A friend of mine once said that good and evil live parallel lives. It's hard to deny that there are and always have been extremely bad people in the world - dictators, secret policemen, drug lords, gang leaders, terrorists, assassins, sex traffickers, and the like; yet one could be fortunate enough go through life without directly running up against such twisted specimens of humanity, even if one knows they exist out there somewhere.
I'll make a bold claim: in the long run, beautiful actions and creations triumph over evil. There have been bad, evil, degenerate people since time immemorial, but the great sifting process of passing time winnows all but a few of them (and then only in generalities) from humanity's common memory. By contrast, we still retain keen awareness and concentrated appreciation of the cave paintings, epic poems, sculptures, architectural constructions, works of wisdom, and great sages from civilizations thousands of years before our time.
It's worth our while to ponder why this is so. Fundamentally, I suggest it's because goodness is what Aristotle called energeia: a positive principle of activity in accordance with capacities that constitute and support life itself. The opposite of this positive principle is a corruption, degradation, privation, or falling away from that positive activity; it's purely negative but doesn't represent an independent principle of its own; evil isn't some Manichean super-reality, but entirely parasitic upon what's good.
We see sadly stark evidence of this in Russia's war on Ukraine: Vladimir Putin and his minions can only kill and destroy, not nurture and build. Although it's no consolation to the victims of Putin's atrocities, this too shall pass. Five hundred years from now he will be a mere footnote to history, whereas the creations and insights of artists and thinkers like Bach, Shakespeare, Homer, and Confucius will live on.
All we can do is act and create as beautifully, humanely, and justly as we can in life. That might not always seem like enough, but cumulatively it makes all the difference.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)