It is very easy to judge someone for a horrible act that you could never imagine yourself committing. It is also very easy to fear extreme and unlikely events like shark attacks, and terrorist acts much more than it is to consider the more likely and common dangers that claim many more lives like driving a car. However, just as we fail to evaluate risk for what it is, we also fail to recognize that evil is far more commonplace than headline making horrors like school shootings and pedophile rings.
You don't need to know about the resent revelation of the largest child porn ring in history, or the ongoing starvation and slaughter of civilians in Syria by all sides of the conflict to know about evil. You don't even need to be aware of the large portion of the world that worries about getting food and clean water every day.
You also don't need to have taken part in causing these things to be guilty of evil.
Many often look at such horror and ask why. One could just as easily look out the window and ask the same if they knew what they were looking at. This is because, as always, that which goes unnoticed can and often does lurk under the surface like some Leviathan. Ignorance is not bliss and that which you do no know can indeed kill you. The evil comes from these things doing so to others.
Consider the clothes you wear. Now consider that the majority of the cotton used in the garment industry comes from Central Asia and is produced by what is essentially slave labor. Now consider that the agricultural practices employed to produce it have irreversibly destroyed the environment of the region and will continue to do so. This sort of thing doesn't go on the labels.
Consider the technology we use (I’m using a MacBook Air to write this). Not only the manufacture of the final products, but the procurement of the materials is extremely exploitative to the people involved. It’s easy to decry the ongoing wars in Central Africa. Not so easy to admit they are fought for resources that go into the technology your lifestyle is dependent on.
Consider that 1 in 5 American women reports sexual assault at some point. Now consider that that number is much lower than the actual number of sexual assaults. Men in the audience, ask yourselves some hard questions about your past and current relationships and consider the possibility that you may be a part of this.
These are only a few examples. The are sensational, which draws the attention. However, the key thing to remember is that all events have other events that lead to them. Nothing happens in isolation. To this end, complicity is as much of a contributing factor to evil as is the act itself because it sets the conditions for it to actually happen.
We are all guilty of complicity to one extent or another and thus all guilty of evil to one extent or another. Thus the question that will ultimately arise is so what? Another less damaging, but ultimately ineffective response is to blow up the issue into some major metaphysical-existential crisis. Workers rights. Global poverty. The 1%. This is all nothing more than hope soon to be swept away for lack of a path to reach it. As lofty and noble as such thoughts are, they are nothing more than good intentions, and few things have caused as much harm as good intentions.
Rather the answer, as always, is to actually do something right now. Rather than making the problem so large that it is either non-confrontable, or comfortably ignorable, look out the window. See what is going on right now. See reality for what it is. Have lunch with the homeless alcoholic. Ask the hard questions of those you are close to. Make decreasing the suffering of others a habit rather than voting for someone who states it as a campaign goal.
If evil is banal, so too can be its opposite.
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