–taken as much as I can remember from a conversation with a friend.
How does one go about defining good or evil?
Many of us have come to believe that it is natural that these two concepts exist. History has shown us this definition; a ruling power creates a set of rules which it forces others to follow. There would only be two types of people then: You were a follower, or you were dead. Naturally, the ones who followed were the ones to reproduce, and teach their offspring to behave the same way. And pretty soon, they came to believe that following these rules was good, and that disobeying them was bad. We are not, after all, defined by who we are, but by what we do.
Thus, we can make these statements:
Good is what conforms to Society’s laws.
Evil is what strays from Society’s laws.
We are taught that slavery is wrong, that bigamy is wrong, that sodomy is wrong, that fascism is wrong, and along the way, we forget why they are wrong.
This may seem like “environmental determinism” (a concept one will come across when discussing evolution) and therefore easily dismissed, but one has to admit, external factors play a key role in the “moral make-up” of a person. Many of the things we consider intolerable today were well accepted in the past. Imagine the number of perfectly nice people, who worked 9 to 5, and went to church every Sunday, then came home to whip the skin off a slave’s back. Imagine a young boy, raised in rural Africa, who was raised on the flesh of defeated warriors from other tribes. Imagine him plopped down into the middle of a city, then electrocuted for having lunch.
It brings up the question: what right do we have to judge someone as good or evil, using the rules fixed upon us by society as a measuring stick? When he has merely strayed from the majority, or is perhaps acting independently from the whole?
I think we should not have that right. Maybe we should withdraw from society and live our lives stripped bare of society’s trappings.
We should focus only on the main essence of our being: survival. We are human, but before that, we are. How we live our lives is but a small facet of how we live. Existence takes precedence over essence. We are born to die, the only truth absolute in its existence, the only thing solid in this world. I have never held a ‘past’ in my hand, nor have I eaten a bowl of ‘future’. The fact that we think and act is secondary to the fact that we exist as physical beings.
In reality, nothing is essentially Good. Nothing is essentially Evil. There is only the foundation: Existence.
Epicurealis 