Stella and I like to bicker at the breakfast table about the nature of evil. That’s what we were doing one morning as we watched Tessa Lena’s interview with Alexandra Latypova on the topic of… well, I won’t tell you. If I tell you it will suggest too narrow a scope for this essay. My main theme is not Covid, but power, evil, war, politics, and what it is going to take to heal.

Our bickering about evil is part of an effort to makes sense of events of the past three years. A new instance of the egregious abuse of power comes onto our radar, and Stella says, “They know what they are doing! This is deliberate evil, there’s no other explanation.”

I will attempt to condense my response to Stella into 20,000 words or less. I think there is another explanation—a much scarier one, yet ultimately more empowering.