The Latter

It’s easy to feel a sense of purpose in our lives—to feel as if we’re playing a part, a role in this world—when we choose to do something that we believe changes the world, whether by promulgating kindness and love, by ensuring the welfare of other human beings, by fixing something that seems fixing.

But lest we forget that there are those among us that have taken up an unsung role—those that promulgate hate and evil, that inflict suffering on other human beings, that break things that didn’t need to be broken. It is not possible for absolutely everyone to be doing the “right” thing, is it? If we posit that suffering is an integral component of a fulfilling life, that heterogeneity in character and in physique is a natural and necessary occurrence in the homeostasis of our world, that every force that exists in our world—good and evil, happiness and sadness, pleasure and pain, life and death, strength and weakness, abundance and famine, humility and pride, valiance and shame—must fundamentally be in balance, then the question inevitably becomes:

Who is responsible for the latter?