On the Intersection of Craziness and Evil

This piece ran in the newspapers in September, 2025.

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I have defined “Evil” as “a coherent force that consistently works to make the human world more broken” — or, more plainly, “to make the human world worse.” Over the years, I’ve shown how, because of the way that “Brokenness begets brokenness,” one can see — actually see — such a “coherent force” operating in the real world.

For example, the brokenness of the world inflicts brokenness on the human beings who grow up in that world, and then, as the other leg in this vicious cycle — “broken” people make choices that make the world more broken.

When I look out upon the world, two ugly things loom very large: the grotesque ugliness of what is now in power in the United States of America, elected by the people in a free and fair election; and the terrible ugliness of what Israel has been doing in Gaza in response to the atrocities that Hamas inflicted on Israel — an ugliness that doesn’t seem to disturb most Israelis (except in terms of their not getting back the Israelis held hostage).

So much brokenness in both peoples, in each case enabling a Force of Brokenness

• to use an extremely broken American leader to attack almost every positive structure in American civilization — from the Rule of Law to scientific truth, from the nation’s leadership of the free world to the cooperative systems of world trade. Meanwhile, more than a third of Americans watch this utterly unhidden wrecking ball dash against the nation’s historic virtues, and see nothing wrong.

Something in these people got broken — as when so many who are passionate about being Christians aligned themselves not with “peace on earth” or “goodwill toward men” but with the very opposite of what Christ taught.

• to use a traumatized Israeli people to make it possible for the most morally broken government in Israel’s history to use the Hamas attack to break the world within Israel’s reach and break down Israel’s standing in the world.

Some explain the surprising lack of Israeli outrage at the war crimes committed in their name as an effect of trauma. The Hamas assault was designed to maximize trauma, and thus trigger an ill-considered response. And it succeeded, apparently inducing in the heirs of the Holocaust a frame of mind where the evil being inflicted on “the other” scarcely entered their moral picture. (Opposition to the war focused mainly on a few Israeli lives — which seemed to outweigh even tens of thousands of Palestinian lives.)

And, as with so many super-Christians in America, this Israeli Evil is committed by a government held hostage by a Jewish nationalist faction that presents itself as the most fiercely Jewish, while embodying the very opposite of the ethic at the heart of Judaism.

Religion is supposed to bolster the wholeness of the world, but the Force of Brokenness can sometimes break people in ways that drive them to betray what they say they believe in.

Brokenness begets brokenness:

• Think — in view of all that’s happened since January — how much more whole the world would be right now if Kamala Harris had won the Presidency, all the damage that wouldn’t have happened.

• Think how much more whole the world would be if the Israelis had responded to the October 7th assault from Hamas from a less triggered spot, choosing whatever would have been the wisest Israeli course for achieving Israel’s long-term survival and acceptance into the world of nations.

There’s one more big piece of my picture of today’s world that contributes to the bleakness of these times: the abysmal ugliness of Putin’s war on Ukraine. We cannot unsee the war crimes we have now seen again in Europe — a pivotal continent that, after giving us two world wars, had made such encouraging progress toward the peaceful order that humankind has always yearned for.

In the destruction Putin has wrought, we see another way that brokenness begets brokenness.

It is because of the brokenness of the anarchic intersocietal system — with no encompassing order to prevent the Forces of Disorder from making the world more broken — that a single sociopathic individual can plunge the European continent back into the darkness of fear and the destruction of human life.

The brokenness of the Russian people — for centuries exploited and dominated by tyrannical rulers, never learning how to claim rights they were never granted — made it possible for the fragile shoots of Russian democracy to be snuffed out by Vladimir Putin, with his dreams of imperial domination, the greed of a kleptocrat, and a cruel spirit ready to kill opponents.

I am one who yearns for wholeness in the human world: a world where societies are ruled by laws that are fair, where people act with goodwill toward one another, and where we sentient beings can find fulfillment.

But these three pictures of how the Force of Brokenness — “Evil” — is ascendant, with far more of the good in the world being damaged than being built, make this for me a nightmarish moment in our history.

And in every case where Evil prevails, we see that an essential piece of it lies in the brokenness of the people — something crazy in them that makes them contribute to the force that makes the human world worse.