Some big thinkers, and some gods, would say “yes,” in two forms. Nature’s lesser evil; the messy fight to survive, reproduce, recycle and create. And human evil; spawned by fear, selfishness and delusion. Marx and Jesus described the root of our evil as the glorification of material things. The desire to have more and inflate this presumed superiority and perpetuate it into the future, what Kant and Jesus called the evil of self-glorification.
We now come to another point in our economic development where the disparity in material wealth is at a high point. Marx, some say, actually justified evil (“by whatever means necessary”) in the name of redistribution to establish material equality. Are we to that point again? Another revolution to fix a corrupted political system? Another kick to the money-changers’ table?
President Trump will go down as one of our most influential leaders because he has exposed the evil in the swamp by standing in the middle of it. By illuminating callous greed and racism — and leading us to the ultimate realization that we need to be more gentle and sharing with each other. Hopefully, before we fall to a divide-and-conquer attack and are forced to learn Chinese.
