Evil is Often Indifferent

There are, I am sure, some people who are evil for the sake of being evil, or nearly so. They relish the thrill of getting away with it, or enjoy seeing others suffer. True cruelty exists as a means to the pleasure of another, who relishes the suffering of others.

Far more prevalent than this, though, is indifference. Evil is mostly banal, and it is more often caused by carelessness or apathy than for it own sake (or for the sake of some perverted pleasure derived from the suffering of others). For every man who seeks to persecute others for the sake of watching them suffer, there are many more who would "accidentally" persecute others for the sake of expediency or convenience.

Case in point:

This is real bigotry. This is real evil, raising its head to mock. Refusing to participate in somebody else's evil is not bigotry. Real small-mindedness is insisting that others must serve you at all times, that all other people are there for not but your convenience. Evil likes to trivialize itself: just offer one single, small, pinch of incense to Caesar, and hope that God does not notice or care. Bow down before the Golden calf, just once, what can it matter?

I saw a nice counterpoint to all of this:

This is difficult, and often untried. But we do live in a vale of tears, and those tears are all the more bitter because of the sheer cruelty of indifference. We don't live in a time and place of hard persecution--but it is certainly a time and place of soft persecution. This may seem trivial in comparison, as if there is a great gulf between what we suffer here and what martyrs suffer elsewhere: in a sense, there is a wide gulf. But even the greatest distance can be traversed by taking many small, seemingly trivial steps.