Evil - Depthless, Immitigable and Ineradicable

And human. Resident, that is to say, in humans, and note the plural. 5% of us, sociologists (viz. Martha Stout) seem by consensus unduly to upperbound the prevalence of the coeurs du mal, are just unadulterated sociopaths, and we -- the mostly well-intentioned though afflicted, the gens moyennes affligées, the ones for whom Eliot laments the "strain on the brain of the small folk" -- might, just might muster the spiritual and the temporal strength to overcome, or at least to resist, since victory in the temporal realm for aught but the myrmidons of Satan appears somehow to have been forbidden... were it not for the one devastating and insuperable impediment of the lack of countervailing moral absoluteness on our side. Those of us not born (or nurtured) to persecute the innocent, ravage the planet, or emulate, as best we can, Snidely Whiplash the Plutocrat in reverent genuflection to the Antichrist, insatiable, in principle, while there's yet a widow left not tied to the railroad tracks. By which, I mean, there's a spectrum. Yes, most of us aren't sociopaths, but we're also not perfect and immaculate in an innocuousness symmetrically to oppose the moral toxicity of the sociopaths, who are, to all appearances, unadulterated, untrammeled and unvitiated in their passionate malignance (impossible not to think of Yeat's contrast of feeble conviction overborne by passionate intensity). So, are we doomed? Well, duh. Yes. At least, temporally. The problem is that, among the ones not explicitly pledged to evil (which includes not only the 5%, but their oath-respecting minions), mere weakness is enough. All that is required for evil to triumph -- well, practically nothing is required, because it's been demonstrated amply that good men and women, among whom I'd include at least the ones not oath-bound to Evil, will do just exactly "nothing" in nearly every single case. Out of fear, out of despair, out of oppression, out of what they may just rationalize (and correctly, from a temporal standpoint) as pragmatism. And those are most of the best among us. The Mother Teresas, the ones who'll stand in front of tanks in Tianenman Square, can be counted on the fingers of -- who knows? -- a few thousand hands? Or the feet of one millipede? Make no mistake. This isn't an unequal struggle or an uneven playing field. This is Hell. And it's been engineered to be this way by the very worst among us for centuries, for millennia, for as long as there've been the two facilitating elements.

Groups and Secrecy

Most singleton humans (the non-sociopathic ones) will do, for the most part -- well, the thing enjoined by the Hippocratic Oath -- no harm to others. The problem arises when they become members of groups, since those who seek to moderate the mob mentality of groups, the power-seekers, ipso facto the sociopaths, will overbear their better instincts, their moral compass, their better reason. Or, for want of a shorter word, their humanity, a thing that can seem to endure only in the smallest of gatherings of humans -- maybe, one is moved to think, those of our ancestors who huddled in caves and had too much to worry about fending off natural predators to kowtow to the ones who'd want to enslave them a few tens of thousands of years later for the useful purpose of constructing Big Stone Tombs. Then and today. the sociopaths band together with their minions, and their works grow in the fertilizer of secrecy. For Power.

And it's never enough. Caligula's motto: oderint dum metuant. Not sufficient that I (the sociopath) succeed, howsoever ueber-outrageously. Everyone else must suffer. We have a world run on an engine of Schadenfreude, a sort of universal Catherine's Wheel. An engine, I guess, maintained by the Morlocks, still hiding from the light.

Not that I'm complaining. It's just the way things are.

I have to assume (since most of us *do* have moral compasses), that they came from somewhere (Someone), and that the temporal battle isn't the real battle. And that the temporal (dominated by the Chthulu-worshipers) really doesn't matter in the spiritual frame. I don't disagree with Spinoza. The loss of any human life is the loss of a universe, and loss immune to quantification, let alone minimization in some cosmic speculum. It's just that each of us is something more than this, something more invulnerable to temporal immolation, something more immutable in the meaning of this 14-billion-year-old universe. And the sociopaths are chaff.

And "therefore..."

I hope it's some consolation. We Eloi so desperately need it.