The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
--Author unknown

The Age of Rogues and Thugs


Every now and then it seems worthwhile to pause in our routine activities and to reflect on a few fundamental questions that persist, and nag, and demand our attention. One question that has troubled many great thinkers in the past several hundred years is this: Are we still on course to destroying ourselves? And if we are, what can we do to alter that course and set our sights on a new outcome?

The answer to the first question is still an unambiguous “yes.” And the reasons can also be posited in the form of a series of questions: Which are the most pressing issues facing humanity that are reasonably within our abilities to control or to solve? Surely on this list are global warming; war; terrorism; the spread of nuclear and biological weapons; energy shortages; pandemics; resource allocation; hunger; population growth; wealth and income inequality; pollution; slavery; health care; and education.

Each of these issues seems to be a clear pathway to widespread suffering, death and destruction, or to our total extinction. What is more neither science, nor philosophy, nor religion, nor education, nor ideologies, nor prayer, nor wishful thinking has given us a glimpse or a hint that any of these nobler modes of thought can lead us away from our own follies, and turn us toward a pathway that hints of enlightenment.

Technology has not let us down. The means for making and controlling needed changes is within our abilities. The will to do so among the “enlightened” persons within our ranks also seems to be there. The power to muster the resources, the skills, and the authority to act is not. It is held by the few who love to dominate and control, but who have neither the moral, the psychological, nor the intellectual abilities to see beyond their weaknesses. And because we are still a hodge podge of societies that rely on brute strength and wealth for power and control, there seems to be little hope that any significant change between and among nations is likely to occur before we run out of time.

What is this strength possessed by the tyrants, or the weakness within all others that allows for the rise of brutes and the suppression of ourselves? Men have grandiose visions of self and are driven by greed. We are dominated by propaganda, and controlled by fear.

Adolf Hitler rose up from obscurity, with average intelligence, with no skills, with no visible physical or mental attributes that set him apart from others. Yet he ruled a highly developed country with many great minds, with an abundance of achievers, with a long history of outstanding contributors and scholars in the arts and sciences. His drive was centered on hatred, jealousy of others, a selfish and distorted vision of self, of racial superiority, and an insensitivity toward others that defied logic, compassion, or any quality approaching human kindness. He commanded followers while killing them ruthlessly. In the end he had not a single friend, yet his actions resulted in an estimated 73 million human deaths.

A similar tyranny lies at the heart of every issue listed in the second paragraph. And their leaders and followers consist of a long list of deniers. They assert that global warming is a fiction, that war is good when it is supports their vision, that pollution is the price of progress, that income and wealth accrue to the strong, that profits trump shortages, that growth issues will solve themselves, and so forth. They all seem to embrace faulty logic, while they show a total lack of compassion and humanity. I am constantly dumbfounded by the realization that a large portion of the world was dominated by church/state alliances that rested of the flimsiest notion that was likely ever conceived. That notion was that heresy (failing to believe what you are told to believe) resulted in 700 years of cruelty of unspeakable proportions. It was a time when hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people were charged, tried, imprisoned, tortured, and put to death because someone was offended when their own religious beliefs were questioned. Such a notion is beyond my cognitive powers, my affective distillery, and my combative nature to understand.

Men and women of great virtue and accomplishment have come and gone with little success in their efforts to persuade us or to get us to heed their warnings. We thus inch ever closer to the abyss, without solutions, without the wherewithal, and without a guide to changing the course that no one wants but the few.