"Evil is a make-believe concept we've invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans.





A progressive young American couple was killed in an Islamic State-claimed terrorist attack last month while on a bike trip around the world.





Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan, who were both in their late 20s, quit their jobs in 2017 to embark on a trip around the world. Austin, a vegan, and Geoghegan, a vegetarian, decided that they're were wasting their lives working.





"I’ve grown tired of spending the best hours of my day in front of a glowing rectangle, of coloring the best years of my life in swaths of grey and beige,” Austin wrote on his blog before he quit. “I’ve missed too many sunsets while my back was turned. Too many thunderstorms went unwatched, too many gentle breezes unnoticed.”





The couple documented their yearlong journey on social media until it came to a tragic and gruesome end in Tajikistan, a country with a known terrorist presence.





Austin and Geoghegan were riding their bikes in the country on July 29 when they were rammed by a car , according to CBS News. Five men got out of the car and stabbed them to death along with two other cyclists, one from Switzerland and the other from the Netherlands.





Two days later, ISIS released a video showing the same men sitting in front of the black ISIS flag. They looked at the camera and vowed to kill "disbelievers," according to The New York Times.

Throughout the trip, the couple embraced the kindness of strangers and sought to demonstrate that people are inherently good .





“You read the papers and you’re led to believe that the world is a big, scary place," Austin wrote. “People, the narrative goes, are not to be trusted. People are bad. People are evil."





“I don’t buy it," he continued. "Evil is a make-believe concept we’ve invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own... By and large, humans are kind. Self-interested sometimes, myopic sometimes, but kind. Generous and wonderful and kind.”





Some conservatives have framed the tragedy as a cautionary tale about not just the perils of travel but also naivete in general. In their telling, an overly generous understanding of human nature is behind much of today's progressive movement, including calls to radically scale back immigration enforcement and policing and support for socialism .



