Having written a book called "Confronting Evil," which will be out September 9, I well understand the subject of miscreants wreaking havoc on innocent people.

It's been with us since Cain and Abel.

While the brothers' story is allegorical, the theme is not.  There is a dark side in every person, and if you embrace that, evil follows.

Sean Combs is an evil man.  The evidence is overwhelming that he used narcotics and violence to coerce people into doing depraved things for his amusement. Caligula light.  

The killer of the four college students in Idaho is evil.  All murder falls under that category.   So does rape, abuse of children, terrorism.  Every day we see this.

The truth is that millions of folks believe in nothing other than their own selfish pursuits.  Of course, there's a scale here. Stalin is worse than Putin.  But both are evil beyond any rehab.

Your local drug pusher is evil, selling addictive poison.  Yes, the cartel kingpins are worse, but so what?  All calculated actions that result in harm are evil. 

The Catholic Church, which has its own problems with evil clerics masquerading as spiritual men, defines a "mortal sin" as an action known to be destructive but committed anyway.  You know what you are doing is wrong, but don't care.

That will get you an assigned seat in hell.

But most evildoers do not believe in a judgmental afterlife. Therefore, moral restraints are few.

I estimate that active evil infects ten to 15 percent of the world's population.  That's a ton of dangerous folks.  And most all of the brutalizers are skilled at rationalizations and excuse-making.

Ask any psychiatrist.

It is the government's job to protect innocent people from the evildoers who would harm them.  But some on the American left reject that demand, leading to the collapse of social order in the New York City subways, in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, in downtown Los Angeles, just to name a few.

And here's the final irony.  The Chinese government is considered evil by some because it denies due process and persecutes groups it doesn't like.  But there is no evil on display in Beijing.  No depravity.  No disorder. 

Any action the government doesn't like is classified as "a crime against the people." Punishment is swift and harsh. The evil folks are constrained, isolated, sometimes executed.

In our free society, it's not like that.  The bad and the ugly have plenty of room to harm and even destroy the good.  And the situation is getting worse.

God help us.