Evil

A Psychiatrist’s Interpretation

Thom Hartmann titled his recent newsletter:

The Fatal Flaw: Believing You Can Negotiate with Evil Without Becoming Its Victim

Evil doesn’t negotiate—it devours

He states what my colleagues and I have tried to warn, that: “There’s no compromising with evil…. Evil, by its very nature, will always win in such situations, even when it appears to have compromised or cooperated.”

Psychiatrists, especially forensic psychiatrists, add another dimension to the concept of “evil”. The addition of a certain pathology, or predisposition to evil, makes it much more powerful, devious, and all-engulfing beyond what one can achieve through rational decision making. As long as one knows the difference between right and wrong, evil is a choice, which is why in legal contexts the most debilitating condition known to psychiatry—psychopathy or sociopathy—does not make one eligible to be, “not guilty by reason of insanity.” Mental unfitness is a different matter; anyone with psychopathy is by definition unfit for any task or office that deals with people.

Hartmann once asked me in one of his interviews, what is the “soul” in my 2020 book, Profile of a Nation: Trump’s Mind, America’s Soul. I stated then that it was the magnitude of the choice we were going to have to make as a nation. I was referring to whether or not we had the moral integrity, the thirst for truth, and the desire for justice to hold a powerful criminal to account and to heal from it.

This is why I helped edit in 2020, The Spiritual Danger of Donald Trump: 30 Evangelical Christians on Justice, Truth, and Moral Integrity. I did not put my name to it, as my public relations consultant at the time said I should not complicate my public role of warning against psychiatric dangers. Now, however, I believe my audience will understand how spiritual health constitutes a seamless continuum with psychological and social health. I pursued divinity studies after medical studies, because I wished to supplement the bio-psycho-social model of psychiatry with the spiritual, making it a bio-psycho-social-spiritual paradigm. It served me well with the patients and prisoners I treated all my career, and now it may guide an understanding of how our current predicament began—not with the psychological but the spiritual.

Profile of a Nation is the book through which I anticipated the January 6, 2021, violent insurrection, as the former president’s response to an election loss. Four years later, the Department of Justice has released Special Counsel Jack Smith’s final report on the failed coup attempt, with Smith’s confirmation that he would have been criminally convicted if he were not reelected as president. The report contained interviews of more than 250 people and the testimony of more than 55 witnesses before a grand jury. Yet, the defendant staved off conviction by waging relentless “lawfare” (litigation abuse without legal basis or merit) to stall time, and his effectiveness at criminality caused craven jurists to capitulate, if not champion his demands.

This includes the compromised U.S. Supreme Court, which abandoned “Equal Justice before the Law,” essentially handing him his second presidency. This echoes what the corrupt American Psychiatric Association (APA) did previously, when it abandoned medical neutrality—the requirement that one apply medical principles without regard to political affiliation or political power—essentially keeping him in his first presidency (I will not go into how close we were to removing him before the APA’s intervention, from the inside, potentially preventing all subsequent calamities).

Just last week, Justice Juan Merchan of the Manhattan District Criminal Court did what he could to cement the incoming president’s criminal convictions, but there were no penalties and no probation. We tried to give him an alternative when we immediately sent him copies of The More Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 40 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Warn Anew, to offer a path to containing the very real dangers without appearing unduly harsh, but input from forty of the nation’s most thoughtful, gifted, and eminent mental health experts did not make a difference—this is what I mean by “America’s soul.”

It relates to the circular argument I once made about health care: we as a nation need universal health care to be healthy enough to vote for universal health care. Similarly, we as a nation must be free of the grip of evil to attain a spirit level high enough to resist evil. Thus we are stuck, surrendering to the primitive impulse to bow before power, as we enter the world view of the prisoners I treat—who do not believe that they need to change behavior to avoid punishment, but only to augment their criminality, to overcome any justice system that would hold them accountable (this is the criminal, primitive fantasy that the president-elect fulfills, and one of the reasons why he is so popular).

This trap is what my colleagues and I were hoping to avoid when, in 2017, we urgently came out publicly to warn against a psychologically dangerous and unfit person in the highest office of the land. We warned that these psychological dangers were a public health matter, and we were not just referring to the more than 1.2 million Americans who would needlessly die because of Covid-19 mismanagement—and make us even more vulnerable to future pandemics—or the violent insurrection against the government that would destabilize American democracy—and eventually upend institutions worldwide.

We were referring to the mental health pandemic that underlies all the above but will effectuate immensely more. I described in my 2024 book, The Psychology of Trump Contagion: An Existential Danger to American Democracy and All Humankind, the depth and breadth of destruction—and evil—the spread of mental pathology is capable of bringing to a society. Mental unfitness at the top translates into mental unfitness throughout an administration, where all decisions will be the opposite of what is needed, and the people will only cheer for the wrecking ball that is brought to their civilization, security, and ultimately survival—while their understandable anger and fear will only give unfit leaders further ammunition to redirect against any innocent target they choose.

Hartmann concludes:

But this incoming administration is being run by a man with 34 felony convictions, a credible allegation of rape, who himself cheated on each of his three wives just like [his choice for Secretary of Defense, Pete] Hegseth allegedly did. Evil, it turns out, flows from the top down.

And the only way to counter it now is to cultivate, from bottom up, our collective Soul.

Announcement:

Dr. Bandy X. Lee will hold a live session on:

“How to Navigate an Increasingly Dangerous World”

This Friday, January 17, 2025, at 12 noon EST/9 a.m. PST on Zoom. A paid subscription is required to receive a link the morning before. Thank you!

Dr. Lee is a forensic and social psychiatrist who became known to the public through her 2017 Yale conference and book that emphasized the importance of fit leadership. In 2019, she organized a major National Press Club Conference on the theme of, “The Dangerous State of the World and the Need for Fit Leadership.” In 2024, she followed up with another major Conference, “The More Dangerous State of the World and the Need for Fit Leadership.” She published another book on fit leadership, in addition to a volume on how unfitness in a leader spreads, and two critical statements on fit leadership. Dr. Lee authored the internationally-acclaimed textbook, Violence; over 100 peer-reviewed articles and chapters; and 17 scholarly books and journal special issues, in addition to over 300 opinion editorials.