There’s a season for everything, even for evil, but it won’t last forever.

Because it’s evolutionarily ingrained across life that individuals with a higher quality and quantity of offspring eventually dominate populations. And people who think more of others and less of themselves are usually not very good at that.

Evil is not held back by scruples or moral boundaries. Evil people will do whatever they need to to succeed. That includes manipulating people, something which today’s technology facilitates. Add to that the fact that for many people in developed countries, life is slowly getting worse instead of improving over the last few years. The frustration over that can easily be turned into hate against minorities, foreigners etc.

Have you ever cheated at a game, cut corners on work or purposefully did something unfair to get better from it yourself?

Yeah it’s much easier to win without any pesky ethics or a strong moral compass.

Good folks have been struggling uphill since the Ancient Greeks as long as there are folks trying to win with a different rule book.

Because it is.

Because they’re evil. Rather, they don’t place the same constraints on themselves that a good person places on themselves.

The common version of the phrase…

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,”

The actual version of the phrase…

“When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”

Simple material effect.

People are shaped by the interrest of the social and material class they are part of. And the evil people are always the one in power and have the money, so they act in the interest of their class and do things that help themselves.

Fucking Marx wrote about this quite a while ago, now his predictions just manifest more visibly, but the cultural and material forces have always been at play. Now we just reached a breaking point as a planet and population, so the underlying systems start to break too and the people on top do everything to stay in power, including ditching reality altogether.

Because only use news to inform yourself .

I think when people feel like things are going downward (quality of life, economy, local security, international security, ecological crisis etc.), tend to regress towards a conservative reflex. They want to protect what they have, by extension, they don’t want things to change out of fear of losing what they have, or they attribute the loss of what they had to unrelated change (I lost my job because of immigration).
I think it requires good quality education and information to go past this conservative reflex and understand that accepting some constrains (regulations, taxes) may make society better for everyone.
It also means that manipulating education and information can prevent that and encourage people to take the natural conservative slope. I think “evil” people have found a powerful tool to do that with the mass adoption of social media that they can buy and manipulate.

I see two big solutions, either falling so low that humanism bounces back out of terror of what happened like after WW2. Or managing to implement systems that will prevent nefarious manipulation of information and instead promote humanism.

I saw on Mastodon someone say something kinda like this: good people don’t feel the need to dominate others.

Evil isn’t “winning” as much as it is “on top.” If you look around, talk to your neighbours and such, you’ll see that good and reasonable people are everywhere; good is the overwhelming majority.

That being said, positions of power are chased and coveted by those obsessed with power, and those aren’t good people. Good people need to take charge, but it’s — in a way — against their nature to do so.

I theorize that it has a lot to do with rich people. There’s more wealth inequality than ever before, or at least (because I’m not well versed in history) if billionaires are maybe roughly equivalent to some kings of yore, that those kings couldn’t have the same widespread impact in old times because of modern mass communication. Billionaires skew overwhelmingly amoral, so this increased global reach is allowing them to shape and skew things in amoral directions, which includes propping up power hungry leaders to do their bidding. This is especially true because the communication channels are controlled by other wealthy people who benefit from the system, so they have a vested interest in seeing that the algorithms continue to support the owner class.

Even savvy leaders like Putin can’t do it alone and alienate the oligarchs (see this CGP Grey video on “rules for rulers” as to why), but beyond that it’s easy to see why weak idiots like trump are simple enough to puppet with money and flattery.

Humans are not perfect, they evolved into what they are now very very slowly. Technology surpassed that and we’ve learned how to manipulate the flaws in humans to control the actions of the masses. The sad part is it isn’t even difficult, it’s very easy to convince people to act against their interests if you get them to associate the desired action with their baser instincts: sex, resources, security.

When a flaw can be exploited, we exploit it. But exploiting it is evil.

You can chalk it up to humans being inherently evil, but it’s just difficult to fight against our inherent flaws, against the animal instincts which drive us and especially the less educated.

Unpopular opinion, but in the west particularly, folk have mistaken writing on the internet for action.

Tweeting resistance rather than performing it.

A lapse into inaction framed as radical rest and self care.

Online they are fierce warriors of justice, offline they go to work in Starbucks, use their apple devices to talk to their families and enjoy the treadmill of streaming services.

And this isn’t to blame them. This is the point of consumerist capitalism. To trap you in a gilded cage.

Because it is. In many ways this is the West getting what was coming to it, but in any case you have rising evil and collaborationist “good” that’s too weak-willed or out of touch to stop it. Then you have the real good bickering among itself and too far up its ass to stop any of it.