often do we have to read about the Stanford Prison Experiment?). For Manne, misogyny is a belief that women should act a certain way towards men. When they don’t, violence and cruelty are often directed towards the women to punish them or to bring them in line. ”

This is a previously published edition of ISBN 9781619636071. An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here. Evil: The Science Behind Humanity’s Dark Side by Julia Shaw is a study of evil and an attempt to define evil. Shaw is a German-Canadian psychologist and popular science writer who specializes in false memories. She started a BSc in psychology at the Simon Fraser University. She went on to complete a Masters in Psychology and Law at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. In 2009, she returned to Canada and was awarded a Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia entitled “Constructing Rich False Memories of Committing Crime.”Yes, this was written before the spill in the Gulf but it is a very well-written and detailed account of how countries have been affected and infected by the oil industry and how their politics have been distorted. It covers places like Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, New Guinea and Ecuador. A comet the color of blood and flame cuts across the sky. Two great leaders—Lord Eddard Stark and Robert Baratheon—who hold sway over an age of enforced peace are dead, victims of royal treachery. Now, from the ancient citadel of Dragonstone to the forbidding shores of Winterfell, chaos reigns. Six factions struggle for control of a divided land and the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms, preparing to stake their claims through tempest, turmoil, and war. At the core of the book is her belief that there’s no such thing as evil — which requires some external sense of moral judgement or frame of reference — just humans who sometimes (often?) do bad things for a variety of reasons — biological, social, cultural and more. You’ve had to choose five books and we’ve gone down quite a dark road. I know you want to end by mentioning a few books that take a more optimistic line. When we start to scratch below their scary surface, even the worst killers turn out to be human beings. And, looking at the data, it seems that human beings largely kill for the same reasons that they do many other things – to find human connections, to protect their families, to achieve their goals, to acquire things they think they need. They do it to deal with basic human emotions like anger and jealousy, lust and greed, betrayal and pride...If your murder fantasies were deeper, and you had less to lose, you too might act on them.