I just watched a movie with my sisters about Human Trafficking, something that they found on TV. It quite vividly portrays how powerful and real an international chain of human trafficking is - literally enslaving people, mostly for sexual exploitation.

While every aspect of this is representative of pure evil and total in-humanism, what feels especially threatening is that nobody can really claim to be completely safe. Be in the wrong place and at the wrong time and you can become a victim, or one of your relatives or friends etc.

I often talk about philosophical topics, analysing the reality, humanism and humanity’s evolution, freedom and environmentalism. It is about problems and setting up the mind set that could produce solutions and consequently, improvements to this world. But when I see things like this, the cynism in me gets so much boost… as if it hadn’t have enough already. There is so much evil in this world, magnitudes more than we are even aware of, worse than we can probably begin to imagine when considered in whole, evil that is only produced by - humans.

So I begin to wonder and I begin to understand, not necessarily condone, but understand why so many people turn to God, or illusion of one at least. When it becomes so unbearable, when it starts feeling hopeless, you have to manufacture a hope to hold on to. People who are, as I speak tonight, slaves living in a literal hell that their fellow humans prepared for them, do not have much to hold on to. I can wholeheartedly understand why religion gets born out of this. Pity that, as every evil seems to breed more evil, religious institutions (and other groups, mind you) prey on it for their petty agendas or some twisted kind of pleasure.

The chain of evil seems to have no ending, probably because it is a circle, one with an incredibly large radius I might add.

So what is one to do, when really looking at this reality in the eye, really understanding that it is there, that it exists, that it destroys and consumes living sentient beings, that it destroys humanity from the inside, that it feeds on it - what is the proper conclusion? What is the proper reaction? What is the proper action to undertake?

You can become a lifetime activist, if you have the stamina. Or you can become a bigger and bigger cynic. In all honesty these kinds of realizations breed mostly negative emotions in me - and a separatist and vengeful instinct. I feel this desire for a clean slate, but I realize that every pursuit of such an ideal will only result in more evil. The only way you can have a clean slate is by stamping out those deemed, according to a certain rule set as “evil” and eradicating them - a very religious approach indeed. When the saviour comes he shall take his children up on the heavens and let down a burning fire to all the evil beings that are left behind - to cleanse the Earth and allow for a fresh start.

How fucking charming.

Obviously, radical types of solutions like that one are not solutions at all. It means exaggerating the amount of suffering and destruction that already exists to a level that merely accelerates our destruction. So where are the solutions?

Faced with such an immense power of evil in this world, no other solution seems attainable within our life time, or multitude of life times even. It is so rooted that every where you look, if you just allow yourself to think enough to see the implications of every group of people you walk by, every building you see, every vehicle that drives by, every piece of equipment you are using, every sentence of your language - you might find evil somewhere in there - in its history, in its reason for being, in its purpose of existence. How?

Any group of people could involve “tortured souls”, abused people or abusers. You don’t know that it does, but you don’t know that it doesn’t either. In a world in which these things happen, you are forced to this kind of uncertainty, to suspicion and ultimately caution or fear - and the root of this is, in simplistic but fundamental term, that human evil.

Same story for buildings which could be built by the sweat and blood of overworked workers working for an unfair greedy corporation. A vehicle could be driving a next “shipment” of slaves down that grey road. A piece of equipment you are using could be produced in sweatshops employing cheap overworked children or be made out of environmentally toxic material when ultimately wasted. The language you speak in may be (and almost always is) the language in which name murders in “national” wars have been fought.

I know, this is cynical to the extreme. I know you might say this is seeing only the bad in the world while ignoring the good. And ultimately I am aware that the logic here would dictate awareness not of only one, but both sides of the coin. See evil, but see good too. Balance the two for your own sanity and for the preservation of your human self as someone who is capable enough to make a difference.

But when it appears as if the evil greately outnumbers the good, or even worse, infiltrates what is perceived as good, deceives you as good.. that’s where things become tricky.

An example? Most people in the western world would probably still believe that democracy is a good thing and that this is what we have in our countries and states, that we are free people, free nations which can choose their leaders and if they do bad punish them by NOT choosing them. It is good. How many people out there could swear how they are helping themselves and their country by voting on elections, how they are exercising their right to make a difference etc. They see it as good, almost without any question about it. It’s as good as the sunlight, as good as an act of kindness. It’s good.

Yet it is evil. You are brainwashed. You are blind. There is no real choice. In Croatia, we only had two real choices both of which are so similar that it is hard to imagine how can this be called a *choice*. Even the more marginal parties don’t offer anything radically different. The most vivid example of that may be the fact that all of these parties are hell bent on bringing the country into the supposedly “democratic” European Union while MOST PEOPLE OPPOSE EU!

And in US? You really think democrats and republicans are so different? You really think you have a choice in the matter? You really think you’re changing the course in any significant way by voting for either of them?

Democracy. Yeah right. Just another stage. Just another way of making people believe they are free to choose, that they live in a free country, while they are being led in a direction of which they are not only oblivious about, but incapable of affecting.

And I could go on and on about evil impersonating good. How can you go by in this world trying to see good in everything, or even a balance between good and evil, and be sure that what you think you see is really what you see?

The conclusion to which this leads to might be “well fsck it then, I don’t care anymore, I’ll just take care about myself and my family”. Indeed, the instinct, the final instinct, is to cacoon ourselves into safety, a degree of isolationism. But where does that lead us?

I have no answers. I feel there are no satisfactory answers. There are only ideals, hopes, like religion something you must hold on to for the sake of your own sanity and sense of accomplishment. Do what you love to do and what you think is right. Do what you believe will make a world a better place, even if it never becomes a Good World.

And Evolution created the heaven and the Earth, and saw that it was…. EVIL. Now some humans.. one in a million, are trying to rectify that mistake. But the odds are looking insurmountable. And many shall give up or give in.