Evil: The Devil Made Me Do It

Satan is the only explanation that seems to make sense anymore.

Essays today are dominated by writers trying to make sense of the ubiquitous evil we see daily in every direction we look.  Catholic priests are debauching altar boys, cardinals are being defrocked for sexual improprieties, nearly every world leader is being replaced by authoritarian bullies who light their cigars with rolled-up copies of the 10 Commandments.  The US empire no longer promotes the pretense of being the guys in the white hats.  We are the bully on the block, and pay us our demanded homage or die.  We do not even care which choice you make - we win either way.  Erdogan, Putin, Trump, Duterte, Bolnosaro, Kim Jung very Ill.  They are all megalomaniacs hell-bent on self-destruction and taking us all with them.

Doubtless, the vast majority of readers, like myself, were taught as children about the Devil, and how Satan was a fallen angel who goes about all Creation undermining everything good as a way of lashing out at his creator for grievances unspecified.  Satan, we were told, is the origin of sin.  Throughout history, this horned and pointy-taled anthropoid personification of evil has been depicted in art and sculpture - even predating Christianity.  We were also taught that at the end of the world (whatever that is) Satan would raise havoc on mankind until God arrived to cast all evil into the everlasting pit of hell.  The event has been named Armageddon, and it precedes the second (and final) coming of Christ to earth.

By the time we completed school, Satan morphed into a mythical invention of ignorant camel-drivers and sheepherders.  People who warn of impending doom are mocked as mentally ill.  In the late BBC series "Apparitions" even cardinals expressed disbelief in the devil - a characterization of clergy that is not entirely untrue.

If that was not bad enough, we see catastrophic global warming around the corner.  Incurable diseases are being discovered almost daily.   Genetic experiments that might CRISPR a super race or more likely a zombie race.  We see addictions and suicides growing logarithmically.  Only a handful of people own most the world's wealth, and they use their armies to extract yet more of it.

So think about it.  What essay has presented a model that explains our world's exponential evil?  Maybe the ancients were right.  It is the devil's work, and he/she/it has a free hand because we fail to see how we facilitate evil by ignoring our own role in the world's apparent self-destruction.