“One major drawback to this concentration upon the worst is that lesser crooks and smoother murderers slip by. By looking closely at Hitler, we may miss the demon closer to home. Faceless corporate boards and political administrators make decisions that wreck communities, ruin families, and despoil nature. The successful psychopath pleases the crowd and wins elections. The thick glass of the TV tube and its chameleon-like versatility in displaying whatever is wanted favors distance, coldness, and the front of charm, as do many of the sleek accouterments of high station in the political, legal, religious, and corporate structures. Anyone who rises in a world that worships success should be suspect, for this is an age of psychopathy.
“The habits of Hitler, reported by reliable informants and assessed by reliable historians and biographers, give evidence of an identification with or possession by his daimon. The principal difference between Hitler’s possession and that of others lies in the nature of his personality and the nature of the daimon—a bad seed in a personality that offered no doubts and no resistance. “I go the way that Providence dictates for me with all the assurance of a sleepwalker,” Hitler said in a speech in 1936.
“Hitler’s call gave him the self-appointed right to be a sleepwalker outside the human world. Outside also means transcendent, where the gods themselves live. Hitler’s certitude also confirmed his sense of always being right, and this utter conviction utterly convinced his nation, carrying it forward in its wrongs. Absolute certainty, utter conviction—these, then are signs of the demonic.
“We begin to see how power corrupts as the guiding whisper becomes a demonic voice obliterating all others. The seed comes with sure and uncanny knowledge. But while a god is omniscient, a human becomes a know-it-all, and so Hitler had no use for exchange with others. There was nothing they could teach him. To show this omniscience he memorized masses of facts—locations of regiments and reserves, displacement and armature of ships, kinds of vehicles—all of which he used to overpower his questioners and embarrass his commanders. This information ‘proved’ his transcendence and disguised his lack of thought and reflection and his inability to hold a conversation. The demonic does not engage; rather, it smothers with details and jargon any possibility of depth.
“Our republic should learn this lesson from Hitler, for we might one day vote into power a hero who wins a giant TV trivia contest and educate our children to believe the Information Superhighway is the road to knowledge. If one clue to psychopathy is a trivial mind expressing itself in high-sounding phrases, then an education emphasizing facts rather than thinking, and patriotic, politically or religiously correct ‘values’ rather than critical judgment may produce a nation of achieving high school graduates who are also psychopaths.
“The daimon’s transcendence places it outside time, which it enters only by growing down. Hitler felt himself trapped by time. He ignored the day’s division into light and darkness, drawing shades in daytime and burning lights all night. The kingdom he was erecting on earth would last a thousand years, he said and the figures with whom he identified were of another era: Frederick the Great, Bismarck, Christ. Insomnia was one of his major symptoms. This timelessness of the acorn and its push to make everything happen at once indicates possession by the daimon, daimon becoming demonic. The appreciation of everything having its season, of giving time and having time and taking time, does not apply to the Bad Seed, which promulgates manic inflation that brooks no interruptions (Hitler’s invention of blitzkrieg and his fury at anything blocking his way), and that demands impulsiveness and hurry.
“Finally, this evidence of direct demonic intrusion, perhaps the devil himself: ‘A man in the closest daily association with Hitler gave me this account: Hitler wakes at night with convulsive shrieks. He stood swaying in this room, looking wildly about him. It was he! It was he! He’s been here! he gasped. His lips were blue. Sweat streamed down his face. Suddenly he began to reel off figures, and odd words and broken phrases, entirely devoid of sense. It sounded horrible.’
“In the last scene of the tragedy Othello, when Iago is revealed to be the malicious cause of murders and the destruction of Othello’s noble and gullible character, Othello asks him: ‘Why he hath thus ensnar’d my soul and body?’ Shakespeare has Iago reply: ‘Demand me nothing: what you know, you know.’ These are Iago’s final words, and they leave interpreters guessing about his motives. But this statement by one of Shakespeare’s arch villains is not enigmatic at all. Iago says, in essence: ‘You already know, Othello. In the lines just preceding you have already twice named me a devil.’ Iago made tragedy out of nothing—as if sport, a game. The Bad Seed takes pleasure in malice, enjoying destruction.
“Without a profound sense of psychopathy and a strong conviction that the demonic is always among us—and not only in its extreme criminal forms—we hide in denial and wide-eyed innocence, that openness which also opens wide the gate to the worst. Again: Note how political tyranny lives on a gullible populace, and how a gullible populace falls for tyranny. Innocence seems to ask for evil.
“Thwarting the Bad Seed begins with a theory that gives it full recognition. So long as our theories deny the daimon as instigator of human personality, and instead insist upon brain construction, societal conditions, behavioral mechanisms, genetic endowment, the daimon will not go gently into obscurity. It drives toward the light; it will be seen; it asks for its place in the sun.
“Above the world is where M. Scott Peck places some of his patients who have in common a condition Peck calls ‘evil.’ He uses the term as a diagnosis: evil basically consists in arrogant, selfish narcissism or supreme willfulness. The rigid frame enclosing his vision does not allow Peck to see the daimon in the demonic. A deep-seated Manichaeism divides Peck’s world into saints and sinners, saved and damned, healthy and sick. ‘Evil is the ultimate disease . . . the evil are the most insane of all.’ By means of a psychiatric diagnosis the moralist can place a patient among the damned.
“A logic that so radically divides good and bad can offer only the same old standardized recommendation we’ve heard for centuries in the Christianized West: Fight the good fight. Peck calls it ‘combat.’ Therapists will be in the front lines of this fight because of their capacity for and training in love. ‘I think,” Peck asserts, ‘we can safely study and treat evil only through the methods of love.’
Hillman responds: ‘Love’ is surely the most omnipotent word in current usage, since the Christian God himself is defined as love. It can do all things. I would insist, however, that it can do very little with ‘evil’ unless this ‘love’ first recognizes the soul’s call within the bad seed. Love may be less an exercise of the will in an act of combat and more an exercise of intellectual comprehension of that daimonic necessity that calls above and beyond the world to the sinner as to the saint. I am claiming that the acorn theory allows a wider comprehension of the Bad Seed than the diagnosis of evil does.
“Prevention, as I understand it,” Hillman writes,” may neither restrict nor admonish. It has to address the same seed, the same call, and invoke the same invisibles that are claiming the price of life itself. The most immediately dangerous of all invisibles is the explosive charge in the seed, its obsessive, compelling potency, like Hitler’s raging obstinacy. Before dismantling the bomb or isolating it in solitary confinement, we may need to lengthen its fuse.
“Effective rituals begin as downers, with mourning. Even if there is no remorse about vicious acts, there can be increased awareness about the demon that prompted them. Hitler only followed the demon, never questioned it, his mind enslaved by its imagination rather than applied to its investigation. After the downers comes not repressions disguised as conversion and born-again reform but that turn toward community service we can witness every day when ex-cons take to the schools and grow down into the kids’ worlds, explaining how the Bad Seed works, what it wants, what it costs, and how to be smart. Mentoring juveniles as a regular repetitive service of dedication is also a kind of ritual.
“Finally, prevention of the demonic must be based in the invisible ground ‘above the world,’ transcending the very idea of prevention itself. Prevention requires not combat but seduction, inviting the daimon in the acorn to move out from the hard-shell confines of an only-bad seed, so as to recover a fuller image of glory. For what makes the seed demonic is its single-track obsession, its monotheistic literalism that follows one prospect only, perverting the larger imagination of the seed toward serial reenactments of the same act.
“My notions of ritual suggest ways of respecting the power of the call. They suggest disciplines imbued with more-than-human values, whose rituals will be touched by beauty, transcendence, adventure, and death. Society must have rituals of exorcism for protecting itself from the Bad Seed. Yet we must also have rituals of recognition that give the demonic a place—other than prisons—as Athena found an honored place for the destructive, blood-angered Furies in the midst of civilized Athens.
“These rituals of societal protection take the demons in. They see the daimon in the demon. And these rituals sharply contrast with current ideas of prevention, which, following Hitler’s own preferred methods for purifying society, would eradicate the Bad Seed.
“Public programs are being proposed to test schoolchildren for their ‘genetic predispositions,’ to uncover potentials for crime and violence in terms of character traits and personality, ‘weeding out’ those who show such factors as ‘early irritability and uncooperativeness.’ These traits indicate not mainly crime, but that genial exceptionality on which a whole society depends for leadership, invention, and culture. Besides, once sorted out, on what compost heap would the weeds be thrown? Or would they merely be ‘improved” and rendered compliant by drugs to which you may not say no, or kept in privately owned, for-profit penitentiaries exempt from labor laws and minimum-wage scales?
“For adequate rituals we substitute rigidities and formulaic fixes like ‘three strikes and you’re out.’ Without exorcisms that attempt to separate the Devil and the daimon, we have only eradications that get rid of both. Rituals not only protect society from the demonic; they also protect it from its own paranoia, from falling prey to its own obsessive and vicious measures of purification, that ever-present American myth: the return to innocence in a Puritan paradise.
“Innocence is America’s mystical cloud of unknowing. We are forgiven simply by virtue of not knowing what we do. To wrap ourselves round in the Good—that is the American dream, leaving place for the evil nightmare only in the ‘other,’ where it can be diagnosed, treated, prevented, and sermonized about.”1
“A society that willfully insists upon innocence as the noblest of virtues and worships innocence at its altars in Orlando and Anaheim and on Sesame Street, will be unable to see any seed of any kind unless it be sugar-coated. Like Forrest Gump eating chocolates and offering sweets to strangers before he ever looks into their eyes, stupid is indeed as stupid does. The idea of the Bad Seed, the idea that there is a demonic call, should startle our native intelligence, awakening it from the innocence of our American theories so that as a nation we can see that evil is attracted, belongs with, innocence. Then we might finally recognize that in America, Natural Born Killers are the secret companions of, are even prompted by, Forrest Gumps.
“The capacity to deny, to remain innocent, to use belief as a protection against sophistications of every sort—intellectual, aesthetic, moral, psychological—keeps the American character from awakening. The American character remains blind to the fact that the virtues of mediocrity—those pieties of disciplined energy, order, self-control, probity, and faith—are themselves messengers of the devil they would overcome.”2
1 “A history of this habit of the heart has been exposed by Elaine Pagels (in her important study The Origin of Satan) as a disastrous, perhaps ‘evil’ essential, an inherent bad seed, in Western religious denominations, making obligatory as countermeasure their relentless insistence on ‘love.” James Hillman, The Soul’s Code, 247.
2 Ibid., 214-270.
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