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By now, he should not be the least surprised by the capacity of evil people to deceive their credulous friends and neighbors—or by the unconscious preference of so many people to be deceived.
First are those for whom the words right and wrong have no meaning other than for such as traffic directions: You turn right at the second stoplight; if you turn left, you’ve gone wrong. They are nihilists, though not all of them know it and though many of them would bristle at the label. All such people are difficult to trust: some are dangerous, and some are lethal sociopaths.
Second are those who recognize right and wrong, a natural tao, and who try to live by what is right, as much as they can. These people are aware that real and implacable evil exists in the world; however, as a psychological defense mechanism, many of them grossly underestimate the prevalence of it.
Third are those who, busy with their lives, haven’t given much thought to right and wrong. When encountering profound evil, they are not sure what to think about it, and they seek to understand it as a complex phenomenon when in fact it’s simple. By imagining evil as infinitely nuanced, they drain all the bl...
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Members of the second group, who underestimate the prevalence of evil, are those most often targeted by it. They can pretty much be trusted not to do profound evil themselves, but
The third type, those who patiently analyze evil from numerous psychological and sociological perspectives until its sharp shiny edges are dull and blurry, are too indecisive to be allies in any fraught encounter with darkness. In fact, they are often likely to have overanalyzed the situation to such an extent that they have talked themselves into an alliance with monsters.
In a world sick with envy that leads to coveting that leads to greed that too often results in violence, it wouldn’t seem that something as small as excellent muffins could lift a man’s spirits, even during talk of murder. But that is the way of the world: sadness and delight, anger and forbearance, hatred and love—all woven together in every inch of the tapestry.
As Earth rotates away from the sun in its daily pursuit of darkness, the
No one can be trusted except when there is money to be made that can only be made working together.
Regret is a kind of sorrow, but he feels no remorse, which is a kind of gnawing guilt. Sorrow, but
no guilt.
where the animals that wake and live in the absence of the sun are going about their business more peacefully than does humanity. There is violence even among their kind, pain and death, but they do not lie to one another. They know nothing of the numerous varieties of deception to which the human race is heir, nor are they infected with the envy that drives men and women to destroy themselves and others—and frequently even empires.
