In our modern world, it's very common to conflate motives we don't understand with some form of mental illness.

This is understandable when it comes to horrific crime. Someone like a serial killer is so violent and twisted that it's hard for us to comprehend their actions.

And there's certainly a fair amount of mental illness that plays a factor.

But today, people often use this explanation

when it comes to political disagreements. Abortion, hatred for Christians and white people,

the mutilation of children to turn boys into girls. These beliefs are so horrible that they can

only possibly be explained by a malfunctioning brain. Of course, that's not the only

explanation. The other option is that some people have a very different set of values that

drive them to pursue goals that we view as evil. The average American would like to avoid this

truth because it comes with an unnerving conclusion.

Your political enemies aren't crazy. They're sane people who hate you and want to hurt you.

As very sophisticated and modern people, we tend to avoid language that implies some form of objective metaphysical truth.

Evil is a concept that conjures up images of old churches,

judgmental Sunday school teachers,

and medieval peasants trying to explain a drought.

We're sophisticated and scientific people who have the technology and understanding

to explain everything in the world that we see.

Explanations that call for unseen forces or divine intervention are no longer required.

In this thoroughly materialistic view, humans are simply animals with more sophisticated brains,

and any undesirable behavior can be understood as a malfunction of that brain.

There's no evil. There's only mental

illness. Modern Americans are also universalists in a very strange sense. We assume that our

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