Power and Innocence: A Search for the Sources of Violence

I bought this for a gift for someone who works as a psychologist and they told me his books are fantastic!

I found this book very instructive, full of insight into the underlying causes of violence of all kinds. I wish I had known about this earlier in my life. May makes the argument that every human being requires significance and if a system obstructs that for too long, violence will inevitably erupt like the sudden emergence of boiling in a pot of water that has been heated for some time. He describes some ideas that are difficult to face, such as that America has always been a land of violence, from the initial genocide of the Indians, through the 1968 political assassinations, to the present day occupations of other people's countries. Another is that the violence in war is sometimes described by soldiers as accompanying deep experiences they miss after their combat experience is over. I highly recommend this book for both its substance and its readability.

....to Stephen Diamond's ANGER, MADNESS, AND THE DAIMONIC, this book always reminds me of one of its central ideas: that innocence unaware of its own daimonic dimension (its own shadow) becomes evil.

POWER AND INNOCENCE is even more pertinent to today's violent society than it was when first published in 1972--during the Vietnam war. Subtitled A SEARCH FOR THE SOURCES OF VIOLENCE, May elaborates really on his introduction to readers in LOVE AND WILL of his conception of "the daimonic," pointing out how power--though corruptive when absolute or totally absent--can, like anger or rage, also be a positive, constructive force. He also warns of the dangers of "pseudoinnocence": an immature, naive inability or (often religious) unwillingness to recognize the reality of evil in the world, oneself or others. Such denial of the daimonic is the antithesis of true spirituality. Though the war is long over, we Americans are currently engaged in hostilities of a different kind: domestic violence, schoolyard massacres, bombings and general mayhem. We are as violent as ever--maybe more so--and May's superb and prescient book is as aprop! os as ever--maybe even more so.