The world seems to make less and less sense with each passing day. Values we once cherished and that bound civil society together face daily bombardment. Offensive things are routinely said and done to intentionally inflame and divide. Freedoms we once took for granted—freedoms of thought, speech, press, religion—are under relentless assault as intrusive government and cancel culture gain ground.
Orwellian is no longer just an adjective. Words and thoughts, once neutral or perhaps disagreeable but not actionable, are now treated as crimes. History is being rewritten to serve political agendas. Petty tyrannies are morphing into bigger tyrannies as governments play an ever more intrusive role in our lives.
We are witnessing an alarming collapse of social cohesion that is propelled, as if it were consciously planned, by something bigger and more menacing than simply falling standards of character.
Today, absolute evil flourishes in clever guises: for instance, distorted versions of social equality, or the officially sanctioned proliferation of outright lies and their costly consequences for the economic and physical well-being of entire communities. This form of evil is of the worst sort, according to Rabbi Gershon Winkler of the Walking Stick Foundation, since it is deceptively camouflaged by rhetoric disguised as humanitarian concern and compassion. Even the serpent in the Garden of Eden could not match the evil of draping the wool over the eyes of an entire population and allowing it to slip-slide into passive naiveté. Dishonesty and deception have time and again caused the fall of great civilizations.
Evil is inseparable from morality and moral agents. A hurricane is not a moral agent – only individual human beings are, and therefore both their conscious choices and actions can be judged by a moral code or law. The Judeo-Christian perspective argues that the source of this code is the Creator and His moral rules are spelled out in the Ten Commandments.
Every manifestation of evil involves a desire to dominate and control, to compel another to bow to one’s will. Evil often starts out small and draws its victims in one bite at a time. Deception about where it’s really headed only magnifies the evilness.
The mortal enemy of evil is truth. Evil is profoundly reactionary and pessimistic. It is at war with human nature because it deals with people not as the unique and precious individuals endowed with rights but as pawns, dupes and tools. Evil is invariably a foe of individual freedom and all ally of collectivist socialism and its authoritarian impulses.
Evil is not a fantasy – it is real.
When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” Edmund Burke
Source: Evil Is Rising, but Despair Is Not an Option by Lawrence W. Reed, FEE.org; It’s Not About Politics by Ray DiLorenzo, Canada Free Press
