My first post in this three-part series, about how the evil that surrounds us has manifested, was about the elite global technocrat class and their distance from the people whose lives they may crush; I noted too their lack of belief in, or loyalty to, the nation-state. Added to this toxic mix, I argued, is the certainty of this class of people that they know best about your life.

I made the case in that essay that surrounding us now was a metaphysical, seemingly a Satanic, level of evil.

I am seeking to explain in this series of essays, how otherwise nice people — and indeed Western people, who grew up with post-Enlightenment norms about human rights and the rule of law — can be doing evil now, with whole hearts.

I am asking how they can be suppressing the respiration of children intentionally; how they can be consigning friends and colleagues to eat in the street like outcasts, or sending cops to arrest a woman and terrify a nine-year-old child, whose crimes were that they tried to visit the Museum of Natural History in New York without "papers"?

How could "nice" people in the humane West, can have be put on the agenda in Washington State just two weeks ago, plans to detain those exposed to a "contagious disease" in forcible quarantine, without charge or trial, and dependent on a court order and good behavior to get out?

All of this is happening right now in America - -in the land of people who, since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, have had the principle of equality governing human relations as a matter of law; a nation that had passed laws against the abuse of or corporal punishment of children in public schools in the 1970s in virtually every state; and a people who have been raised in a culture of freedom and civility compared with lawless or totalitarian regimes, that led them, for the most part, to be, on the scale of decency to cruelty, until two years ago, very decent people.

How could good people be going along with this?

There are lessons from history that we have to learn, or re-learn, and quickly.