It may well be that the way we read history (or, for the most part, don’t read it) is a big problem.

One example is the way the most ‘evil’ people in history are given a kind of mythical, metaphysical status, which has the unintended effect of letting us all off the hook. By investing these people with a sense of having been in some sense ‘made that way’, we are reassured that ‘they’ are not ‘us’.

This allows us all to escape the important moral task of wrestling properly with the truly difficult questions. Questions like: what is evil, really? What does becoming evil look like?  If nobody is ‘born evil’ in any meaningful sense, how does it come to pass that certain people grow up to create the horrors that haunt our nightmares?

How, in other words, does the worst kind of evil get started?

Well. Turn on your TV, today or tomorrow – or the day after, it doesn’t matter. have a look at whatever Donald Trump has said or done now. That’s your answer right there. That.

That is how evil begins.