Ask thoughtful people what the greatest force for good in the world is and you’ll probably receive the same answer that I usually do … love. But ask those same people to identify the world’s greatest source of evil and I dare say you’ll not find as clear a consensus. Curious how evil is such a pervasive reality in our time—touching us all in both large and small ways—yet we struggle to identify its clear source.

As a child I used to believe in the super-villain as a primary source. It seems that every generation looks to personify evil in the monster, the conveniently other, and history always seems ready to supply a Nero, Hitler, or Hussein to keep the trend fresh. Yet, there seems far too much evil in the world to be attributed to even these great villains. Evil is far too close at hand. The search continues.

Next came the theory of evil in the heart of the common man. I was prone to believe this one, I still do, yet not that one-dimensional myth that tries to characterize the little old lady next door as someone who’d kill me in my sleep if she only had the chance. Or even worse, that I’d kill her. Sorry, if evil is near or in me, it doesn’t exactly work that way. What then do we expect evil to look like? Perhaps we miss it because our expectation of its appearance is all wrong. Perhaps the key is to look at the greatest good and find its corollary.

Love—the power and passion to care, to move, to reach, to bless—is good. Arguably, the greatest good. Its opposite? Non-love, non–passion, a-pathos—we call it “apathy.” Apathy—the unwillingness to move, to reach, to bless. Apathy simply doesn’t care. Apathy is not so much a description of what’s in the heart of man but rather what’s missing from the heart of man, and I believe that apathy is perhaps the greatest manifestation of evil on planet earth—the abdication of the human responsibility to love.

Yes, I’ve lost my faith in super-villains, but not in super-heroes. Why? Because I want to be one. Because they care. They are anti-apathetics. Super heroes really make the difference because they care more than ordinary men. They care enough to try and make a difference, they care enough to act, to put love in motion … that is their true power. That is why even their mythos changes the world.

I think it was Thoreau who wrote, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” This is the evil of apathy—even toward our own self development—that plagues mankind.

Edmund Burke perceived this reality and declared, “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

And it was the Apostle Paul, writing to Titus, who revealed the Master’s plan for us all to become super-heroes when he wrote “… we wait for the blessed hope—the glorious appearing of he who who gave himself for us to redeem us from evil and purify for himself a people that are his very own, passionate to do good.”

Come then and dare with me. Dare to do. Dare to be. Dare to care … and save the world.