The Mythology of Good and Evil

After reading the Dawn of Everything, I think one big thing that was missing was that at some point in time, humans adopted the mythology of good and evil.  Instead of simply being wary of strangers outside your group, wary of people who were troublemakers and misbehaved, they created the notion of good and evil, and outsiders and troublemakers were labeled as evil people, and more importantly, evil people needed to be punished, ostracized, humiliated, and destroyed.  And this changed history, because instead of helping troublemakers and bad apples, we started to persecute them and turn them into even bigger troublemakers.  It also was the birth of justified evil which actually resulted in a greater amount of evil in the world.

Our culture is saturated with the concept of good and evil.  Superheroes embodying all that is good face off against supervillains who embody all that is evil.  We consider ourselves good, and we portray our enemies as evil.  When we identify someone in our group, community, country, or world as evil, we feel a deep, emotional desire to teach them a lesson, to put them in their place, to punish them, to ostracize them, to obliterated them.  Isn’t that the purpose of our lives, to overcome evil and help good triumph?  Unfortunately, we have all been sold a rather unfortunate and unhealthy lie, a myth that has actually helped spread more evil than actually reduce it.  In the name of good, we have conducted ourselves like the most monstrous, evil, cruel, villains imaginable.  We have become the very things we swore to eradicate from our group of friends, from our communities, from our country, and from our world.  Why have we held on so long to this dangerous and destructive paradigm of the world?

Perhaps when humans invented the idea of good and evil, they simply acquired a very rudimentary and misguided interpretation of human behavior and psychology, and this was an innocent mistake.  However, the reason it has been perpetuated so much is a different story.  By investing in the idea of good and evil, you can justify the mistreatment of those you have identified to be evil.  You can mock them, humiliate them, punish them, censure them, abuse them, ostracize them, injure them, incarcerate them, torture them, and even kill them.  In other words, you now have an excuse to ironically become evil yourself in order to vanquish evil from the world.  The notion of good and evil therefore always creates a larger sum of evil than a world devoid of such a notion.  But, you argue, isn’t there real evil in the world?  Without good and evil, wouldn’t we all just become amoral?

For anyone brought up on the notion of good and evil, it’s nearly impossible to see a world devoid of good and evil.  It’s like someone who has been raised to see color to all the sudden learn to reinterpret color as different wavelengths of the light spectrum.  You cannot stop seeing red and blue no matter how much you try.  However, by understanding what color truly is, you can become a bit more tolerant when someone demands that they see one color, but you see another.  Color is not as absolute as we are led to believe and learn to appreciate the subtle nuances of color, even the startling fact that color can be perceived differently when placed next to different colors.

Likewise, instead of seeing good and evil, what you are truly seeing is a contrast between social and antisocial behavior.  Because humans have thrived so much as social beings, the only reason humans become antisocial is something that has gone wrong.  Similarly, humans have thrived so much as active, fit beings, and the only reason humans become inactive and unfit is something that has gone wrong.  So what has gone wrong?  One reason is some rare mutation that makes some humans born antisocial or unfit.  More likely, however, is that something in our culture or society that makes us antisocial or unfit. 

As far as our fitness is concerned, we have created a society where we drive everywhere we go and then sit at a desk at work 40 hours a week and then go home and sit on our couch for most of our recreational time.  Technology that supposedly replaced a lot of our laborious work winded up making us unfit.  In addition to this, we have poor nutrition and stress in schools and at our jobs.  We have also abandoned small social networks that helped us go outside and keep active and reduced our stress. 

The real reason for the perpetuation of the myth of good and evil is that it has served the ruling class well in justifying the drafting of soldiers and use of them to steal from and enslave neighbors.  If they can portray their neighbors as evil, not just foreigners who may threaten to steal your land and enslave you, but evil, then everyone can get on board with attacking them, stealing from them, and then enslaving them.  Of course, the great irony is that the attachment of ‘evil’ to an enemy justifies greater acts of evil against them, making you the eviler culprit.

It also has allowed the ruling class to commit crimes against members of society it feels are a threat to them.  Instead of portraying them as enemies of the ruling class, they are simply portrayed as evil criminals who need to be punished, incarcerated, enslaved, or murdered.  They blur the lines between crimes of violence against people and crimes against the state that endanger the ruling class.  The war on drugs was supposedly a war to protect us from dangerous types of drugs, but the classification of drugs has been so ludicrous, most people see right through it. 

In reality, it has been a war against non-prescription, non-patented drugs that undermine the huge profits of pharmaceuticals.  But they’ve tried to make us believe that people who smoke pot or used cocaine or sell these products are evil people who need to be punished as severely as child molesters and rapists.  The war on drugs has not only been an utter failure for making us safer, but it has also backfired against the ruling class.  We know that people who use pot are not evil.  There are so many people who know that investment bankers and stock brokers use cocaine, and are we to assume they’re evil?  And why are sellers punished but not buyers?  Why do we throw a black man in prison for supplying pot and cocaine to white kids, but we don’t throw those white kids in prison too?  And why are cocaine sentences much lighter than crack cocaine sentences? 

So should we abandon punishment for violent crimes like child molestation, rape, and murder?  If these crimes are not evil, what are they?  Obviously, we should protect people from child molesters, rapists, and murderers, and this means incarceration.  The question is, is allowing child molesters to get raped in prison justifiable?  I would guess, the vast majority of people would say yes. 

Herein lies the problem of evil.  We label someone evil, and then we are more inclined to allow an evil act to befall them as some sort of balance in the cosmic universe of justice.  This ‘evil justified against evil’ logic is the foundation of some of the most atrocious acts of evil around.  Adolf Hitler believed that the Jews were evil, that they were all plotting against Germans to steal from them and subject them to the degradations of poverty, injustice, and oppression.  So what did he do?  He had six million of them slaughtered, men, women, the old, children, the disabled, the poor.  Hitler punished those who had nothing to do with harming Germans.  Likewise, the US firebombed German and Japanese cities and dropped two atomic bombs on two Japanese cities.  Oh, but they started it, and they killed civilians too.  So we kill innocent men, women, the old, children, the disabled, the poor, people who had no choice in Germany and Japan starting war? 

If we reframe ‘evil’ acts as unhealthy responses to trauma, suffering, depravation, abuse, and pain, we are much less likely to see punishment and equally unhealthy reactions as logical.  You don’t have a child molester raped to make them less unhealthy.  It doesn’t make sense.  They become more unhealthy, and when they are released, often sooner than drug traffickers, they are MORE likely to molest your children not less. 

People will argue that punishment is deterrence, but that is a slippery slope.  Who gets to punish whom?  If we allow the state the monopoly on punishing us, it’s easy for the state to simply punish us for threatening the state as opposed to punishing us for threatening one another.  In many authoritarian countries, people are punished for criticizing the state.  Punishment as deterrence usually is employed when you want to stop people from doing something that is actually rewarding to them and in their best interests.  If you told everyone to stop exercising, to stop socializing, to stop eating healthy, to stop having sex, you could not succeed by convincing people that they are better off not exercising, socializing, eating healthy, and having sex.  The only way to stop them would be to punish them severely.  Likewise, how do you convince people to donate a large chunk of their income to the state?  You threaten to take away everything they own and imprison them if they don’t.  Because people are inherently social and moral beings, punishment is actually a way of turning them into antisocial and immoral beings.  And the concept of people choosing evil justifies you in punishing them which is then all you need to use punishment to protect the state. 

Have you ever met someone who told you that they chose to be evil?  Certainly, stress and depravation can make people believe that they have to be evil in order to survive and get by, but if you asked them if they were not traumatized and deprived, would they choose evil, they would say no.  Nobody chooses evil when they can be good.  Then how can we portray so many people as evil?  In reality, what they are is unintentionally evil.  Adolf Hitler never said that he would commit evil acts on behalf of the German people and embrace evil to overcome a greater evil.  Adolf Hitler believed he was a good person doing the right thing to avert greater evil.  But he became a greater evil by adopting the notion of evil justified against evil.  Had he considered Jews and other races as perhaps less healthy rather than evil, his approach would have been much different.  He would have asked the obvious question of what made them less healthy, and the answer would have been historical oppression, segregation, and discrimination.  Instead of killing them all, he might have realized that to make them healthier, he would have better integrated them into German society and fought against the discrimination and segregation of Jews.  To embrace the notion of good and evil is to embrace evil as a solution against evil.  It makes no sense, and it actually turns you into an agent of evil.

But how about we simply accept good and evil but reject the idea that we are justified in becoming evil to fight evil?  While this is a better idea, my counterargument would be, then how would you treat an evil person?  Lock them away and throw away the key?  That would be an act of evil too.  If you accept the idea of healthy and unhealthy, you are more likely to create a better world of healthy people.  Imagine if we thought unfit people were evil.  What would we do to create more fit people in the world?  Would we persecute, ridicule, abuse, segregate, oppress, discriminate against, incarcerate, and kill unfit people?  Because being fit is something we are born to want to do, punishment for being unfit is unnecessary.  We don’t need to think of unfit people as evil but rather as unhealthy, and once we accept the idea of them as unhealthy, we look for causes of their lack of health.  What we would discover is a society that prioritizes profits over the wellbeing of the people.  We would discover food subsidies, promotion of dairy and grains, fast food advertising, an auto-centric urban environment, work stress, destruction of social networks, technology making us lazy, etc.  In other words, we would discover that we are being harmed by a group of powerful and wealthy people who only see us as profit generators and not as people.  It is in their best interest for everyone to see the world as good and evil so that they are justified in mistreating us and punishing us in response to us trying to improve our lives and serve our interests and not theirs.