The greatest trick that the Devil ever pulled off was to get people to believe he doesn’t exist. I’ve paraphrased that quote from the 19th century French poet Charles Baudelaire because I think it pretty well sums up much of the burden that civilisation is suffering under today. By ‘devil’, I don’t mean a red demon with a tail and horns that roasts sinners on spits; that was just a symbol invented by the Christian church for this evil force. But now that Christianity is in decline, that image is losing its potency. While some still might find it useful, others will quickly reject it and thus reject any idea of a devil; in other words, they throw the baby out with the bathwater.
To me, the Devil is an all-pervasive force, perhaps more like the sickly green mist that envelopes the ship in Prince Caspian of The Chronicles of Narnia.
Over the ages, this masked form of highly contagious and corrosive energy has employed many clever stratagems to fly under the radar of our consciousness. To my way of thinking, it’s currently using the “science” of psychology to appeal to our vanities; that as nice, kind, caring people, we should tolerate the idiosyncrasies, perversions and dystopian character traits of the “foot soldiers from hell”, the psychopaths and narcissists who seem to be infiltrating themselves into all the most important positions of power.
It is these evil doers that start all the wars, and then install their own types at the tops of the charities, foundations and NGOs. So not only are we supplying their death-dealing weapons with our taxes, but they also prey on our good natures in persuading us to donate money to sort out their “collateral damage” as they would call it: the harm they have caused to innocent civilians. This makes us, in effect, the supply lines for the Masters of War, the narcissists and psychopaths who have no feeling for anyone but themselves.
However, Baudelaire’s “Devil” would have us believe that narcissists and psychopaths are really just poor victims of Cluster B personality traits who are suffering from various forms of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder), and that they just need our patience and healing to be turned into humans who know and respect the difference between right and wrong.
There is a whole industry on YouTube dedicated to examining the psychological traits of these sociopaths, and the most successful psych channels are those run and presented by self-confessed narcissists and psychopaths. The irony of the Devil gathering millions of followers hanging on to his every intellectual justification for why he’s not evil because “Look! Science has proved it… and so you’ve got to love me!” would be hilariously funny were it not so tragic.
The only expert that I’ve found on YouTube who has the courage to call out the evil of narcissism and psychopathy for what is, and then to go on to provide very good spiritual advice and solutions for those being abused by it, is Paula of Narc Con, and I thoroughly recommend her channel.
Otherwise, this huge and hungry audience — often victims desperate for answers and advice — are caught up in the illusion of the cognitive explanation being intellectually complete, while missing the full holistic picture. I sometimes wonder if that’s how the whole psychology industry keeps going. Sufferers of narcissistic abuse are often in expensive therapy for years and years because they don’t find the cure that way — only a transference of their dependence on the perpetrator on to the psychologist. Victims can be stuck forever in painful relationships because they don’t want to see themselves as so unkind or uncaring as to abandon a poor soul who after all, just needs their patience and support.
One thing we know for sure about narcissists and pyschopaths is that they will rarely, if ever, go for counselling. They may be evil but they’re not stupid. They know that, for them anyway, it would be a complete waste of time and money. And anyway, they delight in their diabolical natures.
You may have noticed that ‘evil’ is ‘live’ spelled backwards. I think there’s a synchronistic clue right there. The actions of people taken over by this evil energy are anti-life, anti people thriving and making their lives fruitful for themselves and their descendants. Add a ‘de’ for ‘of,’ as they do in France, to make ‘d’evil’, and you have ‘of evil’. That’s not the official etymology, of course. But as destruction and chaos seem to be the sole mission of certain types — whether in the family home or on the world stage — we can know them by their fruits.
The official etymology of the word “devil’, though, is interesting. It derives from the Greek word “diábolos” which meant “slanderer” or “accuser.” Anyone who has ever been the victim of a narcissist’s lies, devaluation, triangulation and smear campaign must be smiling here in recognition!
So the Devil goes way back beyond Christianity: we find the personification of evil in all the ancient myths, stories which, to me, contain warnings from our ancestors about the challenges we have to face. However, there’s never anything in those old tales about us having to feel sorry for, say, the murderous Egyptian Set or the wicked Persian Ahriman, because they had rotten childhoods. There is no mention that King Herod was badly potty trained and that’s why he ordered the Massacre of the Innocents, or that the one-eyed Balor, whose baleful gaze could raze a whole countryside and cause famine, was only that way because he was bullied at school.
There is actually a big flaw in the “nurture not nature” theories of the psychologists, because often only one child comes out of the family nest as a narcissist or psychopath, while their siblings go on to lead peaceful and fruitful lives.
I used to stay in the ashram of an Indian guru who would say: “When there is peace in the heart, there is peace in the home. When there is peace in the homes, there is peace in the city. When there is peace in the cities, there is peace in the country. When there is peace in the countries, there is peace in the world.”
If we were to turn that on its head, we would find the maxim of the narcissist and the psychopath. Their mission seems to be to cause hell and mayhem wherever they go.
But another great saying, which would put an end to the rule of the Devil (on YouTube, at least!) was left to us by the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu (771–256 BC): “Know thyself; know thy enemy. A thousand battles; a thousand victories.”
Only by knowing ourselves, through and through, and facing our flaws and all, can we ever hope to learn to recognise the narcissist and psychopath on sight, and see through his or her mask…. and then walk swiftly in the opposite direction.
Annie Dieu-Le-Veut 
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