Friday, January 28, 2011

Everyday Pathogens

Yin and Yang: another perspective
Sooooo, is there good and bad? Right and wrong? Black and white?

No.....There isn't.  It's not real.

We "are" what we believe, and our beliefs about that dictate our perception of the world.  Very few people will admit to bad or wrong behaviour, so I can only assume that most people want to do good and right, or that quite a few people are very good liars.  This "good vs evil" thing has plagued us from the very beginning of time.  How many people actually say "I set out to do evil!"?  Some people make the unfortunate connection that sociopaths are evil and conniving, best you not turn your back on them, or more woe for you.  That is not entirely true.

Imagine life as a piece of string.....One end being right/good/happiness, the other being wrong/bad/sadness.....Who would exist at that bad end of the string?  No one by choice...  The fact is, life is not a piece of string.  We all exist in grey areas, defined by parameters that are not decided by us.  According to the law, I can't park my car on a certain piece of ground unless I am granted permission?  So I park my car on this certain piece of ground without permission.  Am I evil?  No I am not evil...  By the same token, if a man steals to serve his hungry family, is he evil?  I don't believe so. 

As a species, we have become confused.  The unnecessary has made us behave strangely.  If all we had to worry about was our basic survival, this other rubbish would cease to matter, and then we may begin to understand the importance of being - less the importance of a punitive existence.

I can name a few who I suspect were truly evil, without regard, Marque Du Sade, Hitler, Stalin, Joseph Mengele, and Caesar - they became famous for their atrocities.  Serial killers, cold blooded sadists.   All of them most likely sociopaths/psychopaths.  However not all cursed (or blessed) with this personality type end up this way.  I call it a personality type, because this is how I see it.  It's not just another word for being "mean", it's like introversion, extroversion, dyslexia, mild autism, tourettes, left brained, right brained....  Its about wiring.

What creates a monster, a truly evil person, a "bad seed".  Science, X + Y = Z.  Genes + upbringing = the person.  I have to laugh at the sociopaths who wax lyrical about the joys of being "mean".  They attempt to bridge a huge gap between "good" and "bad" with a mere personality type.  Cruelty can be a side affect of sociopathy, the nurture aspect plays a major role in this equation.  It is not a given, in fact a sociopath with a brilliant upbringing would be no more likely to be cruel than any other person.  Of course the odds are stacked against them (us...I cant decide).


Good and bad...Who defined this anyway, was it God?  Religion plays its part in all of this, religion tells us that we can have a better future (or afterlife), if we make a sacrifice, of the present, that we may never be in the present, to comit a sin, or be "evil"...ever....  Then it also begs of us to say, that we can commit ourselves tomorrow and the next day, and the day after that.  We cannot predict, nor can we count on the future, the future is just in the mind, it is a dream, it is not a part of reality until it becomes tomorrow - isn't that a hell of a lot to give up?  The religious myth is one of self punishment - paying penance before the crime we will repent later - that we may banish all evil from our lives, at a mere cost, more self punishment.  Is this not masochistic?  Sadism, directed inwards?  So how is evil directed inward, any less "evil" than evil directed outward?  Even without religion, we are capable of terrible crimes against the self, if we talked to our progeny the way we talked to ourselves, we would all have a string of homicidal psychopaths in our wake.  Are we nasty by nature? And if we cant find a way to express this openly, do we take it out on ourselves?  All the while protesting that we are intrinsically good?  This seems like very odd behaviour - I wonder what comment Freud would make, or Darwin, or Nietzsche.


Good or bad...I'm sitting on the fence, I hope I don't get pushed off....on to the wrong side.








5 comments:

  1. you are right that 'amoral' is different to 'immoral'. i think a lot of socios do bad things simply to [unconsciously?] feel alive - feeling anything as a nice change to the flat/shallow affect usually felt.
    when you choked your chicken did you feel anything? heart rate go up?

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  2. i think what i find a little unnerving is that i felt nothing. i had reduced it to an equation. the rooster was an inconvenience, quite a big one, it needed to go. my heart was racing, yes, but only because the situation had caught me off guard. i hadnt planned to kill him. i would felt bad if i had accidentaly run over one of my hens.

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  3. I posit that sociopaths are no more cruel, mean, or nasty than anyone else, within. The big difference is the lack of moral and legal shackles holding us down in our own minds.

    Don't be unnerved for killing a rooster. I'd avoid killing the people if I were you. They tend to investigate those more ;)

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  4. Thats exactly how I feel about it Note. There are times when I have felt bad about things because even a logical mind can see that wanton destructive behaviour is damaging and holds no glory. But in the case of Mr Rooster, I did what I needed to do, and moved on with little more thought. Maybe a little shocked because I crossed a new boundary within myself.

    As for people....I've often thought I could get away with murder if I needed to, and there have been a few people I thought the world would be better off without =) For now I'm content with roosters though.

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  5. The world would be better off with a a lot of people gone. All that matters is who is in your world.

    Killing is of course, usually the last option. There are more effective ways to destroy them and wish they were dead.

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