Scary when people refuse to believe in reality.
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“You watch the news and you read the papers, and you’re led to believe that the world is a big, scary place,” Austin said, “People, the narrative goes, are not to be trusted. People are bad. People are evil. People are axe murderers and monsters and worse.”
Austin continued, saying that “evil is a make-believe concept.”
“I don’t buy it. Evil is a make-believe concept we’ve invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own—it’s easier to dismiss an opinion as abhorrent than strive to understand it. Badness exists, sure, but even that’s quite rare. By and large, humans are kind. Self-interested sometimes, myopic sometimes, but kind. Generous and wonderful and kind. No greater revelation has come from our journey than this.”
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Unfortunately, Austin and Geoghegan discovered first-hand that evil does exist in the world when they traveled through a terrorist hotbed.