What Evil Means to Us

C. Fred Alford interviewed working people, prisoners, and college students in order to discover how people experience evil—in themselves, in others, and in the world. What people meant by evil, he found, was a profound, inchoate feeling of dread so overwhelming that they tried to inflict it on others to be rid of it themselves. A leather-jacketed emergency medical technician, for example, one of the many young people for whom vampires are oddly seductive icons of evil, said he would "give anything to be a vampire."Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, Alford argues that the primary experience of evil is not moral but existential. The problems of evil are complicated by the terror it evokes, a threat to the self so profound it tends to be isolated deep in the mind. Alford suggests an alternative to this bleak vision. The exercise of imagination—in particular, imagination that takes the form of a shared narrative—offers an active and practical alternative to the contemporary experience of evil. Our society suffers from a paucity of shared narratives and the creative imagination they inspire.

Alford's writing has a rich quality.... Alford has a great degree of skill in raising thought-provoking questions without premature closure. It is refreshing to read a book that leaves one feeling unsettled, informed, and yet with a desire to pursue further readings and investigation. This book will be of great interest to anyone who studies the social and psychological effects of violence and who is interested in the philosophy of evil., Intelligent, erudite, and wide-ranging.... His material is certainly rich, but it is his organization and critical analysis of that material, coupled with his exact and yet sometimes lyrical prose, that makes the book a landmark study.... Alford's book is without a doubt a superlative study., What does the cliché that 'evil spelled backward is live' mean? Fred Alford wants to know, and with this provocative question he takes the reader on an intellectual journey which is, in his words, a 'domestic anthropology' of evil.... This book is provocative, intellectually stimulating, and well written., Alford... spent over a year interviewing state prison inmates, college students, and working people to find out how people conceptualize and experience evil. To many of his informants, doing evil is the 'pleasure in hurting and lack of remorse.' It is rooted, from what they told the author, in a baleful, bottomless sense of dread; to cause others to suffer this existential dislocation is somehow (in the mind) expected to alleviate it in oneself.... Alford suggests that hope, and the answer to the problem of evil, may be found through shared narrative—the realm of 'metaphysics and theology.' Although this is a difficult book, it provides an unusually systematic approach to a topic more often addressed through anecdote or abstraction. Of interest especially to professionals who work with people 'on the edge.'., Alford has written a most interesting volume on how we experience evil.... His book is a beautifully crafted psychoanalytic meditation.... Lyrical and evocative.... Extremely thought provoking, compelling and accessible. I urge all psychoanalysts to read this small gem.

C. Fred Alford is Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of eight books, most recently The Man Who Couldn't Lie.