Time & Perspective Quote by Dean Rusk

Rusk’s line lands like a joke told by someone who has read too many cables at 3 a.m. and lived to regret it. The “usual cause of evil” isn’t ideology, greed, or some grand theory of history; it’s the banal, unstoppable fact of human activity. Half the world being awake means someone, somewhere, is always pushing a border, laundering a lie, signing a warrant, floating a rumor, panicking a market. Evil, in this framing, isn’t exceptional. It’s a background process.

That’s the diplomat’s subtext: the world doesn’t break only because monsters choose to break it, but because ordinary systems run continuously and imperfectly. Time zones become a dark punchline about permanent misalignment. There is no synchronized moment of wisdom, no global pause button where cooler heads prevail. Even sleep can’t save you because someone else’s day shift has started.

The intent is also defensive. In Cold War-era statecraft, “evil” was a headline word, a moral certainty used to rally publics. Rusk, an establishment figure tasked with managing crises rather than sermonizing about them, quietly sabotages that melodrama. He suggests that policy failures, misunderstandings, and escalations often come from the sheer churn of people doing things: issuing orders, reacting, misreading signals, improvising under pressure.

It’s cynicism with a practical edge. If evil is partly a function of constant motion, the antidote isn’t purity; it’s process: verification, restraint, redundancy, and institutions designed to absorb the fact that somebody is always awake and tempted to make a mess.