Food for thought

A discussion last night on the nature of evil led me to revisit M. Scott Peck's People of the Lie, where he says:

For adults to be the victims of evil, they must be powerless to escape. They may be powerless when a gun is held to their head...Or they may be powerless by virtue of their own failure of courage...Whenever adults not at gunpoint become victims of evil it is because they have - one way or another - bound [themselves] by chains of laziness and dependency....settling for a child's impotence.

And this further from Erich Fromm, The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil:

The longer we continue to make the wrong decisions, the more our heart hardens; the more often we make the right decisions, the more our heart softens--or better perhaps, comes alive...Most people fail at the art of living not because they are inherently bad or so without will that they cannot lead a better life; they fail because they do not wake up and see when they stand at a fork in the road and have to decide. They are not aware when life asks them a question, and when they still have alternative answers. Then with each step along the wrong road it becomes increasingly difficult for them to admit that they are on the wrong road.

Hmmm.