I’ve been reading The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Sozhenitsyn and ran across this chilling paragraph which seems appropriate for the times we’re living in:
“Evidently evildoing also has a threshold magnitude. Yes, a human hesitates and bobs back and forth between good and evil all his life. He slips, falls back, clambers up, repents, things begin to dark again. But just so long as the threshold of evildoing is not crossed, the possibility of returning remains, and he himself is still within reach of our hope. But when, through the density of evil actions, the result either of their own extreme degree or of the absoluteness of his power, he suddenly crosses that threshold, he has left humanity behind, and without, perhaps, the possibility of return.”
Seemed to resonate with the idea of wétiko which I had mentioned.