{"product_id":"what-evil-means-to-us-u-s-intelligence-and-foreign-military-innovation-1918-1941-9780801434303","title":"What Evil Means to Us: U.S. Intelligence and Foreign Military Innovation, 1918-1941","description":"\u003cp\u003e • Author(s): C. Fred Alford\u003cbr\u003e • Publisher: Cornell University Press\u003cbr\u003e • Publisher Imprint: Cornell University Press\u003cbr\u003e • BISAC: Cognitive Psychology \u0026amp; Cognition\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eC. Fred Alford interviewed working people, prisoners, and college students in order to discover how people experience evil--in themselves, in others, and in the world. What people meant by evil, he found, was a profound, inchoate feeling of dread so overwhelming that they tried to inflict it on others to be rid of it themselves. A leather-jacketed emergency medical technician, for example, one of the many young people for whom vampires are oddly seductive icons of evil, said he would \"give anything to be a vampire.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDrawing on psychoanalytic theory, Alford argues that the primary experience of evil is not moral but existential. The problems of evil are complicated by the terror it evokes, a threat to the self so profound it tends to be isolated deep in the mind. Alford suggests an alternative to this bleak vision. The exercise of imagination--in particular, imagination that takes the form of a shared narrative--offers an active and practical alternative to the contemporary experience of evil. Our society suffers from a paucity of shared narratives and the creative imagination they inspire.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Cornell University Press","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":47781112643735,"sku":"9780801434303","price":6569.0,"currency_code":"INR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0666\/3471\/1191\/files\/9780801434303.webp?v=1778050670","url":"https:\/\/atlanticbooks.com\/products\/what-evil-means-to-us-u-s-intelligence-and-foreign-military-innovation-1918-1941-9780801434303","provider":"Atlantic Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}