The temptation to dissect the intended optimism of your sincere and important post GG is almost too hard to ignore but I won't. I will say that I just stopped doing a separate task because I feel overwhelmed by disgust, painful empathy, and shame. The emotions became so distracting while I was handling dangerous equipment I took a break to come write and discuss my feelings with a few hopefully considerate well meaning folks.

It is very difficult to preserve a legitimate pride in self if one is filled with indignant revulsion at their culture/Nation, gender, and even their species. I do not allow myself to go to the dark side and act on these thoughts of desperate rage and agonizing empathy but to ignore their existence and pretend they are illegitimate is also harmful.

To do nothing is harmful but to do nothing about them is worse.

I write to confront the madness in myself, in others, and in our collective hearts and mind. I write to transmute the pain, blind anger and destructive passions. I write but it reminds me often of fragile Buddhist prayers written on rice paper and cast adrift with a candle to burn for a brief moment and then dissolve as they fade away into the larger sea.

I can not feed the machine and so assume a standard of poverty even though I see no inherent quality in poverty but I see too much collective harm caused by the obsessive compulsion to gratify our lusts for power, prestige, and material wealth.

Too bad that while it is so easy for the evil ones to know one another and work together even if at cross purpose of competition it is at least the reality that evil unites more readily than good. Strange irony in that ehh?

Good people are rightly skeptical of one another and take time to earn each other's trust but evil people can find the bond of common cause even while trying to kill one another. Think of how extremists on both sides of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict were able to systematically derail the peace process to serve their mutual purpose of keeping the conflict in 'force'. Our own Military Industrial Complex is playing our people for fools in like manner and true human created evil comes into domination of events this way.

I am not trying to dwell here on the pessimistic perspective and I actually commend you for your post though I could reduce cynically every element, I choose not to for a reason, I prefer trying to go to the next step.

A step that requires rational analysis of all you have proposed but one that recognizes the significant obstacles we face and tries to build a basis of realistic hope in the effort to find what is good about us that is more important than what is evil.

For "Good" people to rationally confront this serious and growing power of true human evil we must learn to recognize each other effectively and faster. How can we do this?

Traditionally it was through a litmus test of 'doctrine' within established 'communal' and 'cultural' guidelines (religion, guilds, conflict, deeds etc) but this process has been both usurped by easy standards of hypocrisy and is too slow to meet the challenges of our day.

So add to your list of what's wrong, and maybe what is right, the idea that if we can build a social bridge to one another's hearts soon enough we do have the power to quell this growing insanity and resolve the ever worsening crises.

Nothing about this will be easy but neither is it impossible.