Looking Evil in the Eye: Pretense
August 16, 2014 Leave a comment
In my series of posts regarding aspects of evil found in our culture, I want to add this post due to its relevance to our current cultural and political makeup. I’m using the word “makeup “on purpose. Beyond it denoting a milieu or environment the word also connotes the topic of this post ~ pretense.
In his book People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, Dr. M. Scott Peck writes in the chapter titled “The Encounter with Evil in Everyday Life” that
“The issue of naming (evil) is a theme of this work. It has already been touched on in diverse instances: science has failed to name evil as a subject for scrutiny; the name evil does not appear in the psychiatric lexicon; we have been reluctant to label specific individuals with the name evil; in their presence, therefore, we may experience a nameless dread or revulsion; yet the naming of evil is not without danger.
To name something correctly gives us a certain amount of power over it. Through its name we identify it. We are powerless over a disease until we can accurately name it…The treatment begins with its diagnosis. But is evil an illness? Many would not consider it so. There are a number of reasons why one might be reluctant to classify evil as a disease. Some are emotional. For instance, we are accustomed to feel pity and sympathy for those who are ill, but the emotions that evil invoke in us are anger and disgust, if not actual hate…
Beyond our emotional reactions, there are three rational reasons that make us hesitate to regard evil as an illness…I shall nonetheless take the position that evil should indeed be regarded as a mental illness.”
Dr. Peck goes on to discuss the three reasons. I will use summary quotes.
“The first holds that people should not be considered ill unless they are suffering pain or disability – that there is no such thing as an illness without suffering….it is characteristic of the evil that, in their narcissism, they believe that there is nothing wrong with them, that they are psychologically perfect human specimens…For we realize that their inability to define themselves as ill in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is actually part of the illness itself…The use of the concept of emotional suffering to define disease is also faulty in several other respects. As I noted in The Road Less Traveled, it is often the most spiritually healthy and advanced among us who are called on to suffer in ways more agonizing than anything experienced by the more ordinary. Great leaders, when wise and well, are likely to endure degrees of anguish unknown to the common man. Conversely, it is the unwillingness to suffer emotional pain that usually lies at the root of emotional illness. Those who fully experience depression, doubt, confusion and despair may be infinitely more healthy than those who are generally certain, complacent and self satisfied. The denial of suffering is, in fact, a better definition of illness than its acceptance.
The evil deny the suffering of their guilt – the painful awareness of their sin, inadequacy and imperfection – by casting their pain onto others through projection and scapegoating. They themselves may not suffer, but those around them do. They cause suffering. The evil create for those under their dominion a miniature sick society.”…
Finally, who is to say what the evil suffer? It is consistently true that the evil do not appear to suffer deeply. Because they cannot admit to weakness or imperfection in themselves, they must appear this way. They must appear to themselves to be continually on top of things, continually in command. Their narcissism demands it…
Think of the psychic energy required for the continued maintenance of the pretense so characteristic of the evil!…”
“I said that there are two other reasons one might hesitate to label evil as an illness…One is the notion that someone who is ill must be a victim….One way or another, to some extent, all these people (the evil) and a host of others victimize themselves. Their motives, failures and choices are deeply and intimately involved in the creation of their injuries and diseases….
The final argument against labeling evil an illness is the belief that evil is a seemingly untreatable condition…It is the central proposition of this book that evil can and should be subjected to scientific scrutiny…It would, I believe, be quite appropriate to classify evil people as constituting a specific variant of the narcissistic personality disorder.”
Dr. Peck goes on to describe this variant of personality disorder:
“In addition to the abrogation of responsibility that characterizes all personality disorders, this one would specifically be distinguished by:
(a) consistent destructive, scapegoating behavior, which may often be quite subtle.
(b) excessive, albeit usually covert, intolerance to criticism and other forms of narcissistic injury.
(c) Pronounced concern with a public injury and self-image of respectability, contributing to a stability of life-style but also to pretentiousness and denial of hateful feelings or vengeful motives.
(d) Intellectual deviousness, with an increased likelihood of a mild schizophrenic-like disturbance of thinking at time of stress.
…
But there is another vital reason to correctly name evil: the healing of its victims.”
(all emphasis -bold type- mine)
*****************
Over the course of some sixty years I have encountered some distinctly evil people. The common characteristic of their personality is the veneer of pretense with which they surround their lives. Perhaps, instead of the word “veneer” the word “mirror” would better convey the 360 degree reflection of themselves they so desire.
In their mind’s eye they see themselves in a grandiose role, a self-assessed worthy role (remember Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Lady Macbeth?). To support their ‘self-thesis’ the pretentious will seek out others who will regard them in the same way ~ a Super Pac to fund a super ego (the three witches met Macbeth; his ego chose to ‘believe’ their words). Pretentious people will demand to be seen in their ‘light’ only. You become to them only a speck in their shadow.
Those, of course, who can rightly see what every one else can see will disagree. And, if they make any statement contrary to the ‘fairy tale’ narrative imposed they will be called deniers and ignorant or worse.
Today our nation has a President who fits all of the above characteristics of pretense. God help us.
Jesus said, “If the light in you is darkness how great is that darkness.”
Jesus’ perfect love can cast out fear…and evil.
~~~~~
I liken the characteristic of pretense to the walls of Jericho: The huge stone walls of Jericho looked invincible. Yet, after seven days of marching around the façade with God’s presence (the Ark) in the lead and with ram’s horns blowing on the seventh day, the walls fell down; the city of Jericho became indefensible. My how the mighty façades have fallen over the years.
Cindy Wity 
Self-Central Casting
April 20, 2026 Leave a comment
In trying to understand the phenomena of the double down defiant, the disruptive and destructive characters under the evil enchantment of our culture, I came across the vain imaginings of main character syndrome (MCS).
Seeing yourself as the main character in a narrative of one’s own struggles, a mediated aspect of MCS, is considered normal. You might hear a life coach say “Living your hero life starts in your head—and it’s won in your daily choices.” Our culture embraces the internalized hero narrative.
Scientific American says To Lead a Meaningful Life, Become Your Own Hero
Forbes offers How To Become The Hero Of Your Story: Eight Steps
But when someone believes that their experiences and problems are more important than the next guy’s experiences and problems, that self-serving perspective is nobody’s friend.
And when someone starts acting like they’re the main character of not only their story, but everyone else’s, that is delusional and narcissistic. Imagination and passions take on a dramatic self-narrative that entails self-absorbed behavior, a lack of empathy, and seeing everyone else as a side character.
Taking on this perverse aspect of MCS, a person views their life as a movie and themselves as the central character. Such a person romanticizes their importance on the world stage. They behave as if they always have an audience. Checking in with others to invoke reality-based self-reflection is not a consideration. Basking in the mind’s spotlight is more important.
When I first came across main character syndrome, I immediately thought of Anna Karenina in Tolstoy’s novel by the same name. Some have suggested that Anna is the heroine of the novel. Oprah called the novel “one of the greatest love stories of our time” referring in particular to the passionate and illicit love affair of Anna and Count Vronsky in a milieu of 19th-century Russian social norms.
But the heroines of “one of the greatest love stories of our time” are two women whose prosaic love pays attention to those around them. Dolly is not caught up in romantic notions of herself or life. She is down-to-earth practical with her love. And, it is Kitty’s self-giving love shown to her husband’s dying brother that the analytical Levin comes to recognize as making the world go round.
Anna is all drama, all self-absorbed, all self-deception, all main character syndrome. Everyone else is a side character.
It should surprise no one that a person with MCS may also have narcissistic personality disorder (NPD).
Someone with NPD is characterized with a perverse self-interest, grandiosity, entitlement, and power fantasies. Such are manipulative, emotionally immature, attention-seeking, and lacking empathy.
In practice, such a person may focus on information patterns in the MSM and social media and ignore anything contradictory. This myopic view of things provides a confirmation bias for an imagined reckless hero narrative.
Did Renee Good and Alex Pretti hone in on the anti-ICE media narrative that included the tough guy talk of Democrat politicians – Minnesota’s governor Tim Walz, AG Keith Ellison, and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey – and then hone in on ICE officers? Did the rash Good and Pretti act out their ‘confirmed’ narrative?
Does MCS have a cultural imprimatur?
James Bowman wrote about the Tough Talk of the above politicians and the street theater response “their intemperate language” could be expected to invoke. He went on to reference Kat Rosenfield’s The Free Press article Minneapolis Isn’t a Movie which carries the subheading “There is a pervasive sense that ICE agents are more like cartoon villains than legitimate law enforcement. The killing of Renee Nicole Good proved this a dangerous illusion” and then referenced a Substack article:
After Alex Pretti was killed, Michael Shellenberger wrote on his Substack,
Both Good and Pretti were thirty-seven years old when they died, and Millennials, more than Gen X before and Gen Z after, are very progressive and are “heroes in their narratives,” researchers find. The deaths of Good and Pretti are thus the result of a collision of forces that have been building for decades. After World War II, fighting Nazis and fascists became the number one heroic fantasy for Americans and others in the West. And Baby Boomers taught their own revolutionary heroic values to their Millennial children, who see fighting Trump and ice as an opportunity to achieve a form of transcendence.
Do the endless world-saving super hero movies and video games contribute to MCS? What about viewing everything in terms of power dynamics and a hero-villain victim-oppressor narrative? Wouldn’t an action-hero of such fantasies want to bash an oppressor with her car?
Validation of a self-serving bias is accomplished when media comes along to chronicle the deadly street theater in heroic terms and to direct blame away from the deadly aggressor and place it on ICE and Trump and anything else except the character who acted out their hero fantasy.
Such validation will have the “heroes in their narratives” double down their acting out. (The deep state loves those with MCS. The deep state doesn’t care how many are lost to protect itself.)
Our culture has produced and enabled many “heroes in their narratives”, including alleged assassins and alleged attempted assassins.
Luigi Nicholas Mangione is accused of murdering of Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare.
Tyler James Robinson is accused of murdering Charlie Kirk.
20-year-old Michael Steven Sandford attempted to steal a police officer’s firearm and use it on Trump, during a rally in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Gregory Lee Leingang stole a forklift from a North Dakota oil refinery and later confessed to trying to kill the then-president by flipping the vehicle.
Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Ryan Wesley Routh broke into Trump International Golf Club and staked out for several hours before Trump.
Those with attention-seeking main character syndrome include left-leaning cosplayer Christians (James Talarico, David Brooks, and David French to name a few ), politicians (Gavin Newsome, J.B. Pritzker, Tim Walz, Barack Obama, and Jasmine Crockett to name a few) and federal and supreme court justices who want to be seen as heroes resisting the Trump administration. These and more are promoted on MS-13 (MS NOW), the NYT, and other propaganda outlets.
Those with attention-seeking main character syndrome include a host of activists who want the world to be looking at them as they do battle against media-designated oppressors. Hence the ubiquitous presence of cameras to record themselves on social media.
Islamism produces main character syndrome that generates “Allahu Akbar” terrorism characterized by a lack of empathy for anyone not embracing Islam and ‘heroically’ responding to Qur’an’s call to Muslims to “strike terror in the enemies of Allah” (8:60).
For those with main character syndrome, what occurs is not a lack of feeling, but a lack of understanding. Hindsight, foresight and insight are banished for the sake of a romanticized fantasy that places them at its center.
Read about Pseudo-heroes here:
All the Dream Houses of the Left: The Left’s political imagination builds heroes, villains, and entire histories untethered from reality, substituting narrative for fact until it collapses under scrutiny.
With hedgehog mindsets, those with main character syndrome have taught themselves not to see anything but themselves in the drama they concoct, a drama that is validated by the confirmation bias of the media and mullahs. Self-deception is key to MCS and the media and mullahs enable self-deception.
~~~
Identity Shaped by the Misshaped
I don’t find it surprising that main character syndrome is a thing when modern culture works to remake identity with its evil enchantment and the loss of a tangible community to help us break that spell.
A mechanized worldview banishes all transcendence in its path and would have us believe that the source of meaning comes from within the world of ourselves. Such a disenchanted perspective of the goodness of the Good can foster the utmost ruthlessness and egoist pursuit of one’s own narrow interests.
Without the Good, reality is abstracted, truth is inverted, language is subverted, history is weaponized, and we are alienated from each other. Progressivism, socialism, and Islamism, by these distortions and with violence, each act to strengthen a bond to itself. Identity envisioned with the myopia each requires can foster a main character syndrome hell-bent on protecting what it holds to be true.
Tangible community, with its relationships, sense of cultural purpose, membership, status, traditions, and continuity that once formed identity is being replaced with online identity promoting the symbolic devotion and fusion of identity with power for its own sake, power which demands control of everything. A perfect fit for the narcissist with the loss of community.
Sociologist Robert Nisbet, in The Quest for Community writes that community “encompasses all forms of relationships that are characterized by a high degree of personal intimacy, emotional depth, moral commitment, social cohesion, and continuity in time.”
Our digital age fosters social atomization and alienation along with depression and other mental illnesses. Spending time alone in front of a screen can produce MCS. The desire to overcome our isolation and to overcome the world can be found online.
Release man from the contexts of community and you get not freedom and rights but intolerable aloneness and subjection to demoniac fears and passions. – Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community
Call it main character syndrome. Call it identity shaped by the misshaped. Call it Bad Actors in Bad Fantasy. Call it self-central Casting. Whatever term you may use, you will find that the Self-center Cannot Hold.
~~~
Regarding our culture’s evil enchantment:
“Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years. Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modem philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth.” ― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
~~~
From The War on Meaning:
The object of the system was to create a dual consciousness. At public meetings, and even in private conversations, citizens were obliged to repeat in ritual fashion grotesque falsehoods about themselves, the world, and the Soviet Union, and at the same time to keep silent about things they knew very well, not only because they were terrorized but because the incessant repetition of falsehoods which they knew to be such made them accomplices in the campaign of lies inculcated by the party and state.
-Leszek Kołakowski
~~~
It is no surprise that sloth is a characteristic of MCS driven by NPD. Empathy takes effort. Scapegoating and sacrificing victims to one’s narcissism is easy.
Recognizing and accepting the boundaries of others takes restraint. Crossing lines doesn’t.
Looking for meaning outside one’s self, the internet, and media takes effort. Accepting one’s self-narration of experiences, like a pre-written movie, is easy.
“The sixth Deadly Sin is named by the Church Acedia or Sloth. In the world it calls itself Tolerance; but in hell it is called Despair. It is the accomplice of the other sins and their worst punishment. It is the sin which believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, loves nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and only remains alive because there is nothing it would die for. We have known it far too well for many years. The only thing perhaps that we have not known about it is that it is mortal sin.” ― Dorothy L. Sayers, The Other Six Deadly Sins
For Sayers, this is the evil enchantment of the modern age.
~~~
The Feminine Wound: The Radicalization of Young Women Is about More than the Internet and Social Media › American Greatness
Heros of their narratives:
Men without chests:
Rate this:
Filed under 2026 Current Events, mental health, Political Commentary, Politics, social commentary, social engineering, social science Tagged with Main character syndrome, mental health, narcissism, politics, sociology