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What Evil Means to Us: U.S. Intelligence and Foreign Military Innovation, 1918-1941
Hardcover
PhilosophyGeneral PsychologyGeneral Sociology
ISBN13: 9780801434303
Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr
Published: Sep 4 1997
Pages: 200
Weight: 0.88
Height: 0.71 Width: 6.38 Depth: 9.26
Language: English
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.
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