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I can be good, and I can be evil.
It's a simple observation but one that feels necessary to consider often. There are contradictory ways of being[1] from one moment to the next, one time to the next. We can act in all manner of ways that, when viewed from a different perspective, might be considered questionable.
Now consider a different context, a different society, a different time. Who knows how we would act? I genuinely have no idea.
Of course we'd all like to think that we'd be good, that we'd do the right, noble, ethical thing. But we're highly social beings[2]. The context around us shapes us, forces us into ways of thinking that feel natural. Of course I think this way! We all do! Everyone thinks they're right.
It's difficult; In some sense I don't think there are truly globally "good" values or ways of being. There are "good" values in specific instances and contexts, but to say that over the arc of history we can apply the same values and determine who the "good" were seems a bit misguided.
And so we exist in this perennial situation where our actions are in a large part determined by what and who is around us.
Maybe one way to think about it is how our actions fit with our nature[3]. Our nature is simply our nature. What's good and what's evil are separate; external concepts that map on to different dimensions of that nature. They don't capture the full complexity of it. In reducing our nature to these simple ideas we loose a lot of the texture, that it's probably not really about good and evil at all.
Last updated Thu Dec 16 2021 in Berkeley, CA
1: /thought/hypocrisy-and-contradiction.gmi
3: /thought/the-nature-of-something.gmi
/thought/beyond-emotional-pornography.gmi
/thought/one-question-for-god.gmi