Forrest
Good luck with your attempt on critical thought/devil’s advocate. It is nearly impossible to do in person and completely impossible to do in an unmoderated forum.
Fred came close to addressing your basic question–what gives with these people? Why do they reappear constantly over time–Socialist murderers over here (cue pic of a dead Che), religious murderers over there (cue pic of dead Zawahiri) and individual mass murderers everywhere else. Why are we constantly afflicted with them? How do sick individuals like Mohammed gather so many around them that their pathology turns into a religion??
While these scumbags love living the good life, I find it hard to believe that simple greed explains the thousands of years of tyranny and oppression that these psychopaths have wrought onto humanity. Their desire to oppress and control their fellow man is almost sexual in nature–they can no more stop their murderous ways than a pedophile can stop molesting children. Wealth is almost a byproduct–at the most it appears that wealth relative to their fellow man that matters most to them.
So, to answer your question, I think that any material or spiritual explanation for these oppressors and killers is superficial and fails to address that they are fundamentally damaged. Some (myself included) would label that damage as “evil”, realizing that that label itself begs your initial question. But until we truly understand thought and consciousness, we will not be able to explain this condition. We can only extirpate it when encountered; understanding that these are the beasts who can never be appeased. Put them down like the mad animals they are and categorize them as dead-end evolutionary attempts.
