We need to ask ourselves a very important question: what exactly is evil, and how do we stop it from proliferating? How do we restrain it so that it doesn’t grow to the point of consuming our entire civilization?
To answer this question, let’s look at the definition of evil as found in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, which defines it as being “morally reprehensible, sinful, wicked; arising from actual or imputed bad character or conduct; causing harm; the fact of suffering, misfortune, and wrongdoing; something that brings sorrow, distress, or calamity.” It can be used as a noun, adjective, or adverb.
With this definition in mind, we could look around us, and look at the entirety of our human history, and we see that the human race is abundant and replete with examples of evil. For example, in a broader sense, when nations commit genocide, single out a single group of people to horribly mistreat, or enslave entire blocks of people, treating them as no better than semi-worthless animals, we can see tremendous amounts of evil at work. In a narrower sense, when a serial killer murders a bunch of innocent people; or a rapist, with no control of his sexual appetites, rapes a bunch of women; or thieves attack and hurt people to steal property from them and loot their possessions; or when criminally-minded gangs roam the streets in poorer, inner-city neighborhoods, or in countries like El Salvador, terrorizing the people that live there, making them live in fear of their safety of just peaceably living their lives; all of these are examples of evil in our society that, in many cases, hits us close to home.
When you think about all of these things that represent and epitomize evil, the important thing for you to understand is you should not want these things, under any circumstances, to proliferate and flourish throughout society. You want to restrain it. The more we allow evil to grow throughout society, the more unstable and chaotic it becomes. It’s like a virus that grows and grows, consuming everything in its path, until the whole of society is consumed, and all that’s left is a rotten corpse.
A stable and peaceful society is one where people flourish, not evil, allowing society, and its citizens, to thrive, prosper, and grow in strength. It’s a society that continues to move forward and progress, has longevity, lasting long into the future. If we look at the numerous civilizations that have collapsed throughout human history, we discover that a vast majority of them collapsed from within, due to their own moral decay – this is just another way of saying that evil was not restrained, but was allowed to grow and proliferate until it consumed those civilizations to the point where they could no longer function or sustain themselves, at which point they collapsed. If we want everyone to benefit from a stable and peaceful society, one that is long-standing and progresses in a forward manner, then that means we need to stop the spread of evil. We need to stop it from growing and expanding, like a virus, until it destroys us.
So, how do we do this? How do we stop the spread of evil? How do we stop it from growing and expanding like a virus so that it doesn’t consume us and destroy us? The answer is that we have four things in our society that, if healthy and kept intact, hold evil at bay and keep it from expanding and consuming us. Here are the four things:
- Law enforcement
- The church
- The family
- Our conscience
Now that I’ve listed these four things, let me go into some more detail as to how these four things work.
1. Law Enforcement
The job of these people, if we’re to be generalistic, is to stop evil people from doing evil things so that the rest of us can enjoy our lives with a relatively high level of freedom and safety from the threats to our well-being that comes from evil people, and their evil behavior. Law enforcement comes, stops these evil-minded people from doing their evil, sequesters them into prisons, and stops their evil from proliferating and hurting people.
Ideally, evil behavior is banned by law, and law enforcement works to enforce those laws that ban evil and support good behavior. Societies never get it perfectly right, but they’re so much better for trying.
If law enforcement backs off, and isn’t aggressive in their attempts to restrain and hold back evil, then evil becomes more rampant, flourishes, and everyone suffers. We can see no better example of this happening than watching what has happened in our black communities within our big cities, here in the United States, after the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Keep in mind that throughout the 1970’s and early 1980’s, many black communities were struggling from the unrestrained proliferation of evil in their communities. Crime was rampant. Violent crime and homicide rates were going through the roof. Black leaders knew they needed to do something to curb this problem. The answer came when Republican and Democratic lawmakers worked together to pass a law, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, that created much harsher penalties for crack cocaine use and selling, and allowed the police to be more aggressive at combating and restraining this proliferation of evil. And you know who else was on board with that plan? Black lawmakers – all the members of the Congressional Black Caucus at the time stood behind in support of this plan. So did most members of the black community, who rallied around their caucus.
Once the police got rolling in their more aggressive police tactics, the black communities saw their violent crime and homicide rates fall, evil being more restrained, and everything started becoming safer, relatively speaking, for the peaceful members of the black community who were just trying to live out their lives in peace.
Then a new generation of blacks came along, who had forgotten everything that happened. They had new technology – camera phones – that allowed them to more easily capture events of police aggressiveness. And social media made these videos go viral, so that everyone could now see these events. This helped to lead to the creation and rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.
That movement, which basically vilified all law enforcement because of the few who abused their power, or was based on blatant lies, caused law enforcement to back off, leading the criminally-minded members of their community, those that do evil, to become emboldened, causing the homicide and violent crime rates in those communities to skyrocket out of control, like it did back in the 1970’s and early 1980’s. The rise and flourishing of evil in their communities is directly related to the backing off of law enforcement. It seems that this movement has forgotten all that their predecessors did in the 1980’s, and has backtracked. This movement is, based on the truth that black lives matter, but has quite literally caused tens of thousands of black lives to not matter. Talk about a contradiction!
So, law enforcement helps to restrain evil, keeping it from flourishing, and when law enforcement backs off, evil grows and expands, hurting society. We see this most clearly in the black communities. This brings us to the second thing that restrains evil.
2. The Church
Now I can’t tell you about other religions, just my own, since I’m a Christian. Nor am I speaking to evil behavior that was allowed to proliferate within the leaders of one sect of Christianity that hurt many people. I’m speaking of the ideal purpose of the church.
From a general standpoint, the church, which represents those who follow Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, and follow his teachings, are to live the kind of lives which causes goodness to proliferate, and causes evil to be suppressed, repressed, and eventually destroyed. Being a Christian, a follower of Jesus, is a lifelong process of becoming ever closer to the ideal version of ourselves – we’ll never get completely there in our lifetime, but we are all the better for trying, and so is society.
How does the church restrain evil? They do this by first recognizing that humans are inherently evil and sinful, and working against that nature. The process of confessing our sins, our inherent evils, to our kin, helps us, with our kin’s moral support, to combat and work against our human nature.
Second, by assembling at our churches, we listen to sermons that, if done right, have a convicting quality that helps us see evils, and the seeds of evils, inside of us, and work to help us weed them out before they grow and become powerful negative forces that consume ourselves and society. The church works to develop and improve our conscience, which I’ll be talking about later in this article.
Third, the church develops ministries whose goals are to stop the effects of evil in our society, as well as attempting to stop evil itself – they might have food pantries to feed the hungry, shelters for battered women, counseling programs to teach people how to control their temper, counsel married couples so that their improved relationship doesn’t lead to a broken home, and then there’s marriage conferences, day-care centers, and the list goes on and on.
Oh yeah, and we can’t forget that the abolitionist anti-slavery groups in the first half of the nineteenth century were primarily Christian groups. The Christians saw slavery as evil and wanted to work to abolish that horrendous institution.
And we can’t forget that our modern health care system in the Western world got its start because of the Christians creating institutions to take care of the sick.
These are just a few of the ways that the church restrains, holds back, evil, and works to destroy it.
I know some of you are thinking, “Churches are far from perfect. They are so full of faults that I don’t even want to go to church!” If this is what you’re thinking, keep in mind that, yes, the church is not a perfect institution; it has not been perfect since the day Jesus left us. But despite its imperfections as an institution, its existence works so much more powerfully to restrain evil than not being in existence. Remember, it was the imperfections in the early churches at Thessalonika, Corinth and Ephesus that were one of the reasons why Saint Paul wrote letters to those three churches, which he wrote in part to address their imperfections so they could be corrected and become more perfect – these writings are today considered part of the Pauline Epistles and the Christian scriptures, and if you haven’t read them, consider doing so, looking for those imperfections Paul was trying to address.
I want you to also keep in mind that there is a deeply spiritual cord running down the middle of all of this, but I’m only talking about the more general aspects of the church today, and its work at combatting evil.
Now let’s move on to the next thing that restrains evil, and this next thing is something that I’ve written extensively about.
3. The Nuclear Family
There is a strong correlation between the intact traditional nuclear family and evil being suppressed and restrained. The point of my article series on the family is about the importance of the family structure to society, so I’m going to go into more detail with this point about the role of the intact nuclear family structure, and how it helps to hold down, and suppress, evil.
If you don’t believe me, let’s go over some statistics that I’ve given before, but tweak them a little bit so that you see them from a good vs. evil perspective. To start out, I want you to understand that criminal law is about taking things that we, as a society, deem to be evil, and codifying those things into law, laws that ban those evil things from being perpetrated. The argument is that by allowing the intact family structure to flourish throughout society, and changing the households that don’t represent this intact family structure into households that do, we can do a great deal to maximize our ability to restrain evil, and help bring progress and longevity to our civilization. And strengthening the family does so much more to restrain evil than any amount of government programs could ever do.
Now, with that understanding in mind, let’s begin.
– Children that don’t come from an intact family background are much, much more likely to commit violent crimes than those born into intact families. In fact, 17 out of every 20 inmates in prison come from broken homes that are far from being intact, healthy, two-adult families.
– When a child doesn’t come from an intact family structure, they are much less likely to have parental involvement in their life, and the emotional attachment to parents that it brings, and this greatly increases the likelihood of that young person perpetrating a crime, and becoming a criminal.
– A rise in violent crime over the previous thirty years is directly related to a rise in the number of young people who don’t grow up in intact and functional families, a problem which is most profound in black communities, where only one in four households represent an intact family. High-crime neighborhoods are characterized by households with no father present, that is, a lack of households that represent traditional two-parent family structures.
– You’ll notice that when looking at statistics on a statewide level, that the states that have a higher percentage of intact families have a lower crime rate. For example, according to one study, the states that have the highest percentage of traditional families have a violent crime rate of 343 per 100,000 people, whereas states that have the lowest percentage of their populations in traditional family households have a violent crime rate of 563 per 100,000 people.
– Across the country, a 10% increase in fatherless homes, that is, homes with a single mother raising children by herself, and not the traditional nuclear family structure with two adults, correlates to a 17% increase in juvenile crime, suggesting that there is a type of “compound disinterest” that takes place concerning the traditional family, or lack thereof.
– The type of aggression and hostility usually seen in adult criminals, that epitomizes evil, can be seen, or foreshadowed, in those same people earlier in their lives, such as by unusual aggressiveness seen as early as 5 or 6 years of age. This aggressive behavior is much more likely in children who don’t come from traditional family environments, but are raised in a home by a single mother, that is, don’t come from an intact family background.
– If you analyze homes in neighborhoods that are considered high-crime areas, 90% of children raised in a safe and stable family environment avoid criminal activity, whereas only 10% of children raised in an unsafe and unstable home environment, where there isn’t an intact family structure present, or a father present, avoid criminal activity. If criminal activity represents evil that has been codified and banned by law, that’s a big difference in the amount of evil that comes from broken homes vs. homes with intact families, right?
-If a man, who has been a habitual criminal matures to the point of maintaining a stable marriage relationship, which is essentially the core of an intact family, this maturity, which allows him to have that healthy relationship, parallels a gradual decrease in criminal activity by that man. Not only that, his example also greatly decreases the odds that his children will become criminals and thus commit violent crime when they get older.
– Having both a mother’s strong affectionate attachment, and a father’s authority and involvement, in a child’s life seems to be the most important buffer against that child having a future life of crime and doing evil. In many of America’s inner cities you’ll find that in most households that there is no father present, and the relationship that a single mother tends to have with her child tends to be quite distant. All too often, this distant relationship becomes an abusing and neglectful relationship. These conditions greatly increase the risk of that child growing up to become a psychopath, the epitome of an evil person.
– You’ll find that most most men that are charged with rape, a terrible evil perpetrated on women, come from broken homes that don’t have intact two-adult family structures. These men that don’t come from these intact and healthy families are many times more likely to commit rape.
– Two out of every three juveniles in juvenile detention centers come from households that don’t have intact family structures.
– Are behavioral disorders a representation of evil? I think so. They hinder the well-being of those individuals who suffer from them, causing them to be more likely to perpetrate crimes, be violent, have problems with poverty and homelessness, magnify our drug problems, and the addictions and street violence that comes with that, and generally become a drain on our nation’s resources, all things of which fall in the category of forms of evil. Now, if this is the case, it’s important to note that 85 percent of the behavioral disorders found in children, and a large percentage of those found in adults, can be traced back to the fact that they didn’t come from intact families, and the effects their upbringing had on their behavioral development.
– Those that don’t come from healthy, intact families are much more likely to commit suicide, drop out of high school, abuse chemical substances, and end up in mental institutions or prison.
– Those that come from intact families tend to be more well off economically, and have more upward economic mobility. Young people that don’t come from intact families tend to be much more likely to be disadvantaged and underprivileged, and to live in childhood poverty. This economic disparity is a form of social evil found in society.
– The role of a father, in a healthy relationship with his wife, does more by example to help foster positive social behaviors in a son, which allows him to be better equipped to stay out of trouble, have better self-control, and not go down a life path of doing evil. This increases the young person’s chances of flourishing and prospering, and not perpetrating evil.
As you can see, the role that the intact traditional nuclear family structure plays in reducing and suppressing evil, and keeping it from proliferating and destroying society, is enormous. The more we can, as a society, strengthen, support, and build up the family, the more we can help to bring evil under wraps and protect society, allowing it to move forward, and have longevity.
With this being said, there is one more thing we have, in our society, that helps to keep evil at bay.
4. Our Conscience
Our conscience allows us to live well, and be good, and avoid evil. It stops you when you’re tempted to make that bad decision that, if made, takes you down the road to evil. Our conscience tells us what not to do, such as an unjust and evil act, before we do it.
Our conscience is something that requires training for it to work properly. And where does that training come from? It used to be possible to get some training that shapes our conscience in our education system; unfortunately, our education system seems these days to be training everyone into “little devils” who perpetrate evil deeds, thinking that those deeds are good even though they’re not. A vast majority of our conscience training really comes from our involvement in our local church, and our upbringing in intact family structures. These two things, the church and our family, does more to inform and shape our conscience than anything else in society, doing a great deal in terms of teaching us how to act justly, and do good, and avoid evil.
It’s interesting to note that there is a deep profound contradiction that underlies each of us as human beings. We, as humans, could arguably be inherently evil, but we also have an inmate sense of right and wrong, a moral monitor that either “approves or accuses.” It’s like an umpire, a referee, that disposes us to view life situations in a moral and ethical light, and helps us judge right and wrong. This innate sense of right and wrong, the conscience, is a universal thing that can be found in people of all the world’s cultures. Although we have this innate sense of right and wrong, we still need a lot of moral training to make our conscience work best, and this is where the church and the family fit into the picture.
You should also understand that it is possible for you to get the wrong moral training, or a hardened, or seared conscience, that causes you to do evil while thinking it to be good. I mentioned that above. A human being can sincerely follow the wrong moral standards, which urge him to do something that he thinks is right, but ultimately is morally wrong. Think of Paul, in the Bible (yep, I’m bringing him up again…). Before he became a Christian, he persecuted Christians, even to the point of death, thinking that he was doing the morally right thing, but later realizing that he was grossly wrong. This is why it’s important to educate and train your conscience, and the two best ways to do that are through the church, and through an intact family upbringing – both help to mold a young person’s conscience more than anything else in society, and in a correct way, so that they become morally upright adults which don’t practice evil, but have that internal referee that blows the whistle on them when they are about to step into doing evil.
Conclusion
So, in this article, I made the case that there are four things that our society needs to restrain evil, in order to allow us to prosper, make progress, and have longevity that allows our civilization to remain intact long into the future. Those four things are: law enforcement, the church, the intact nuclear family structure, and our conscience.
It’s interesting to note that all four of these things are under attack in our culture, and are being eroded, and that in almost all cases, it’s the political left that’s doing the attacking and destroying of these buffers to the spread of evil.
They create programs that attack the nuclear family, and incentivize the creation of households that are different, claiming these other household formats, such as a household ran by a single mother, are just as valid of formats as the nuclear family, claiming that not looking at all formats as equally valid makes you racist and sexist – this is despite the fact that the intact traditional nuclear family structure does more for the well-being of blacks and women than any government program or policy could ever dream of.
They attack the church as bigoted, and bad for society, and are working to destroy it, despite the fact that by doing so, history will look at their negative sentiments towards us in much the same way history looks at the Nazi’s negative sentiment towards the Jews, or white supremacists’ negative sentiment towards the blacks.
They attack law enforcement, especially in the black community, despite the fact that doing so causes evil to flourish, especially in the black communities, which hurts the blacks in those communities the most.
They attack the human moral conscience as some kind of outdated, archaic thing that we’ve “evolved past the need for,” as if each human being having an internal referee that blocks us from doing evil is bad for human progress.
What is the political left thinking? They’re working towards our demise, and ultimately the collapse of human civilization, something that could take us, as a human race, many centuries or even millennia to recover from – assuming we didn’t “extinctify” ourselves. Or maybe the left is doing all this because, as these buffers to evil disintegrate before our eyes, they can have the government, the state, move in and take over, as part of their scheme for more and more state control, and create a police state – all part of an ultimate goal of complete state control over everyone and everything.
Let’s open our eyes right now to the reality of evil, how its flourishing causes society to collapse, and its restraint help us progress as a society, and forge ahead into a brighter future that allows our civilization to be long-lasting, and free. Let’s work to protect, and strengthen, the four things that restrain evil, and stop working against them.
