There is clearly this sub scene... people working in shadowy ways to get things done. When they light shines on it, a cartoonishly bad scene is exposed, and the conversation becomes what to do about that. Its a tough conversation, but its the real conversation...yet for some reason its very hard to have.
Take some of the facts on human trafficking. A quick Google search shows 2.5 million in forced labor, much of it forced sex labor. So we're talking 2 million sex slaves, but the conversation on the news is often on feel-good topics. But talking about feel good things doesn't make the 2 million sex slaves go away.
There is simply a psychological aversion to taking on things once they get dark enough, and this psychological aversion can be systematically exploited by criminals to get away with crimes: Want to get caught? Be known around town as a trouble maker, and beat somebody up. Want to NOT get caught? Become a model member of the community and church, and beat somebody up after drugging them, and wear a pig mask and strap on dildo while chanting praises to Satan. Once the crime is sufficiently disruptive to the worldview of those who know you as a model community member, the cognitive dissonance will cause them to deny the possibility, just as they do with the dark sub-culture all around us.
A perfect example is the inevitable respondent to this kind of post includes the "tinfoil hat" icon. The tinfoil hat is a symbol of paranoids, who wish to prevent beams from effecting or reading their minds. They are derided as fools. The problem is that all modern science has fairly well already achieved mind reading, and it remains is an area of active research:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jan/31/mind-reading-program-brain-words
which could in time represent a dire threat to our privacy and liberties. The crowd dismissive of tinfoil hats and their mind reading fears has diverged from scientific reality, in order to find a more psychologically comfortable space where thoughts will always be private. "Grounded in reality" has come to mean burying one's head in the sand, rather than in tinfoil.
So the question is, how do we overcome these challenges in facing the dark and fearful aspects of life? I for one think there's power in the Buddhist path, like when they contemplate skulls and the impermanence of all things, like when they say "life is suffering". Its lost in the christian path, but its still there in life being permeated with sin, in knowing that everything in this world is corrupt. We need to understand the life we were promised in the sales brochure is bullshit, evil in all forms is out there, and our time is short. We need to be able to find a place of peace will looking all sad and dark things strait in the eye. Until we can get to that point, the power of the darkest and most absurd evil will always be amplified.
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