Clayton Cramer has a great piece about Islamic death worship and the danger to Western Civilization (even to leftists!), and it led me to an interesting thought: all evil social structures are built on entrenched hypocrisy. E.g., it's great for young Muslims to blow themselves up, but apparently not for the imams, tyrants, mullahs, and so forth. If the heavenly reward is so great, why aren't the supposedly most spiritual Muslims also the most eager to attain it? Cf. the Communist Party and their subjects.
In contrast, good systems like democracy, capitalism, and Christianity at least attempt to apply the same rules to everyone. Sure, the end results aren't the same for everyone (some get rich, some get poor), but everyone supposedly plays by the same rules.
Then again, maybe I'm wrong and it's just a matter of degree. I guess everyone was supposedly equal under Communism, too... and anyway, the investments of US Senators tend to beat the stock market by 12%, so maybe I'm fooling myself. Still, it seems like there's some objective difference.
The difference between sucess and failure is usualy only a few percentage points. Even the Mafia knows to take just enough to keep them coming back.