Very nice and also a very timely subject. I've also put some thought into this and seems to me that the evil that we see in the world has two fundamental sources. The first are people who are just truly evil: they enjoy hurting others. I suspect that there are not very many of these. The second is far more prevalent and much harder to eliminate: evil that is justified in the name of a higher good. If you look at accurate explanations for the subject behavior in Milgram's Obedience under Authority experiments, he showed that normal people were willing to inflict pain and even go as far as killing someone only when they were doing it for a higher purpose. They knew what they were doing was wrong and were quite disturbed by it, yet they did it anyway, for the greater good. (If you don't know these experiments, no one was actually hurt, because the person the subject thought they were electrocuting was an actor.)
While truly evil people may hide, those doing evil for a higher good actually do everything in the open, because they truly believe it is a higher good. There are exceptions, of course. I suspect that Trump is one who is truly evil as you can see from his twitter feed and all of his past misdeeds and statements flaunting them (e.g., about grabbing women). But most are not truly evil, but are instead justifying evil by pointing to a higher good. Faith-based reasoning is ideal for this, whether it is faith in a religion or some other ideology, such as trickle down economics or capitalism. Note that much of the evil in governments and businesses today are of the higher good kind. US politicians justified torture to prevent another 911 type of attack--they even got psychologists to go along with it! The US has a massive gun violence problem, yet the NRA justifies weak gun laws by citing it as a right, even though the founding fathers never imagined semi (or fully) automatic weapons capable of killing and maiming dozens in a few minutes. If you look at all of the scams in businesses, it almost always comes down to continued bending of the rules to meet mandates handed down by higher up leaders who never learned the dangers of managing by outcomes. When lower level people are being forced to make impossible stretch goals or else lose their job (or part of their pay), many will game the system.
Then we get to religion, which is perhaps the king of using higher good as an excuse for evil. Almost every religion has and still continues to commit evil in the name of their beliefs. Since those beliefs have no foundation in evidence, but are not to be questioned as they are ____-given (insert your favorite deity here), it is easy to use them to justify great harm. Just a few days ago, Congressman Steve King, defending a bill to ban abortion, including pregnancies brought through rape and incest said “What if we went back through all the family trees and just pulled out anyone who was a product of rape or incest? Would there be any population of the world left if we did that?” He later said that he didn't say that, but in fact it is on tape. He also still is supporting the bill. As a personal aside, if such a thing happens, I will likely look to move out of the US, since I have three daughters. This is getting to be like the handsmaid tale.
I suggest that everyone interested in these issues, read Zeynep Tufekci's article on why the final season of GoT is so bad (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/the-real-reason-fans-hate-the-last-season-of-game-of-thrones/). She points out that Martin's story was sociological--showing how people's actions are shaped by society, which often results in people being a mix of good and evil. However, once hollywood ran out of his books, the writers changed the story to a typical psychological tale about individuals, instead of society. This is why the last two seasons felt as if characters seemed so out of character--the story was no longer sociologically driven.
Next, watch the series The Wire (Netflix or HBO). This is a 5 season series telling a sociological story about police, gangs, politics, unions, and school system in Baltimore. The corruption and the positive behaviors (often in the same character) are driving by the situations they find themselves in. The most moral person in the story is a homeless drug addict. Nearly everyone else justifies bad behavior for one or more higher goods.
It's a big subject. So if we are in that stage of our evolution that we need leaders then let us have good ones...
The very fabric of our humanity has been undermined in such devious ways by what does not serve our best interests to the extent we have become mere pawns in its game.
Although the bigger picture for us all is to transcend our limitations and to explore that which has been ignored for so long we have to take our feet out of the mud of the past and relinquish our ideas of a future not yet here and deal with the now where we must find our true selves or be forever lost in the reliquary of the machine, that matrix of the mind that seems so real yet is only illusion that we believe in to be so true.
None of this is new, our history is littered with civilizations run on the same principles of power and greed that have kept so many in thrall to those who believe themselves to be kings or emperors but are really despots out for their own gain, and the crazy thing is they believe their own lies and have had us believe them too and any that didn’t believe them were taken care of.
So we have gone along with this illusion, and down through all of our past we have played their game. Some few did see through the illusion and tried to warn us, to break the deception and set us free; but it seems we were not ready to stand on our own feet and throw off the shackles of oppression and think and feel for ourselves.
The machine has grown huge and has put us on the brink of a change that many of us may not survive.
Injustice is rampant; the leaders of our societies are so caught up in their deviousness and destructive purposes they won’t stop and are blinded by their own beliefs that they are right and the rest of us are lesser beings whose only worth is to serve in the system that makes us slaves to them and not a free people.
Our gathering protests are seen as subversion and an attack on the establishment, and never before have so many risen up all over the world to call out the injustice; and although they work to keep it bottled up, humanity as a whole is saying: enough is enough and rise to challenge the old paradigms whose time has gone and to restore justice and the balance where we can all live in peace.
This is our time and never before has it been more crucial to find our way out of this mess we are all in and are so threatened by, that fear has become the norm.
Many fingers are pointed to say: this is the biggest injustice, and these are the worst offenders who prey on the innocent; but we are all in this together, and we are the problem, and the solution.
It is not enough to cut the head off of any part of the beast for it will only grow another one. We must find the heart of the darkness that is in us all and dispel it with the light we must find in our own hearts.
In the words of a wise man who has been saying for a long time: what you are looking for is inside you....