The Christian idea is that evil comes from Satan. If there is such an entity as Satan, it would be found in places where it is least expected and not found in places where it is most expected.

Americans expect evil to come from the government. While some governments are in fact tyrannical and corrupt, American government is neither. The real abuses in America don’t come from the government. They come from places least expected. They come from entities deemed sacrosanct such as family and community – as well as of course priestry itself, as we have found out recently with Catholic clergy’s child molestation scandal.

The Communists expect evil to come from capitalists. The evil in Communist countries did not come from capitalism; it came from the government. In that situation government really was tyrannical and corrupt. The government was seen as representing the will of the people and was sacrosanct for that reason. It became a much bigger perpetrator than even the worst in Western capitalism.

There are some on the Left who expect evil to come from the system. Then they find themselves at the mercy of entities non-affiliated with the system, such as Taliban, inner city gangs and Westboro Baptists. These people get to find out that there are many things that can go wrong, and that the system is only one thing that can malfunction. Many find this out, to their grave detriment, from experiencing wrongdoing by entities unaffiliated with the system.

We see the same thing with places where evil is most expected. One such place is the criminals, drug addicts and mental patients. I had interaction with the preceding; I didn’t find them to be worse people than an average person. There is in psychology a belief that evil is caused by people with personality disorders. No; evil is caused by people choosing to do the wrong thing. That is the case regardless of their personality and psychology. Most people who do wrong are perfectly normal. They do not have a psychological problem, they have an ideological problem.

Where is evil most likely to be found? It appears that it is most likely to be found in places where it is thought least likely to be found. Satan can find ways to fool anyone. Adequate scrutiny is imposed on governments in Western democracies, there is enough attention being paid to fighting corrupt business practices, and there are enough people in the system who are good enough chaps. Attention needs to be paid to the least expected sources of evil such as family and community. That being done, family and community can become a value as wrongful practices in it are corrected while the benefit of family and community is achieved. And that will lead to the best possible scenario: Where people have both the rights and liberties of democracy and the human touch of community, and the two work together to create the best of possible worlds.