The Nature of Good and Evil
From the moment you were born, good and evil did not matter to you. As a child, your journey was not determined yet. People develop their own perceptions of what is right and wrong, as they grow up, through their experiences. What a person sees as evil and wrong could be different than how others view it. A person cannot rightfully understand what it means to be good unless they can avoid evil. To truly avoid being evil, one must learn to stay true to their ideals, goals, and relationships.
The journey to good starts with the choices that will shape you for the rest of your life. An image of a new-born baby can be used as a symbol to represent good things such as: the untouched, purity, and innocence. Such description is titled under a new-born because when a baby is born, its sensory motors are heightened due to the incapability of sight. As from what I remembered, the inability of sight can also possibly symbolize another aspect of purity in a way where one is not able to see the impurities of another. A new-born child can also be represented as innocence.
Once a baby is born, people keep babies indoors and out of harm and danger. A baby also can resemble an awareness of the purity and innocence being able to be easily broken, because of the fragility of an infant. Therefore, a new-born baby can generally symbolize purity, innocence, and untouched; however, it can also emphasize the fragility of the nature of good in such a way where if a single influence is displayed, one can easily learn and assimilate rapidly and change. With the society in which we live in today, the mass media plays a big role upon how an individual thinks, dresses, and acts.
The media industry has become overpopulated by the dominance of men, thus demeaning women into several bad images. Women today are represented as sex symbols in music videos. If not, represented as a sex symbol, women are set on a high expectation to become model-like figures in order to gain acceptance of the society within the fashion industry; this expectation leads to the loss of one’s self through binging, dieting, and smoking cigarettes. Such dramatically terrible actions advertise bad images for the younger generation, encouraging them to become beautiful like one of the models on television.
In regards to commercialism, there are many advertisements that encourage the society to allow children to become obese. We as a society are feeding our children with unhealthy foods due to the high rates of poverty. In relation to poverty, it is one of the reasons why there are criminals who steal to survive. Going back to Charles Darwin’s theory of “Survival of the Fittest”, we strive to survive in such a chaotic world filled with injustice and evil to where we reach a limit when it is difficult to be good sometimes. It takes just as much energy to be evil as it does to be good and few people have energy enough for either course… Evil isn’t what one does, it’s something one is that infects everything one does. ” This quote, stated by Davies in Rebel Angels, exhibits the role of society. All of these industries believe that they are doing justice to the economy and the people (for example, to make people look or dress better, etc); however, in reality the products they are advertising are unhealthy for the public. We, as a general public, are solely attracted to what looks appealing, and are not really drawn to what it really does for you.
This emphasizes the corruption of the society, thus revealing the nature of evil. “The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. ” This quote means that we are evil because we are ignorant of the good things in the world because we are selfish. And we are selfish because we refuse to understand such things. For example, when it comes to advertising, the industries advertise products for popularity and for more money without really caring about the outcomes of the public.
They are ignorant of the outcomes the public. “The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear sightedness. ” Going back to the resemblance of one not being able to see, a blind man symbolizes purity because he is unable to see the imperfections of someone else. Camus explains that it is impossible for one to remain good, once an individual is evil; he or she has no representation of consciousness or guilt because he or she is only thinking about themselves.
The nature of evil is thus, represented as the ignorance and selfishness of the people. It is said in Asian cultures that the good balances evil and vice versa and that one cannot do alone without the other. In Chinese philosophy, Yin-Yang describes “shadow and light. ” It represents the polar opposites or the different forces that are interconnected and interdependent in the natural world, and how they work with each other in turn in relation to each other. Without the balance of good and evil, there would not be any balance within the earth’s core.
Yin is like the moon, and Yang is like the sun. Without each other, one would not exist. For example, if the sun did not exist, there would not be such thing as “night” nor “day”. To paraphrase everything, the good becomes corrupted by the evil. However, the natures of good and the natures of evil intertwine to become a regular human being. There is an equilibrium between saints and Satans, somewhere in between the immortals, which is also known as us, human beings. There is Satan, because there is God.
Human beings are made of good and evil. One cannot just be good, and one cannot just be evil. In some form, they are both good and evil, because one cannot be without the other. You need evil in the world, for there to be good. The way one sees evil may not be evil for the other but also, he might see good in it. Even though Davies says evil takes as much energy as good and people barely have energy to do either, but evil is not what someone does, but he is evil himself from how he infects everything from what he does.
