There is a basic contradiction in trying to be wholly evil. The end point is to be the last remaining 'being', enjoying the terminal satisfaction of having annihilated everything else... And then annihilating oneself. Because 'oneself' is the final remnant of good (since all beings are God's children).
But short of this envisaged final non-event; we need to be careful not to overvalue the achievements of evil: evil can only convince people that it can exclude good - it cannot actually achieve this. The persistence of good can be seen by the fact that evil must continually deploy bribery and coercion to suppress what would otherwise be the spontaneous arising of good here and there.
Even if a global totalitarian society is achieved by the evil-Establishment: a society of complete and universal monitoring and physical control, a compulsory virtual world... Even if each individual is flooded with distractions, and their thoughts and emotions continually manipulated... Even if all thinking is superficial, fake, inculcated, automatic...
Even if all this seems to be the case; we must remember that this world is the creation of a loving God and it is inconceivable that he would ever, under any circumstance, leave a single one of his children without possibility of salvation - when that child is capable of wanting it.
No matter how complete worldly manipulation may seem to be, total manipulation cannot be a reality - there will be made (by God's power) the actuality of freedom and the possibility of agency - specifically there will be chances to think in free agency from our real selves; escaping all manipulations.
Of this we can be sure; and to believe otherwise is merely to choose to believe otherwise.
We inhabit a world where all institutions and nearly-all once-good individuals have been subverted and corrupted; and insofar as the subversion and corruption are systematic then they cannot be contained, channelled and directed only against The Good - therefore sooner or later systematic undermining and inversion will affect the institutions and persons of evil.
People will then become cynical about evil; in the same way and for the same reasons that they have been corrupted into cynicism about Christianity, marriage, families etc.
The triumph of evil will, in and of itself, engineer people into the situation where they find themselves utterly isolated - hence very difficult to influence in any predictable fashion: individuals will stand in awareness of little more than their existential essence - and that, in itself, is a state highly conducive to the intuitive recognition of the reality of God.
In a sense, at the extreme the reality of God becomes unavoidable and each faces the stark choice of accepting or rejecting his creation and love. This choice cannot be compelled either way - and each has the resources to choose God, if he so chooses - a situation of extreme hazard for evil!
Therefore, the closer evil comes to a situation of final victory, the more brittle and vulnerable that triumph becomes.
We need to keep this in mind, and not succumb to despair in face of the incremental world-takeover by evil; but instead to hope - and understand that this hope is solid, realistic, hard-headed.
2 comments:
I profoundly disagree. How can anyone know if they do not hear? Nothing good for anyone's spiritual health will come from this darkness. About all we can conclude is that God in His Providence has decided that the current peoples of the world and their descendants are vessels of wrath.
@JM - Well, it would help to read what I actually wrote before expressing disagreement...
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