Myths of our lives: Good and Bad

 I work in a school, teaching math. When I was a student, I did not enjoy math class. I felt as though there was a "right" way to do the problems, and I certainly did not know that right way. This, in turn, made me feel like an idiot. My assumption was that all of my peers very clearly knew the right way, and the only reason I did not was because I was less good, or worse, than they were. 

All of us that are alive believe together in a myriad of collective myths. Most of these are benign, or necessary to avoid total anarchy. We believe in the myth that you must stop your car at a stop sign. We believe in the myth that you need to use money, another myth, to buy food at the grocery store. It's arguable that those myths are necessary in order for society or civilization to exist. Otherwise, we'd live in a chaotic wasteland. 

The existence of a good-bad dichotomy is another myth that most of us believe in. It was first posited by Zoroaster (also known as Zarathustra), an ancient Iranian spiritual leader. It spawned into its own religion, Zoroastrianism, which centered around a good vs evil dichotomy. This two-sided nature lead to a belief that the physical world was "bad" and the spiritual world was "good". To achieve gnosis (oneness with God), you needed to shun the physical world and all it's pleasures (anything that brought one out of poverty, physical comfort of any kind, sex, you get the picture), and hope that your prophet was telling the truth. 

Even in Zoroastrianism, the earliest example of good vs evil being used to manipulate the minds of large groups of people, we have these issues. When the labels "good" and "bad" or "evil" get attached to things, that's the end of the story. Nothing is absolutely good or bad. The atomic bomb, arguably the most "evil" weapon ever created, can be also be used to power cities in an environmentally friendly manner. Nuclear power (along with wind and solar) could be one of the keys to saving humanity from the immediate climate crisis, yet it's a technology that was developed by one group of humans for the explicit goal of killing a very large number of other humans. If you label it as "evil", you can't allow for any change. 

Perhaps the ideas of being good and bad can live on, but in a modified form. Good -  having the right or desirably quality -  and bad - having an undesirable quality - both have incredibly subjective meaning. Who is the judge of what is desirable? The individual. Something might be desired by one person that is not desired by another. I argue this itself is desirable, because out of these differences we have diversity, and through diversity we find strength. Someone just as capable as myself could argue this is undesirable, because it leads to irreparable differences, which can cause interpersonal rifts and actually leave us worse off. Are either of those opinions better? No, because to be better, we have to apply universal judgements of good or bad, which don't exist. 

I say that the ideas of good and evil as we interpret them today, perhaps not as they were originally intended, don't exist. Because of the subjective nature of "good" and "bad", nothing can be good or bad for every person alive. Every human has the capacity to exercise their meaty brains and determine what they desire and what they don't. This will lead to conflicts, but those conflicts could be resolved with less suffering if we humans could detach the idea of what we find desire-able from good, and what we find undesirable from bad. It might create a pathway to empathize with another human being who finds something desirable which you find undesirable. That thing, whatever it may be, makes us stronger as a collective group. Other people who value different things than I do mean my life experience can be richer, but only if I listen to those different opinions. 

This, right here, is where organized religions lose me. Treat other's as you wish to be treated, that's fine. Honor thy father and mother, I get it. Have one set of good things that you must work to spread throughout the world, whoa, hold on. It's the elimination of diversity. (Sometimes, literally.) 

The beauty of humanity is that we are diverse in our desires, minds, and accomplishments. Other people have done things I find undesirable. This makes me a richer person, that I might learn more about that which I do not desire. Ultimately, I might desire something that, alone, I never would have appreciated. However, if I judge that thing, or that person, as bad, I will not want to talk with them, or listen to what they have to say. I will not want to experience them. When I use the word "listen" I mean something slightly more, something I'm not sure we have a word for now. I don't mean listen as in a TV host, where the next response is canned (dictated by whatever religion you believe). I mean listen as in see, understand, be within, experience. You won't truly experience the other person if you're clinging to a good-bad dichotomy. You'll evaluate "do they agree with me or not", which is a wholly different interaction. 

We also must remember the fact that christianity posits the existence of an all-knowing god, and a good-bad dichotomy. If the god was truly all-knowing, there would be no good-bad dichotomy because there would be no free will, and everything would already be determined. You can't have both, but that's a topic for another post. 

As an exercise, pick a thing you think of as a "bad" absolute; some thing you think is bad, that can't possibly be good. For example, killing someone else, or not replacing the toilet paper after you use up the end of a roll. Now, think, for more than a few minutes, about that thing. Is there no situation you can think of where doing that thing you're thinking of might have a beneficial outcome? 

Good and evil, right and wrong, are myths. They are not real. More than that, our collective belief in them is harmful to many human beings alive right now, and many more that have already died. To truly be open to all possibilities in the future of a world that is rapidly evolving, we must forget this myth. Or, at the very least, remember the subjective nature of these ideas. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. To each their own. Horses for courses. One person's trash is another's treasure. There are so many quips and idioms, that we forget how profound they are. 

The main takeaway from this is that we live in a world of false dichotomies in 2021 on Earth. Things have to either be this or that. Or, maybe they fall somewhere on a scale; grey as opposed to black or white. Pick your analogy. They all are about as effective. This dichotomized thinking damns us. It puts us in mental boxes out of which it's incredibly difficult to climb. It creates a mental landscape where false dichotomies arise from nothing. The universe is complicated; it's messy. While there are some clear mathematical answers to some very specific questions, there is not one answer to many of the questions we grapple with. (Sorry, Doug.) If there were, and we knew it, life would be instantly boring. 

Given the first two decades of the 21st century, one of the few things we can say for certain is that being alive right now is not boring. Certainly not if you're paying attention.