Evil is among us.
Not in a distant, theatrical, Shakespearean way. Not cloaked in metaphor or softened by history.
It’s the person in front of you in line at the grocery store.
It’s the driver you just waved through.
It’s the knock at your door.
The unsettling part isn’t that evil exists.
It’s that it’s become so ordinary.
We live in a kind of slurry. A blended state where inputs and outputs blur together.
We joke that AI can’t truly create. We say that it only reconstitutes what it’s seen, what it’s learned. And yet we stop just short of recognizing the same constraints within ourselves.
Conditioned. Incentivized. Nudged.
Reassembled from what we consume and what consumes us.
This mirror becomes uncomfortable. So we look away.
But evil doesn’t just walk among us. It runs through us. Impossible to ignore, no angle to look away without it in our sight, without it whispering in our ear.
Okay. Now what?
Here we are, more or less collectively, at Day Zero: the point at which ignoring this reality is no longer plausible. This isn’t escalation so much as resolution.
The image has sharpened. The blur is gone. What remains is clarity, and clarity brings an uncomfortable responsibility.
What we’re about to learn, about ourselves and each other, is how deeply cowardice permeates the same social substrate.
And I don’t mean cowardice as a reluctance to harm. In many ways, it’s the opposite. Cowardice prefers clean lines. Simple answers. The removal of whatever is deemed bad, foreign, or inconvenient from the whole.
There’s a seductive logic to it. Cut away the rot, restore purity, move on.
Of course, painted differently, that same inverted definition of cowardice becomes a permission structure for cruelty at scale. Harm reframed as necessity. Violence reframed as order.
What this logic fails to understand is that some things just don’t scale. Cruelty chief among them.
Cruelty is exertion. It’s transference. It’s energetically expensive. It demands an end state. It requires an other, and it requires participation… again and again and again. It burns fuel constantly. Entropy catches up.
Joy doesn’t work that way.
Peaceful joy is effervescent. It radiates. It spreads without instruction. It doesn’t need enforcement or consensus. It simply shines. And I think we need more of that right now. Not as an escape, but as a counterforce.
Honestly, the most punk rock thing we could do right now is slow down and sing together.
I wonder what overcoming this moment will actually require. I wonder even more what we’ll build on the other side of it.
Evil won’t be extinguished. There will always be an other. The weakest among us will continue to use cowardice to salve their hurt hearts. It won’t work. Not at scale. Not across time.
And still… Here’s the bind:
I am stricken with a palpable sense of indignation toward the entity into which a sizable portion of my earnings flows.
My work. My effort. Taxed. Siphoned.
Fed directly into the very apparatus we claim we want extinguished.
There’s no clean exit from that realization.
Only the clarity of seeing it.
And what we each choose next.
Author’s note:
This piece was developed in collaboration with generative systems, used not as a source of answers but as a pressure test for clarity. AI assisted in structuring, refining, and stress-testing the ideas, as well as co-developing the accompanying visual language. All arguments, judgments, and conclusions remain my own.