All that is required for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.

Because it’s evolutionarily ingrained across life that individuals with a higher quality and quantity of offspring eventually dominate populations. And people who think more of others and less of themselves are usually not very good at that.

I saw on Mastodon someone say something kinda like this: good people don’t feel the need to dominate others.

Evil isn’t “winning” as much as it is “on top.” If you look around, talk to your neighbours and such, you’ll see that good and reasonable people are everywhere; good is the overwhelming majority.

That being said, positions of power are chased and coveted by those obsessed with power, and those aren’t good people. Good people need to take charge, but it’s — in a way — against their nature to do so.

People have it tough and I think they have gotten full of hate and greed. Evil people feed on hate and greed.

Have you ever cheated at a game, cut corners on work or purposefully did something unfair to get better from it yourself?

Yeah it’s much easier to win without any pesky ethics or a strong moral compass.

Good folks have been struggling uphill since the Ancient Greeks as long as there are folks trying to win with a different rule book.

Because you’re reading too much news and the intention of majority of them is not to make you informed but scared and angry. The vast majority of thing you’re scared about never end up happening.

I think when people feel like things are going downward (quality of life, economy, local security, international security, ecological crisis etc.), tend to regress towards a conservative reflex. They want to protect what they have, by extension, they don’t want things to change out of fear of losing what they have, or they attribute the loss of what they had to unrelated change (I lost my job because of immigration).
I think it requires good quality education and information to go past this conservative reflex and understand that accepting some constrains (regulations, taxes) may make society better for everyone.
It also means that manipulating education and information can prevent that and encourage people to take the natural conservative slope. I think “evil” people have found a powerful tool to do that with the mass adoption of social media that they can buy and manipulate.

I see two big solutions, either falling so low that humanism bounces back out of terror of what happened like after WW2. Or managing to implement systems that will prevent nefarious manipulation of information and instead promote humanism.

Because they’re evil. Rather, they don’t place the same constraints on themselves that a good person places on themselves.

Because only use news to inform yourself .

In some ways, evil is getting the upper hand at the moment, mostly brought on by moderates failing to address basic and fundamental problems forming in society due to being corporate captured.

However, we have a few options at our disposal:

1. Joining and organizing within your local community to create connections with others is incredibly powerful, will make the coming months much more bearable, and lay the ground work for effective resistance.
2. We can still effect things drastically with a general strike. This massively impacts their income streams, and can bring the country to its knees if done on a large enough scale.
3. Join the IWW and attempt to unionize your workplace, so that the general strike is even more effective.

If we put in the work, we can resist this and we can win. Don’t become paralyzed with doubt and fear, march on and push as much you can. Together we’re strong, separated we are weak. So join up with allies while we still can easily!

Evil is not held back by scruples or moral boundaries. Evil people will do whatever they need to to succeed. That includes manipulating people, something which today’s technology facilitates. Add to that the fact that for many people in developed countries, life is slowly getting worse instead of improving over the last few years. The frustration over that can easily be turned into hate against minorities, foreigners etc.

Because it is.

The common version of the phrase…

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,”

The actual version of the phrase…

“When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”

Simple material effect.

People are shaped by the interrest of the social and material class they are part of. And the evil people are always the one in power and have the money, so they act in the interest of their class and do things that help themselves.

Fucking Marx wrote about this quite a while ago, now his predictions just manifest more visibly, but the cultural and material forces have always been at play. Now we just reached a breaking point as a planet and population, so the underlying systems start to break too and the people on top do everything to stay in power, including ditching reality altogether.

Because it is. In many ways this is the West getting what was coming to it, but in any case you have rising evil and collaborationist “good” that’s too weak-willed or out of touch to stop it. Then you have the real good bickering among itself and too far up its ass to stop any of it.