Liberalism struggles with the problem of evil. If everyone gets to pick their idea of the good, and we believe that everyone's desire is positive, simply because it's "what they want," then we have no basis for telling people that some desires are not, in fact, good.

This is why we see institutions, like higher education, which should be defending truth, beauty and justice, encouraging dialogue and defending reality, even when the truth is painful, buckle under the weight of obviously antisocial, sociopathic, bullies.

Liberalism lacks the resources to stand up to people who seek to impose their desires at all costs, and who will infiltrate all large-scale organisations and manipulate the will of good-natured individuals who struggle to imagine that some people have malign intentions.

The best way to understand the problem of evil is to understand yourself as a member of a humanity that is riven with ambivalence - the capacity to do good, and the capacity to cause harm. Without God there is no way of understanding which habits are good and which bad.

Nihilism is a natural feature of liberalism, because there is no way from within the system of telling what to do. Individual freedom comes at the cost of the destruction of all meaning, and is, in practice, impossible to bear, trying to ground itself in itself.

The attempt to create meaning through individual identity can be seen not as a reflection of some deep buried "truth" of the self, but rather as a desperate symptom, of a need to be understood and feel part of a collective project. These are deep human needs.

To tell someone that they are limitless and that there is no end to the modifications they can and should make to their body or their life, is cruel and untrue. We are bounded creatures, half-fate, half-hope. Unhappiness and suffering is a feature of existence. Nothing is easy.