About
About Tom Kubarych
In our day, we use the term narcissism more than subjectivism. Whatever we call it, it is at the root of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the incivility of polarized American politics, and other evils we are dealing with now. The “power ideologies” Lewis was referring to were communism and Nazism. It required great virtue to stand up to these totalitarian states, whose ideologies claimed that anything was justified if it helped to bring about the societies they were trying to create. In that situation, many who would not have done evil in normal conditions “did not” and “maybe could not”, stand up against evil. Today, the far right and far left are the same breeds of cat. Only the presentation has changed.
Tombo Baggins and his old friend Treebeard
Hi, I’m Tom Kubarych, a.k.a. Tombo Baggins. There have been many calls for the serious scientific study of evil. I wrote my Ph.D. thesis on one of them (Peck 1983). The first personality disorder (PD) recognized by psychiatry was the psychopath (Hare 1999). In theory, a psychopath does not have a conscience. On one view (Fingarette 1967), this represents an absence of morality. Evil, or at least some kinds of evil, is better conceived of as a perversion of morality.
A putative ‘evil’ subtype of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) consists of people who do have a conscience but use self-deception to pervert it into a belief that what might look like evil to weaker persons is actually a great good, and a very special, superior person can recognize this and impose a different morality on others. Thus, Hitler and Stalin were able to morally corrupt entire societies. Peck cited J.R.R. Tolkien as knowing more about evil than any psychiatrist, and the character Gollum in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings as the best literary depiction of his proposed personality disorder, so I acquired the nickname “Tombo Baggins”.
cience is about measurement, so Peck was at least correct in saying that, if we want to study narcissism scientifically, the first thing we have to do is learn how to measure it. So, I became a psychometrician. I am informed that, for non-statisticians, my psychometric papers
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on narcissism and other constructs have excellent soporific qualities, though of course my colleagues and I think they are great. If you have difficulty sleeping, have included my papers on measuring narcissism, as well as a few other constructs using modern psychometric methods.
A major problem with trying to study evil scientifically is that modern science developed according to a program that power over nature is the sole criterion of what is worthy of scientific (and publicly funded) research. That is one thing with sciences like physics; it is quite another thing with sciences like psychology, where the power is over people and, ultimately, by some people over others. Because of this, Peck rejected the myth that science is value-free, and insisted that any such study would have to value healing over knowledge and be based on love. This, not adherence to a particular set of doctrines, he called a “religious psychology”.
I am not a scholar of religion, but I do try to be a practicing Christian, and I believe I can give the interested reader a better understanding of the concepts of narcissism and self-deception, and their relation to evil, with the aid of my favorite writer C. S. Lewis, who many readers will be familiar with. I am working on a book for the general reader that begins with an overview of narcissism and the many ways in which that term has been used. From there, it tackles self-deception from philosophical, scientific, and religious perspectives. This is followed by a chapter on conscience. The book concludes with a proposal that what I am calling the ”Will to Joy” is a more fundamental human motive than other candidates, such as Freud’s primarily sexual libido, the Adlerian or Nietzschean Will to Power, or even something I am far more sympathetic to myself, Victor Frankl’s Will to Meaning.
In the meantime, I am setting up this website to talk about narcissism, self-deception, evil and my favorite writer, C.S. Lewis.