If you underestimate how Very Bad things are here-and-now; then you are complicit in the evil of these times

In times like this, it is - I suppose - understandable, maybe even "natural" to seek for some reason to be optimistic, or at least positive about the-world; and to seek also for some task with which you can cooperate to "save the world" - or, make a better world. 

But, what I see, is a lot of people who so grossly underestimate the severity of the spiritual condition of The West (and, apparently, nearly all of the world) that this must be evidence of their own lack of understanding. 

I am saying here that the practical-minded positivity of too-many commenters derived from a radically inadequate grasp of the breadth and depth of corruption already established in-place; from top to bottom in The West. 

And this lack of understanding must itself be evidence that they personally are complicit with the main-stream of evil in the world. 

This underestimation of evil has, itself, many causes - perhaps the most important being that people get distracted from understanding reality by an overwhelming focus upon their lives here and now, the question of what they are "going to do"; and a fear or fascination with The Future: a desire to know in advance what is going to happen. 

They put the "cart" of physical-action, before the "horse" of spiritual-understanding.  

So people shear-away from a recognition of the truly appalling, by far the worst ever in history, spiritual state of the world - because this seems too pessimistic, despairing or defeatist... 

In reality; the refusal to confront the scale of evil in the world now - and the consequent tendency massively to overestimate the possibilities of Doing Good on some social or community level; some larger than individual scale - this refusal itself comes from a this-worldly perspective which is itself evidence of being so deeply complicit in the evils of the world that they have become invisible.

The terrible danger of unconscious complicity is that repentance becomes impossible. We cannot repent a sin that we do not recognize. 

And that is the very-worst, most spiritually-lethal, problem with holding to a positive, optimistic, Can Do kind of attitude to the socio-political scene of this world 2023. 

It is a form of self-blinding, which is being used to justify a worldliness of attitude that cannot help but be deeply caught-up in the ideology of a purposively evil world.   

It is easily understandable why people would deceive themselves about the severity of our actual condition; because if the world was still (as it was just a few generations ago) divided between a significant proportion of people and institutions on the side of God and divine creation - and those against them; then we could indeed engage in "business as usual" - by working-with the Good-forces, by the kind of organizing and politicking that humans have been doing for centuries (if not millennia)... 

However; now there are no "good forces" of sufficient size and cohesion for this strategy to do anything other than encourage one form of evil against another. 

Look around you! It is impossible to find any genuinely-good cause for us in The West to support that has more than a handful of adherents; those large (or even medium) scale causes that are put forward as good are always deeply enmeshed in the denial of evil. 

This denial of evil, this calculated auto-blinkering, is inevitable because it is the pre-requisite for worldly activity with the world as it is now. 

Yet it is spiritually lethal - so long as it lasts. 

Our primary and essential task in these times is to be aware, to be conscious of what is, to know evil wherever and whenever it is present. 

Only after this has been accomplished should we become concerned about "what to do" about it; and that any "what-to-do" answer will (by the nature of our condition) very likely be personal and spiritual and immediate - rather than communal and political, or to do with strategies and plans.