It may help to think of evil — and to know evil — as a latent or potential bloom within any population and one that may be connected to political ends. However, the primary switch, whether with Dachau or Rwanda involves the taking of license (yes, like 007) which may be a subject worth some focus. In psychopathology, one notes the loss of boundaries involved in bipolar and narcissistic personality disorders; in the complex social disorders that become of interest in political psychology, analogs may apply: who are these people who in Kenya would commandeer a mall expressly to murder non-Muslims without any moral compunction — only pseudo moral excuse — and with ferocious and unbridled sadism? Those are the same souls, or kinds of souls, we are talking about whether talking about frenzied Catholics, Nazis, Hutus, or Janjaweed.

I’m not going to add much to the above.

I think we understand the Pharaoh confronted by Moses as the analog “malignant narcissist” or, in the modern outlook, the glorious dictator, the template for all who would dress proudly while up to their pants’ cuffs in their own constituent’s blood.

What is of interest here is whether mankind might acquire the brights to get its nets around this facet of human wildness and cage or channel it for a coming age in which energy resources, trade systems, and related economic and political arrangements may depend mightily on the global ability to defend them from, basically, magnificent assholes and the damage they would do as long as enabled by either surrounding fear, incompetence, or passivity.

In Syria at the moment, both Bashar al Assad and the Al Qaeda groups have made plain their inabilities as regards containing themselves.  They are those whose days have already passed and with every atrocity and injustice left in their wake they are helping the present and future politics overtake them.

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