Years ago, I sat across from a former police commissioner from Beijing. We were discussing things we had both seen: abuses, prisons, a system he had grown up in, and a system I had spent years exposing. He looked at me with a strange mix of pity and cynicism and said something I've never forgotten: "You Americans ... you are too kind. You don't understand real evil." He didn't mean we were nice. He meant we were sheltered. He meant that Americans operated on a fundamental assumption that the people in power—whether in government, finance, or culture—were basically playing by the same human rules as everyone else.