GOOD VS EVIL

 

GOOD VS EVIL: THE STORY OF HUMAN MORALITY.

The hero charged into the villain’s lair, it’s been years into this hero’s journey and now it seems it has come to an end. He has crossed seas and climbed mountains for this one battle, a battle with a man who has brought enough terror in this world. He opens the entrance but as soon as he does it, he gets trapped in a cage. The hero feels weak and as if his hard work means nothing as his plans are about to be hampered.

The villain explains he is going to kill the hero in a brutal and slow way. The hero who is about to die asks the villain for a favor, for one last wish before his demise. The villain answers,” yes, what do you want?”. The hero asks the villain, “why do you do this? Why are you evil?” The villain simply answers, “it’s what I do”.

If you tell a 4-year-old me this story and tell me the villain’s motive is just he/she is bad, I would 100% believe you but then I grew up, now that explanation seems to shallow. Imagine being bad just for being bad, it doesn’t sound right to me now.

So today I am going to try to understand the whole concepts of good and evil because I realized that the more I grew up the line between good and evil is very vague and this culminated in me watching the 2019 Joker film, where the main character The Joker (played by Joaquin Phoenix) seems to blur this line even more. The Joker doesn’t seem like a normal antagonist, he is driven by good intentions, from what I see.

So this week I went online trying to get an accurate answer, an actual line that splits good and evil and this is what I could get.

So GOOD is usually associated with life, charity, warmth and happiness while EVIL is usually associated with deliberate wrongdoing. For some these explanations is enough but what I wanted to know more. What actions are good and what are bad.

So if you take into context the above descriptions of good and bad. Good things can involve love, selflessness and many more and bad involves selfishness, hate and many more. But this is a 2-D representation of good and bad. If love is good but how about the too much love is that good? How about overprotective love that deprives one his/her freedom, is that good?

How about killing? Killing is considered a bad thing but how does killing in war become a good thing? Just how? From the above description of good and bad, good and bad are given 2 dimensional approaches. But this is not the only description of good and bad, this is the popular description of good and bad.

That was the dualistic approach to good and bad. This is very popular in Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Islam and Judaism), Manichean beliefs and in Zoroastrianism. In these faiths, good and bad are opposites, they are dualistic realities. If Jesus or Zoroaster would have seen Joaquin Phoenix’s portrayal of the joker, they would immediately classify the joker as either good or bad, because the two (good and evil) are opposites, one cannot be the other.

In most culture, good and evil are approached as opposites, one cannot be the other.

This is the most popular interpretation of good and evil since there are about 4.192 billion people who carry this interpretation of good and evil because of their faiths. But there are more explanations on good and evil.

The rest of the descriptions of good and evil are really alike and they are very interesting. Most of these descriptions identify that good and evil do not exist at all. One of the faiths with this description is Buddhism, Buddhists believe that good and bad are an antagonistic imagined reality and they hamper men from achieving Nirvana or Sunyata or emptiness. In short Buddhists believe good and evil are all imagined concepts and they drive men away from the true purpose of life, that is achieving emptiness.

Another interesting approach towards good and evil is the approach taken by the western philosopher Spinoza. Spinoza has written some propositions that coincide with his own ethics, two of which have really interested me.

In proposition 8, he says, “Good and evil is just nothing but the effect of sorrow or joy” and in proposition 68, he says, “If men are born free, they would be no concepts of good and evil”. These also go hand in hand with the beliefs of pyrrhonism, they believe that “Good and bad do not exist by nature but they are relative to the one judging”

To summarize what has been written above, good and evil are all imagined realities and they really depend on the subject of the actions. For example, take Nazi Germany in World war two, to the Germans having concentration camps and torturing Jews was good but the to the one affected these acts feel evil and wrong.

So does this mean good and evil are imaginary and good and bad do not exist in the real world. Usually when it comes to hard questions like this, I usually add science to the mix. So according to most evolutionary biologists, good and bad might have come from the fact that humans are social animals and some behavior shown by members in the group can reduce chances of survival. For example, gluttony is considered bad in most places since overconsumption of food by one member of the group might leave nothing for the others, affecting the group dynamics.

But we now live in communities that don’t just survive anymore but they thrive. Doing bad things these days most of the times do not lead to the death of the whole group (in most instances). So how does this theory match up with today’s society. Well, the interesting part of this theory states that good and evil things come from society, meaning good and evil are not natural but depend on human groups.

So most other approaches to good and bad acknowledge that good and bad are imagined realities and that they are all in our heads. I tried to elaborate this to some of my colleagues but they did not concede, most believe good and bad are real and they are not imagined realities. So I tried one more time to find a way to prove that good exists in the real world and not in the imagined one only.

According to the book Sapiens by Dr Yuval Noah Harrari, what differentiates the real world and imagined world is that the real world is constant and there is proof for phenomena’s existence. For example, If I say mountain Kilimanjaro exists in the real world, it does because it can be held and touched and will always be there or take for instance gravity, gravity exists in the real world because it is constant and its effects are still there whether I believe in gravity or not but the imagined reality is different, it dwells in the domain of the human brain. For example, the free market economy if many people believe in the free market economy it actually exists but if not it won’t because it dwells in the mind of people, you cannot punch or kick or touch a free market economy and the free market economy is not a constant, it doesn’t everywhere and every time unlike gravity that exists everywhere and was there since the beginning of time.

To prove that good and evil dwell in the realm of the real and not imagination, I used this logic. So if good and evil are real, there are must be one constant good or constant evil that has existed in all human cultures in every period of time and to make it short, I found no constant good or evil. Some may say killing is considered a universal evil but the Aztecs used to sacrifice humans every day for the goods. The same goes for evils like sexual infidelity or suicide and many others. What is found bad or good by one culture is considered different by the other. This makes good and evil not constant but this makes good and evil a reflection of a certain society and culture, thus making good and evil an imagined reality.

CONCLUSION

The matter of good and evil is a hard one to understand, I might have said that good and evil are imagined but that doesn’t mean they affect human life and the human condition at all. One of the important characteristic in the human condition is the existence of the imaginary world.

Good and evil might be imagined but they echo every part of our society.

So don’t go around doing bad because a 16-year-old said so. As long as people believe in the existence of good and evil, it will still affect our society.

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