Good and Evil; Right and Wrong

People love good and evil. That's not to say that they love evil in itself, but they love the idea. Good and evil provide a wonderful juxtapostion, a dichotomy which lets us simplify life and divide it into two easy categories. Good is, well, a good thing; evil, a bad thing. Done and dusted.

But it's a false dichotomy. The world isn't nicely divided into good people and evil people. In fact, there very few evil people, and even those generally considered evil have rarely, if ever, thought themselves to be evil.

People like good and evil because it lets them split the world into two parts. More importantly, it lets us say "I'm not evil, so I must be good". Makes sense, right?

But the world isn't that simple. I rather doubt that any studies have been done to back me up, but I can nonetheless confidently make the assertion that Christianity has lost more souls to pettiness and squabbles within the church itself than it has ever lost to Satanism.

Evil people - well, people we consider evil, although I think they're often just misguided - do damage, certainly. But more damage is done by perfectly normal, everyday, "good" people. Not because these people regularly attempt to genocide entire ethnic groups, but because there are so many more of us. Off the top of my head, I can think of perhaps five genuinely terrible people who have lived in the last half-century. No matter how much damage they do, they will struggle to match the damage done by the 6, 7, 8 billion people who lived alongside them.

And this is where the truly worrying implication of the dichotomy of "good versus evil" becomes apparent. Greater atrocities have been committed by people working fervently for Good than have ever been committed for pride, selfishness, greed or any other hallmark of an evil person. One need only think of the inquisitions, witch-hunts and crusades of the Christian church; the more recent homophobia perpetuated particularly by modern churches, mainly in America but also elsewhere (The rightness or wrongness of homosexuality in a Christian context is a topic I am neither qualified nor willing to discuss, but the blatant hate preached by some churches is doubtlessly wrong); the various atrocities committed by Oriental religions, including militant Buddhist sects in and around the 16th century; and perhaps most strongly in the modern Western consciousness, militant pseudo-Islamic terrorist groups.

These are only a few examples; a little research will provide you with many more. And every one of these groups is convinced that they are doing not just something acceptable to good, but something mandated by good.

To paraphrase Sir Terry Pratchett, they have gotten so caught up in Good and Evil that they have forgotten about right and wrong.

It's a scarily easy thing to do. If you think about it, you will realise that we all do it, to a greater or lesser degree, on an almost daily basis. How many times have you looked down on someone for doing something "evil" - someone you know or someone in the news, it doesn't matter who - and completely forgotten that they are human beings, like us; if you are Christian, they are your fellow (lost) sons and daughters of God.

We get so caught up in insisting that we are good (as opposed to being evil, which we clearly are not) that we excuse almost every wrongdoing as a momentary slip-up. "Okay, so I did something wrong, but I'm still a good person!"

But good people are people who do not do wrong things - or do them as little as humanly possible. Nobody is completely, perfectly good, and I know perhaps a handful of people who are almost good people. Almost, but not quite.

When we trick ourselves into thinking that being "good people" allows us to do wrong things - not evil, but wrong - it is the first step towards a very slippery slope that leads to very "good" people doing very Wrong things.

On Being Labelled

People who keep on insisting that they're "tired of being labelled":

(Be honest, we all say it sometimes)

It's unfair. There. See? I agree with you. Simplifying someone until they're a two-dimension caricature isn't fair on that person, and in an ideal world everybody would treat everybody as a complete person.
But the sad fact is, that's not going to happen. It's physically impossible. Tomorrow morning, from the moment you wake up, treat everybody you meet as a whole and complete person. Extrapolate their background, their context, and their personality from what you can see of them - logically. Make no judgements you cannot substantiate with logical progression from readily available evidence. Let me know how long you last.

People who consciously "don't label people" have simply moved up to a higher, more equal level of labeling - not necessarily a bad thing, but nonetheless not an absolute lack of labels. The absolute best we can do (assuming absolute, blind equality to be "better") is leave everyone's labels blank, but that leaves us crippled in our interactions with everybody. Imagine introducing yourself to a white/European-looking man who can't speak English by running through every dialect of every South African language on the basis that they could be his home language, or introducing yourself to an African man by running through Spanish, French, Italian, Greek and Russian first. It sounds absurd because it is. We need to make snap judgements about people based on information that doesn't completely logically lead to the conclusions we make.

We can't know every possible fact about a person before we interact with them, or do anything affecting them. We have to put people in boxes based on what we know about them. And no, it's not fair; racial and sexual stereotyping - and therefore racism/sexism - exist because race and sex are the two facts we can immediately and (almost always) unambiguously determine at a glance.

But it's the way the world works. We all do it, and we would go crazy otherwise. So you have a choice: You can play the game and make it easier for people to put you in the right box - how you dress, how you act, how you talk and what you talk about, and how you treat people around you are all things almost entirely under your control. Or, if you want to, you can continue to "refuse to be labelled" and have people carry on labeling you anyway. Because believe it or not, most people don't particularly care. Sad but true. Deal with it, or spend the rest of your life crying in the corner. It's really up to you.

(A rant about) YOLO

I am the first the acknowledge that there is a good sentiment behind "YOLO"; so good, in fact, that Horace mentioned it (as carpe deim) in the first century BC. The same theme even appeared with only minor changes in The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest "story" writings - as opposed to records of laws etc. - known to modern civilisation. Life is short, and it is important that we take opportunities to enjoy it while we can.

But the YOLO fad has degenerated from what may once have been a genuinely good philosophy - I know that's optimistic, but despite the world's best efforts I do still have some shred of faith in humanity - into something that I can only describe as utterly stupid. I refuse to soil the names of perfectly good adjectives like "terrible", "moronic" and their compatriots by using them to describe something so totally devoid of meaning or rational thought.

As far as I can tell, "YOLO" translates not just to "You Only Live Once", but "You Only Live Once, let's try and make it as short as possible".

It's the ultimate excuse to do stupid things - just what teenagers have been looking for all along. They display a blind faith in the principle comparable to the blind faith of the Salemites in the judicial process of the Salem Witch Trials (With similar results on the health and safety of the group and those around them, too).

You hear a rational argument against something stupid? "Shut up and stop being boring. YOLO!" In a way, it's the ultimate way of distancing yourself from stupid decisions: Instead of accepting responsibility for the stupid decisions you make, or even showing the responsibility required to think about the decision in the first place, you pin the responsibility on an abstract principle. Even after the fact, when you're feeling the consequences of your idiocy, it's easy to just say "Ah well, YOLO" and carry on to the next act of idiocy, and so on and so forth.