“But whoever hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in the darkness, and does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes.”
– 1 John 2:11, KJB
Evil does not usually begin with mass killings or tyrannical regimes. It begins with small steps. A compromise here. A silence there. A decision to look the other way. Each of these makes the next step easier, until finally the person, or the society, has descended so far into darkness that turning back feels impossible. The slope is real, and examples of how quickly it can carry people downward abound all around us.
Good and evil are not abstract terms. They are rooted in the choices we make every day. When you decide to treat others with fairness and compassion, you are practicing goodness. When you choose to exploit, manipulate, or harm others, you are practicing evil. These choices can be personal, such as how one treats a neighbor, colleague, or stranger. They can also be collective, expressed in movements, ideologies, and systems that either uphold virtue or destroy it.
This dual reality means that good and evil operate on two levels. On the personal level, each individual bears responsibility for their decisions and their consequences. On the collective level, societies build cultures, institutions, and movements that can either lift humanity toward justice or drag it into oppression. The same principle applies to virtue. Wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice are practiced first in personal life, but when multiplied across a society, they create cultures that resist evil. Their opposites—ignorance, cowardice, intemperance, and injustice—begin in individuals, but when tolerated, they become the operating principles of mobs, governments, and empires.
Understanding this dual nature of evil is critical. What begins as a personal choice to ignore or excuse wrongdoing often grows into a collective movement that normalizes it. And once normalized, evil becomes harder to resist because admitting the truth would mean confronting one’s own complicity. This is the essence of the slippery slope. The descent begins with ignorance, deepens with cowardice, accelerates through intemperance, and finally hardens into injustice. At each stage, the difficulty in reversing the downward slide becomes greater.
Ignorance vs. Wisdom
Wisdom begins with seeing the truth clearly. Ignorance, its inversion, blinds us to it. It is the first step into evil because it allows people to stop seeing others as human beings and start treating them as objects. You cannot be good if you do not know what good is.
History is filled with examples. The Aztec and Mayan civilizations practiced ritual human sacrifice, killing thousands—including children—because they believed their gods demanded blood. Rome filled its arenas with gladiators, turning the slaughter of men and women into entertainment. The crowd had to blind itself to the humanity of the victims, or else admit it was complicit in murder.
Modern ideologies continue this blindness. Whether in the racial theories of the Nazis, the class warfare of communism, or the “us versus them” rhetoric of today’s progressive-driven identity politics, the same lie repeats: some people are less human, less worthy of dignity, less deserving of life. Once this belief is accepted, cruelty is inevitable.
Ignorance is not always permanent. If a person turns toward the truth early enough, they can pull themselves out of the decline. But the longer they live in the lie, the harder it becomes. Wisdom is the safeguard, because wisdom insists on seeing people as they are: human, dignified, and worthy of compassion. Without it, the descent begins.
Cowardice vs. Courage
Courage is the willingness to act for what is right despite the risk to your life or well-being. Cowardice is its inversion, the silence and compliance upon which evil depends.
Germany during the Second World War shows this clearly. Most German citizens were not ignorant of the atrocities that were happening. They saw Jewish neighbors vanish. They heard the rumors of camps. Soldiers on the front lines and officers in the cities knew the atrocities. But fear of execution, imprisonment, or loss of livelihood kept them quiet. Cowardice allowed the Holocaust to unfold.
The same pattern still repeats itself in corporate life. Employees see their companies harming others, but stay silent to protect their paychecks. The opioid epidemic in America is one example. Pharmaceutical executives pushed addictive painkillers, and thousands of employees kept quiet out of fear of losing their jobs. Their silence helped fuel a crisis that killed hundreds of thousands.
Cowardice is never neutral. Refusing to act against evil strengthens it. Courage, by contrast, is the only response that can halt a person’s further descent toward evil. Speaking the truth, even at personal cost, is how one breaks the chain that otherwise leads deeper into darkness.
Intemperance vs. Temperance
Temperance is how we govern our emotional nature. It demands self-control, restraint, and reason. Intemperance throws these aside, letting anger and resentment explode into violence and irrational behavior.
In recent years, movements that began with causes worth discussing have often turned destructive. Protests turned into riots, arson, and looting. Antifa and radicalized factions of Black Lives Matter left behind billions in damages, dead bodies, and broken communities. What could have been dialogue became mob hysteria, while the leaders of these movements enriched themselves on the funds that they extorted from virtue-signaling corporations.
Lenin called such people “useful idiots.” They believe they are serving justice, but in truth, they are pawns. They are convinced they are brave, but they are hysterical. They believe they are truth-sayers, but they are tools. Their rage supplies the energy, but their passion blinds them to how they are being used. The mob becomes a weapon in the hands of those already further down the slope—those who deliberately direct chaos to gain power.
Developing and promoting temperance is the answer. Fight passion with reason. Rage with dialogue. Without temperance, intemperance and the mobs it fuels always lead the way to greater evil. While the mob creates the fire, there is always someone behind it supplying the matches.
Injustice vs. Justice
Justice demands fairness, truth, and dignity. Injustice twists all three into weapons. It is the final stage of the slope, where evil ceases to be accidental or chaotic and becomes deliberate and systemic.
This is the realm of true evil. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot did not stumble into cruelty and the murder of millions—they built it. They blinded their populations with propaganda, silenced dissent through terror, and harnessed mob rage into organized oppression. Their systems did not simply permit injustice; they required it.
In modern times, figures like George Soros represent another form of this corruption: those who foment chaos for personal power, funding and directing movements that erode freedom and stability. While serial killers and psychopaths like Charles Manson shock us with personal depravity, their impact on society is small compared to those who can mobilize entire populations. While we must fight to identify and remove individuals who perform evil acts on a personal level (pedophiles, serial killers, murderers, etc), the masterminds of injustice are the greatest threat, because they transform the ignorance, cowardice, and intemperance of others into weapons of mass destruction.
Justice alone breaks this cycle. It demands truth over propaganda, equality over privilege, and accountability over corruption. Without justice, injustice hardens into tyranny, and once entrenched, it cannot be uprooted without the destruction of societies and the death of millions.
Fight Back!
The slope to evil is real, but it is not destiny. At every stage of this descent, there is a chance to resist. The answer is to call out evil when you see it and to live by the virtues that prevent the descent. Wisdom dispels ignorance. Courage overcomes cowardice. Temperance restrains rage. Justice defeats corruption.
Charlie Kirk lived this out by engaging ignorance and passion with dialogue and education, not with shouts and slogans. He showed that reason and truth are stronger weapons than rage or hysteria. His example is a reminder that the way to reverse the slide into evil is not through violence but through the steady practice of virtue. His assassination is a reminder of how far the leftist progressive movement has gone in warping the minds of its followers, that anyone who questions their theology must be silenced.
Each of us faces the choice. We can drift downward, silent and complicit, or we can stand in the light and refuse to yield. The first path leads to darkness. The second toward the light of reason. We must all commit to fighting the darkness—before it is too late.