Your enemies aren’t mentally ill. They apparently just want to kill you.

In our modern world, it is very common to conflate motives we do not understand with some form of mental illness. This is understandable when it comes to horrific crime. A serial killer is so violent and twisted that it is hard for us to comprehend his actions, and there is certainly a fair amount of mental illness that is a factor.

Today, however, people often use this explanation when it comes to political disagreements. Abortion, hatred of Christians, the mutilation of children — these beliefs are so horrible that they can only possibly be explained by a malfunctioning brain. But that is not the only explanation. The other option is that some people have a very different set of values that drive them to pursue goals we view as evil.

Our differences are not based on mental illness but fundamental beliefs about right and wrong.

The average American would like to avoid this truth, because it comes with an unnerving conclusion: Your political enemies are not crazy; they are sane people who hate you and want to hurt you.

As sophisticated and modern people, we tend to avoid language that implies some form of objective metaphysical truth. Evil is a concept that conjures up images of old churches, judgmental Sunday-school teachers, and medieval peasants trying to explain a drought.

We have the technology and understanding to explain everything in the world around us. Explanations that call on unseen forces or divine intervention are no longer required. In this thoroughly materialistic view, humans are simply animals with more sophisticated brains. Any undesirable behavior, therefore, can be understood as a malfunction of that brain.

There is no evil; there is only mental illness.

Modern Americans are universalists in a very strange sense. We assume that our values, beliefs, and customs are the default for all humans everywhere. Americans believe that all our assumptions about the way life ought to be lived are arrived at through individual human rationality, so if another person has a functioning brain, he will, of course, come to the same conclusion.

When we are confronted with someone who has very different understandings or goals, it is assumed that something has happened to his faculties of reason.

We try to argue with these people in hopes that rational debate will help them see the error of their ways. If debate does not work, we begin diagnosing the dissenting individual with all kinds of pathologies that explain why he doesn’t see the world the way we do. The explanation for divergent morals or goals is always a defective mental process, never a genuine difference in how we view the world.

The obsession with material explanations accounts for half of this phenomenon, but the other half is explained by our desperate need to avoid real conflict.

One of the major selling points of liberalism was the reduced need for violent conflict by removing existential questions from the political arena. Who is right about God? What is the ultimate good? To what end should we orient our society? These are all important but dangerous questions. The answers are exclusive and all-encompassing.

These are the things that people are willing to kill and die for, so better to make them off-limits and focus on something everyone can agree on — making more money and increasing the standard of living.

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The desire to end the terrible wars that were fought over religion or identity is entirely understandable, and it is difficult to argue that the focus on economic cooperation did not produce significant benefits, but this was always a trade-off that could never last.

We may like to pretend that we are too advanced and sophisticated to get hung up on these primitive concerns, but under the surface, they continue to define us. Those conflicts do not disappear, and when they re-emerge, you have stripped your civilization of the tools needed to identify and address them, which is exactly what we are seeing now.

Americans no longer have the moral language to discuss good and evil, so they simply apply a clinical diagnosis to their opponents instead. Believing a radical leftist is mentally ill is far easier than addressing the alternative. If the progressive is a perfectly sane person and still wants to take your son if you do not chop off his genitals, then the calculus for what must be done changes radically.

Differences of opinion can be navigated as long as two parties share the same moral assumptions and the same goals. But if there is a fundamental difference in what is considered good or evil — if two groups seek radically opposed outcomes — then no amount of rational debate will ever resolve the core issue.

If our differences are not based on mental illness but fundamental beliefs about right and wrong, then a disturbing conclusion emerges. When rational debate is no longer an option, then the only solution left is the same one our unsophisticated ancestors came to for centuries — one group must win and the other must lose.

In the best scenario, this means an exercise of power from the winning side that allows it to rule over the other, forcing its way of life upon the defeated foe. In the worst scenario, this means violence and war until one side is no longer willing to fight to defend its way of life.

In either case, this is a return to an existential understanding of politics. The stakes are no longer higher taxes or lower taxes, but survival.

It should be said that mental illness is real and can be a factor in some political trends, but the idea that half of Americans are crazy because they do not share your political views is absurd. The truth is much darker: We are at least two societies, with mutually exclusive understandings of morality and purpose, trapped in one country.

The theoretical neutrality of the liberal system allowed this drift to occur under the surface, but the differences have become too extreme to ignore. Both sides have their own internally consistent understanding of the world, but they are entirely incompatible with each other.

One side is going to win, one side is going to lose, and the winning side is going to impose its way of life on the other. There is no way to avoid this reality, and obscuring the truth with comforting fictions about mental illness only ensures that you will be the side that loses.