The Convenient Evil
People need enemies. That’s what I’ve noticed anyway. Not just actual adversaries—imaginary ones, the kind you can point to and say there’s the problem. Societies run on them. So we get a rotation: one year it’s Putin calmly invading, the next it’s ISIS, al-Qaeda, Kim Jong-un, whoever plays the part well enough. The ranking shifts constantly, sometimes dramatically. One decade Bashar al-Assad is the worst thing alive, the next we’re almost friendly with him.
What gets me is how precisely the moral calculus aligns with economic interest. Saudi Arabia executes people for witchcraft, for blasphemy, for nothing at all. They disappear journalists. But they never seem to climb the charts. Maybe because they sell us oil, or we sell them tanks and missiles. Evil gets ranked by convenience, not by body count. The enemies that matter are the ones that move markets. Everyone else can wait their turn, or never get one at all.