The two greatest flaws in human thinking is the notion of good and evil and the idea that life is about the pursuit of happiness.
From a very early age, infants are capable of discerning appropriate and inappropriate behavior. They smile when they share things, and they frown when someone steals either from them or another, even a puppet. But they do not have a notion of good and evil. They simply like people being nice and selfless and don’t like people being mean and selfish. It is only until later in life that we are taught the idea of good and evil. When we do nice things, we are told that we are a good kid, a good boy, a good girl. When we do mean, selfish things, we are taught that we are bad, and when adults do really mean, selfish things, they are evil. When we learn that there are bad and evil people in the world, we are also taught that they are punished, either through cosmic justice or directly from other people. While we are praised and rewarded for being nice and kind, we are punished and physically assaulted for doing mean, selfish things. We are taught that people who do mean and selfish things deserve to be punished and physically assaulted. We all grow up taking these things for granted and never learn just how damaging, destructive, dangerous, and ironically mean and evil this kind of thinking is.
The problem with this kind of thinking is that it releases us from the responsibility of abiding to our very own rules of morals. So long as the other person has committed a moral infraction, I am free to commit any moral infraction in punishing them. The Catholic Church, perhaps, was the best example of this irony in their persecution of heretics, non-Catholics, and simply anyone they didn’t like. Label them as evil, and they were free to assault, torture, and kill them. In this sense, the inception of evil led to the multiplication of evil as people were liberated to commit evil acts in attempts to punish those they believed were in violation of moral rules.
It is one thing for you to be accused of breaking moral rules and being punished, but the brilliance behind the creation of good and evil is that the definition of evil was expanded beyond moral infractions to include disobedience. Religious leaders created all types of rules that had nothing to do with morals. You had to eat a certain type of food, avoid other foods, refrain from eating on certain days, dress a certain way, cover your head or don’t cover your head, women have to cover their faces or hair or skin, children have to obey their parents, everyone must obey their priest or Pope, you can’t get tattoos, you can’t drink alcohol or caffeine, you can’t sleep with someone of the same gender, you can’t dress like someone of the opposite gender, you have to be circumcised, you can’t worship other gods, you can’t cuss, you can’t work on Sunday, etc.
At what point do you prioritize this list or assign certain weights to certain infractions? Is it the same to kill your neighbor as it is for a man to wear a dress? Is it the same to rape a virgin as it is to get a tattoo? Is it the same to sleep with someone of the same gender as working on Sunday? And what about cultures where tattoos are spiritual and religious rituals? Are they the same as rapists and murderers? While we all have a sense of how bad things are from rape and murder at the top to eating pork at the very bottom, a lot of people are confused and would equate a man wearing a dress with a rapist or child molester, and this is where the concept of evil fails. Some might even go so far as to believe that it is okay to beat up or even kill a man who wears a dress, because in their mind, this person is evil and is equal to a rapist or murderer, while others would consider this person as equivalent to someone who has to go into work on Sunday.
In creating a moral equivalence between heinous, violent, anti-social acts and disobedience, the church and ruling establishments succeeded in putting the fear of god in you every time you disobeyed an authority figure. They made you feel like a rapist or murderer for disobeying authority, for eating pork, working on Sunday, or a dude wearing women’s clothes. As such, people who are anti-authoritarian at least subconsciously believe that they must be punished, and whether they know it or not, punish themselves by indulging in self-destructive behavior like binge drinking and drug addiction. They think that being a rebel and disobedient automatically means they must harm themselves in one way or another. There is nothing wrong with being disobedient. It is not morally equivalent to any heinous, anti-social act like rape, murder, vandalism, or battery. Of course, making disobedience morally equal to rape and murder allowed those in power to punish disobedient people in the same manner that they would punish a rapist or murderer. If you want to domesticate humans, teach them that to be disobedient is the same offense as murder and rape, and you will be punished as such. You will learn to fear being disobedient as much as you will learn to fear killing or raping someone.
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Let’s say you stop conflating disobedience with immorality. How then would you describe a rapist and murderer if not evil? Isn’t a child molester the epitome of evil, preying on innocent children? One might argue that saying an evil person is actually a sick person is blaming a disease for behavior that people can really control. For example, some people say that alcoholism is a disease or obesity is a disease. This seems to liberate alcoholics and obese people from responsibility for engaging in unhealthy behavior.
This is not what I am saying. You don’t have to suffer a disease in order to be sick, ill, or unhealthy. And you can either become sick by accident or on purpose. You can choose to smoke cigarettes and get lung cancer or you can happen to grow up in a household that smokes indoors and get lung cancer through secondhand smoke. Or you can just happen to get lung disease by living near a freeway because poor neighborhoods are often near freeways. Certainly, there are things we can do to mitigate sickness, but a lot of times, we cannot avoid getting sick. Whenever someone gets the flu, we shouldn’t blame them for catching it. However, we can blame someone for not taking care of themselves and becoming sick all the time.
Just as someone can become physically unhealthy by exposure to parents who are physically unhealthy, people can also become mentally and psychologically unhealthy by exposure to parents who are mentally and psychologically unhealthy. The question is, what do we do with them? The answer should not be inflict as much harm to them as they inflict upon others. If someone is physically unhealthy, do we physically harm them further? If you break your leg, do we break your other leg? If someone is mentally and psychologically unhealthy, do we mentally harm them further causing more trauma? Of course, if someone is harming people, we should isolate them to protect innocent people. The question is, should we punish them beyond the restraint upon their movement? Should we allow them to be raped and beaten up in prison? Should we scorn them in public? Should we drag them through the mud figuratively? Should we label them as ‘bad’ and ‘evil’ people and treat them as such the rest of their lives?
For the same reason that we do not punish people who become physically unhealthy or sick, we should not punish people who become mentally or psychologically unhealthy or sick and commit moral infractions upon them. In fact, the majority of times people commit moral infractions as a result of their psychological sickness, it is because they believe that they are bad and evil people, and as such, a bad and evil person seems bound to commit antisocial and violent acts. If they realized that they were just psychologically sick and not ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ they might be a lot more lenient on themselves and not be inclined to commit antisocial acts. They may be more inclined to seek help instead of hiding from the shame of believing that they are a ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ person. When people hide from shame, they are more susceptible to becoming antisocial and then committing more antisocial acts.
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The second great fallacy is that life is about pursuing happiness. Happiness is only one treat that nature gives us for a greater purpose and goal. That greater goal is healthiness. Healthiness is an optimal state of being that is actually a dynamic state of growth and empowerment. Organisms that are healthy are better equipped to prosper and adapt to their environments and pass on their healthy genes and behavior or culture. Nature ‘rewards’ healthy organisms with a number of things including chemicals that make us feel good or happy. We shouldn’t confuse chemical-induced feelings with our purpose in life. If we do this, then we might as well just all become heroin or opioid addicts. Unfortunately, most first world people think that their purpose in life is pursuing happiness or a chemical-induced feeling, so doing drugs is fulfilling their purpose in life.
Nature also ‘punishes’ unhealthy organisms by not only depriving them of chemicals that make them feel good, but also giving them chemicals that make them feel terrible like cortisol, the stress hormone. A common piece of advice is that events are neutral, our interpretation of them makes them pleasant or unpleasant. Likewise, cortisol and adrenaline are not dumped into our blood stream randomly. Our genes in combination with our upbringing and culture teach us when cortisol and adrenaline should be dumped into our blood stream. Take snakes and spiders for example. Most all of us are born to fear snakes and spiders. If we find ourselves locked in a room full of snakes or spiders, our adrenaline and cortisol levels will be off the chart, and over time, our health will deteriorate. We may even be driven mad. But I keep watching video of people handling snakes and some people have these tiny, furry pet spiders that actually look cute and have changed my mind about spiders in general. You see in these spiders thought and feelings that make me regret spraying and killing a spider with bug spray. Spiders can panic, run away from you in fear, hide from you in fear, and suffer as they inhale toxic bug spray. Our upbringing and culture can subdue our genes.
Likewise, money and celebrity have never existed in nature for millions of years, yet humans get excited about it. There is nothing in our genes that tells us to be attracted to large stacks of cash and millions of followers and likes on social media, yet they can release a great deal of dopamine into our blood stream (albeit temporarily). Of course, abstractions like money, status, and celebrity can also be harmful and unhealthy to us if we obsess about how much of it we lack. Pursuing it at all costs can also deprive us of experiencing pleasure from the more important purposes and goals in our lives.
A Harvard AI identified several factors that lead to happiness: autonomy, personal growth, self-acceptance, positive relations, purpose in life, environmental mastery. However, I would argue that these are not factors that just lead to happiness but rather factors that lead to healthiness that are rewarded with chemicals that make us feel happy. Likewise, the absence of these things can release cortisol which can make us feel anxious, depressed, upset, irritable, and sad.
Right away with autonomy, you can see how obedience is the opposite and while we may be rewarded with money and status by authority for obedience, we are surrendering our autonomy which is also a source of happiness. While we may be thriving at work by obeying our boss and in the process perhaps screwing over our staff and customers, we are rewarded with praise, bonuses, promotions, higher rank, and higher company status. Herein lies our conflict, because when we get home, we don’t feel happy. Rather, our lack of autonomy at work makes us feel depleted, frustrated, anxious, and depressed along with obeying orders that we know harm employees and customers. This transitions into self-acceptance. Part of us feels rewarded for obedience, yet another part of us feels punished for surrendering our autonomy and harming others. We cannot accept ourselves if we feel conflicted about what we are doing and what kind of person we are being. This conflict and self-doubt also releases cortisol and makes us feel frustrated, anxious, and depressed. As a result of this, we don’t exercise, we eat horrible foods, and we effectively punish our bodies, because we can’t accept who we are.
Our personal growth is also stunted by acts of obedience and lack of autonomy. If we are not in control of our actions, if we are compelled to subordinate our interests and concerns with the interests and concerns of authority figures who lord above us, then we cannot grow. In fact, I read a book, The Eternal Child by Clive Bromhall and Rogue Primate: An Exploration of Human Domestication by John A. Livington that argue that we have in fact been trapped in a permanent juvenile state where we consider authority figures as our perpetual ‘loving’, ‘protective’ parents. We don’t want to grow up and personally develop but rather live in a perpetual state of arrested development acting like children and never taking responsibility for our actions, one another, humanity, or the planet. We are placed in this bizarre juvenile state of suspension because it is cheaper to hire and easier to exploit juveniles than it is grown-ass adults.
Positive relations, purpose in life, and environmental mastery are all related to the omnipotent trait of socialization. Humans took over the planet, because humans, more than any other animal, developed the ability to live in larger and larger social groups through both genetic evolution and cultural design. Part of that cultural design was the creation and enforcement of moral codes perpetuated through advanced language and communication. When teenagers complain that social embarrassment or exclusion is a fate worse than death, they are not exaggerating. To become isolated in human society is a fate worse than death, because humans are trained to and possess an innate capacity to harass one another and animals to exhaustion and then death. This is how we hunt, and this is how we punish moral violators.
However, we are talking about primitive humans with a primitive understanding of human psychology. Certainly, when ancient humans committed moral infractions, they did not view this as mental and psychological sickness. They could not put two and two together and understand that a misbehaving child is the product of parents who are neglectful and/or abusive. They could not understand that when parents shame their children into believing that they are bad people, the child becomes even more anti-social and withdrawn increasing the likelihood of more misbehavior. It is now time to evolve and change all that.
As social creatures, the purpose in life is not wealth, status, power, or celebrity. These traits are more descriptive of parasitic organisms than symbiotic and social ones. The purpose in our lives, as social beings, as the most socialized beings on the planet, is to work harmoniously and symbiotically with one another. This cannot happen if we are busy being obedient to an authority that believes in accruing wealth, status, power, and celebrity. In other words, by serving and being obedient to a parasite, one cannot fulfill one’s true purpose of living harmoniously and symbiotically with other humans and nature itself.
For the most socialized creature on the planet, environmental mastery is not just about Boy Scouts stuff like being able to live and thrive in the wilderness. For better or worse, we live in urban civilization and need to master the intricacies and complexities of our urban environment. Since our urban environment is dominated by people, this means being a people expert. Once again, being obedient to a parasite in pursuit of wealth and status, we cannot learn to be people experts. We rather learn to become people parasites or harmful to people, viewing them only as one big clump of host prey instead of the wonderfully diverse, unique, and complex individuals they are. People parasites are more likely to see the forest and not the trees and continually over-generalize people and place them in big groups based on pseudo-scientific demographic categories like race, income-level, generation, pedigree, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, political identity, etc. Parasites don’t need a fine-tuned understanding of their prey as much as humans pursuing harmonious and symbiotic relations with one another. Parasites just need a broad and over-generalized understanding of their host prey in order to suck out their blood or nutrients.
Now, you may be arguing that instead of calling antisocial people ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ I’m introducing the notion that they are actually parasites. This is a more accurate description, but it doesn’t mean that we should then punish and harm parasites. After all, the only difference between a parasite and a symbiotic partner is whether they harm us or not. Within us all are once foreign, independent organisms that now are an integral and vital part of us, our mitochondria. Some archaebacteria may well have been harmful and killed their host. As far as human parasites, since they learned to be parasitic, they can also learn to be harmonious and symbiotic. They are not ‘bad’ or ‘evil’; rather, they are unhealthy. When a human becomes unhealthy or stressed, they become antisocial and parasitic. If you have ever heard of the Universe-25 experiment, you know that manufactured, restrictive, and over-crowded environments can turn otherwise social creatures into unhealthy, antisocial, and cannibalistic creatures. It can happen and has happened with humans too.
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So what do we do when a human becomes unhealthy and antisocial. If they are committing violent and antisocial acts, of course, we must isolate them. But for all the sick people in the world, the important word here is healing. They need to be healed. We then reframe ourselves from punishers to healers, and we reframe ourselves from ignorant and obedient perpetual juveniles to conscientious, forgiving, healing, responsible, autonomous social adults.
Basically, do you want a world full of good and evil people and moral enforcers who do evil things to evil people, or do you want to live in a world of healthy and unhealthy people and healthy people who try to heal unhealthy people? In the former, you have a world of mostly unhealthy people, those who believe it is their job to right a wrong, to punish violators, to do harm upon those who do harm to others. When you get cut off in traffic, the violator is not stressed out and inattentive or perhaps daydreaming like you do 90% of the time you drive, they are evil, and as evil people who inflicted harm and injustice to you, they deserve to be taught a lesson. You speed and chase them down and then cut them off. Has it ever occurred to you that when someone is cutting you off, they may be retaliating against you after you cut them off without even knowing it? Instead, why not reframe them as stressed out and unhealthy. In this case, it is better to leave them alone, slow down, create some distance between yourself and this stressed out and unhealthy driver.
In the latter, you have a world of mostly healthy people. The act of trying to heal someone also makes you more healthy as opposed to the act of trying to punish someone which makes you less healthy. In one world, you are more autonomous, more likely to personally grow, more accepting of yourself, have more positive relations, have a greater purpose in life, and are a greater master of your social environment. In the other world, you are constantly defensive and vigilant against evil people, resentful, unforgiving, hostile, vengeful, as well as mindlessly obedient, stunted, self-loathing, lonely, directionless, and anti-social and mostly unhappy and stressed out, anxious, and depressed to boot.
Just as one would optimize physical health by physically exercising regularly, one can also optimize mental and psychological health by exercising your autonomy, exercising your personal growth, exercising self-acceptance, exercising positive relations, exercising purpose in life, and exercising mastery of your social environment. You do these by making decisions for yourself and living with those decisions as opposed to relying on others to make your decisions for you and then blaming them when things go wrong. You pursue personal growth which always means doing things outside your comfort zone and learning something new and starting out as a novice where you make mistakes and fail. It means learning to accept mistakes and failure without beating yourself up which also means exercising self-acceptance. And you are more capable of accepting yourself if you don’t indulge in harmful and unhealthy behavior, like allowing others to make your decisions and not taking responsibility for your actions and decisions.
You exercise positive relations by hanging out physically with friends instead of digitally on social media. Just like being a novice, you accept the fact that you will make social mistakes, get rejected, and fail at friendships. You must also learn to forgive yourself and allow yourself room to fail. You must also avoid negative, toxic relations that only bring you down and compel you to be alone. You exercise purpose in life by being a social, helpful, healing person instead of a spiteful, antisocial, moral enforcer that goes around harming others who you feel are immoral and/or disobedient. You exercise mastery of your social environment by engaging in and contributing to your social environment. There is no other way to master your social environment and exercise positive relations but to physically hang out socially. Likewise, there is no other way to keep fit but to physically exercise, preferably outside your home with others, and there is no other way to lose excess weight than exercise and consuming fewer empty calories.
People have countless excuses for not socializing. Primarily, people feel uncomfortable. If they’re invited to a cocktail party, they won’t go, because they don’t want to feel awkward and stressed out. But this is like someone avoiding exercise, because they don’t want to feel that initial burst of discomfort, sweat, soreness, and fatigue. When you exercise long enough, your body starts to relax and enjoy the exercise, and eventually, you get chemicals that make you feel euphoric and less pain. Likewise, after an initial burst of social discomfort (which many people mitigate with alcohol), your body starts to relax and enjoy the social interaction, and eventually, you also get chemicals that make you feel euphoric and less self-conscious. Unfortunately, if you over-rely on alcohol to mitigate that initial burst of discomfort, you can undermine the social experience by becoming too disinhibited, too frank, too direct, too intimate, too pushy, too aggressive, and in many cases, too defensive and agitated when conflict arises. Instead of reinforcing social interaction, excessive alcohol can do the exact opposite and deter you from social interaction.
Another excuse for not socializing is that some people believe in social classes and levels and stratification. They don’t want to hang out with people who they think are below them. By the same token, why should anyone above them want to hang out with them? So they don’t feel worthy of being around people above them. This leaves them with very few possible friends who happen to be exactly at the same level they are at. Of course, because a lot of people spend themselves into debt, you never can really tell if someone makes more or less than you based on their material possessions. In the end, you don’t end up with any friends. In reality, you can be friends with anyone from any social ‘level’, any race, any religion, any nationality, any sexual orientation, any gender identity, any age, any political view, etc. Those in power have learned to divide and conquer, and only people who obsess about these different categories wind up divided and conquered. If you ever watch those asinine sorority TikTok videos, you see a world of homogeneity with pretty, slender, light-skinned women. They will likely go on in life to only interact with people they consider at their same level, and as a result, they will wind up mostly lonely, miserable, and antisocial. I’m not sure what kind of man would want that as lifelong company, and even if they are selected for their looks, those looks don’t last forever.
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The biggest key here is self-acceptance. Under the good-evil model, if you make a mistake and hurt someone and violate a moral code, you can’t accept yourself. Bad people do bad things. If you are compelled to criticize, harm, and punish moral violators, then you will also be compelled to criticize, harm, and punish yourself. This is why thieves and strippers often throw away their money and waste it on luxury status items that immediately lose their value upon purchase. If they valued themselves, they would simply invest wisely. When we feel that we have done something wrong, we feel compelled to punish ourselves whether we are conscious of this or not. We essentially abuse, mistreat, and undermine ourselves, because we feel like we deserve it, because we are bad.
Recently, a British prenatal nurse was found guilty of killing seven newborns, likely more. They found notes in her house presumably to herself that said things like, “I am evil I did this”, “I am a horrible evil person”, and “I don’t deserve to live. I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough to care for them”. What if instead, she had written, “I am sick I did this”, “I am a sick person”, “I need to get help and heal”. If she had viewed herself as sick rather than evil, it is more likely that she would have sought help and healing.
Not only does the concept of evil hurt us, but it hurts everyone around us, because we become unpleasant company. If we don’t deserve positive relations and good, rewarding company, then we make ourselves unpleasant to be around. But what if we used the healthy-unhealthy model? If we witness someone committing a moral violation, our instinct would not be to harm them but to avoid or heal them. As such, when we find ourselves committing a moral violation, our instinct would not be to harm or undermine ourselves but to heal ourselves. What would that look like?
We would look for the origin and cause of our brief and uncharacteristic moral transgression, and we would discover its source. Sometimes, we might discover that we are not in control of our lives, and we feel compelled to do things that harm others or ourselves. Our frustrations mount, and we don’t feel good about ourselves, so we lash out at others and harm others. The path to healing would not be to punish ourselves but to continuously question why we are not in control of our lives and decisions and how we can take back control. Are we in a job or relationship that is toxic and harming us? Should we leave it then?
Healing also means going even further to origin triggers like a childhood traumatic event. We can reframe the past in such a manner that it has less power over our present and future. For instance, we might feel like a victim to an older sibling who abused us. We will forever resent them for it and forever consider ourselves a victim for it. But what if we learned to forgive them? What if we focused on the good things they did like taking care of us when our parents were not available? How can we blame them when they were just a kid too and they were put in that position by their parents? By reframing the past and forgiving others, we can lessen the power the past has on our present and future and start the healing process. The healing process cannot begin if we are constantly picking at our scabs or wounds, never forgiving and always feeling resentment and bitterness. The best way to practice forgiving ourselves is through forgiving others, and the best way to heal ourselves is through healing others.
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When Adam and Eve ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they were banished from paradise. Ever since, their offspring believed in a world of good and evil, and they conspired to commit evil atrocities against those they considered to be evil. It did not matter to them whether the infractions were immoral or simple acts of disobedience, they reveled in the creative and ingenious ways of persecuting, torturing, and killing in an orgy of retributive evil. They dunked victims in vats of boiling oil, they incarcerated victims in tiny cages, they placed victims in metal containers and burned them alive, they placed rats in a bowl on their stomachs and heated the bowl to force the rats to gnaw their way into people’s bodies, they placed them on a cone and had weights pull their legs down ripping their internal organs apart, they tied them to horses and had their limbs ripped off, they were skinned alive, etc. The tree of knowledge of good and evil might as well have been a concoction of the devil, and after eating from it, humans have lived in hell ever since. It is time for humans to go cut down that tree of knowledge of good and evil and burn it. There are only healthy and unhealthy.
When an organism is unhealthy, it can no longer operate at full capacity and must make compromises. When we are suffering from hypothermia, the body stops sending blood to the extremities and we suffer frostbite and can loose our extremities. Likewise, when someone is suffering from abuse, they stop reaching out to others, they stop being social, they stop making friends, and they become increasingly isolated and in a constant state of defensiveness only caring about themselves and their safety. Panic attacks and social anxiety only guarantee a lifetime of isolation and misery. As such, they are more likely to commit antisocial acts, what we may interpret as immoral or evil acts. Instead of abusing them further and causing them to hide in shame even more, leading to even more antisocial behavior, it is time humanity grew the fuck up and treated them as unhealthy people who need to be healed. There should be no shame in being mentally or psychologically unhealthy, often as a result of sexual, mental, and/or physical abuse. Out in the open, they can seek help and healing. They can learn to trust others again and form the social bonds necessary to become more social and healthy beings.
Imagine going to a doctor and telling them, “Doctor, my back is killing me, I’m feeling lethargic all the time, I’m often confused and disoriented, I feel like something is horribly wrong with me.” The doctor replies, “Oh, I see what it is, you’re a bad person, you’re evil. Here’s my prescription. You need to harm yourself as punishment. You need to get in a fight with your spouse. You need to isolate yourself from friends and family. You need to feel a couple weeks of shame. You need to feel horrible about what a bad person you are. You need to avoid healthy things like exercise and a good diet. You need to binge and feel even worse about yourself. You need to indulge in alcohol and drugs. You need to hurt someone, because that’s what bad people do. You’ll feel better after all this is done.” It sounds absolutely absurd, but this is exactly what people do to themselves when they do bad things. It doesn’t help them, and it doesn’t help society. We need to stop doing this.
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