Evil is more prevalent now in The West than at any time or place, for the simple reason that it has become invisible - and this invisibility is due to the lack of any perceived alternatives.
Since the mass decline in religion - there is nothing to provide a contrast with what is: almost nobody with power now believes in life beyond mortality, hence this is excluded from public discourse even as a possibility.
Few even believe in the possibility of 'utopia' - except perhaps the Transhumanists who see life only in terms of here-and-now feelings, and who yearn for technological 'solutions' from breakthroughs in medicine, drugs, genetic engineering - and perhaps the provision of wholly-satisfying (but fake) alternative virtual realities. For such people, The Matrix movie scenario of human consciousness living in pleasurable dreams while their bodies are exploited depicts a paradise not a hell; because as long as people think they are happy, it does not matter what is really happening.
But the sincere Transhumanists are desperate fools, because the emerging reality is of a malign-motivated totalitarian mind control more comprehensive than humans previously could imagine - a society where electronic technology enables surveillance to be mandatory, continuous and inescapable - and linked with continual inputs of stimuli and control of emotions. There is zero indication that any such system would then be used to make men continually feel happy...
Fortunately, it looks as if science, technology (and economic efficiency) has plateaued and begun to decline, and this will probably trigger collapse of the global bureaucracy before we have the ability to impose on ourselves what we seem unable to recognise as universal enslavement.
There are, of course, real alternatives that we could imagine, if we allowed ourselves - including better futures; better futures than any past... from a spiritual and Christian perspective; and in a timeframe which extends beyond death.
It seems clear that human life is not meant to be mere pleasure; but must and does entail some kind of struggle with experience; and from that perspective the experience of life here and now is extraordinary in its capacity to educate us, to make us more insightful and wiser... but only if we take a perspective that includes the spiritual as well as the material, and which does not equate Man's freedom and agency with isolation and relativistic nihilism. As I have often said: we can aspire to be both spiritual and Christian - a Christianity rooted-in and guided-by the freedom and truth of our partly-divine self in direct communication with full-divinity.
In some ways we seem almost infinitely far away from such a renewed perception... Yet in other ways it seems like it could happen in an instant; by a simple and sudden change in those fundamental assumptions that we have faith-in; leading instantly to a shattering alteration in the way we perceive...
