If you really believe in the notions of good and evil as inherent moral states, and that you are good and that there are people out there who are evil, then in this article I aim to rip your conviction over such thinking to shreds. For the sake of personal development, of course.
‘Your’ understanding of good and evil
‘Good’ and ‘evil’ are just labels which we apply to actions based on what we would want done to us and what we wouldn’t. It’s that simple and that ego-based. Thus, good and evil aren’t just contextual: they are also, in our own heads, very malleable.
This means that sometimes these labels aren’t even applied rationally – such as when people buy into their society’s application of these labels because it suits them.
Some people consider homosexuality to be evil, and these people usually believe this because their religion or government tells them so, or because they’re simply homophobic to the point that they don’t recognise their phobia as just that – a fear – but rather as moral intuition. Sometimes it’s a combination of the two.
Don’t believe me? Think your beliefs about what is moral and immoral are all yours and having to do with the society you grew up in?
Let me ask you: have you ever wished someone were dead? It doesn’t matter if it were for a fleeting few seconds or a number of years, or if you regretted it afterwards or not – have you ever wished someone would just die?
The answer is probably yes.
Now ask yourself, what would it take for me to wish again for that person to die? The same awful thing they did last time or something equally bad, right? And then, what would it take for you to condone the killing of him or her?
Oh, it couldn’t be done, you may say: ‘there’s no way I could ever condone such a thing.’
The Milgram Experiment
In 1961 a psychologist named Stanley Milgram ran an experiment to see how much suffering ordinary people would inflict on a stranger under the pretence of scientific experimentation. The subject, a scientist and a fellow participant met for the first time to conduct an experiment. Put in separate rooms (the subject and scientist in one and the fellow participant in the room adjacent), the subject was told that for every one of the scientist’s questions that the fellow participant got wrong in the other room, the subject had to administer electric shocks of increasing voltage to the other participant.
At the touch of a button on a machine in front of them, the subjects delivered shocks of higher and higher voltage to the participants, while listening to the screams coming from the other room. Under the supervision of the scientist 65% of the subjects who did this experiment gave the stranger the maximum 450 volt shock, something which would easily kill a human being.
The exact details are here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
Actually, it was all staged to make the subject believe this was happening. The ‘fellow participant’ and the ‘scientist’ were acting out roles, the screams were pre-recorded and played through a speaker and there were no electric shocks at all.
The reason none of the subjects actually refused to give shocks up to 300 volts, and that most of them ‘killed’ the other participant, is that the scientist told them to keep going.
Most of the subjects showed stress and the desire to stop, but all it took was some mild, firm and non-threatening words from the ‘scientist’ for the subject to keeping hurting the stranger in the other room.
Milgram’s experiment was inspired by the acts of Nazi war criminals and the defence they used in courts that they were ‘just following orders’. In light of the experiment this defence carries a lot more weight than you might otherwise think. It also helps explain why several million Germans subscribed to Nazi ideology and played their parts in some of worst events in human history. It helps explain why millions of people go to war in the first place just because politicians think it’s a good idea to do so.
It even helps explain the continued survival of major religions despite the supernatural absurdity and contradictions present their dogma.
Authority, right into adulthood, is potentially the bigger influence on our behavior than free thought and conscience.
So, what would it take for you to condone the killing of a human being?
Just permission and a little encouragement from an authority figure is all it takes for the average person to condone the killing of someone they’ve never met. Hence the public acceptance of the death penalty in Japan, China, several US states, Iraq and plenty of other countries. Then there’s war, such as the Iraq War, in which large numbers of Americans and Britons condoned our military forces killing thousands and thousands of Iraqis for…what was it? Oil, WMDs, toppling of dictatorship for Iraq’s own good, terrorism? I forget.
So powerful is authority that we’ve even be trained to think of killing in very different ways. War is acceptable, but murder is not. Capital punishment is acceptable, manslaughter is not.
And remember that authority needn’t be a scientist, as in the Milgram experiment, or a dictator or some sort of celebrity. The media, alone, is an authority figure. Society, alone, is an authority figure for the individuals it comprises.
And if it works for murder…
So, if authority is all it takes to make us kill, it’s not hard to see why millions of people around the world support lesser violations of the sanctity of human welfare – such as the persecution of minority groups. Sexist, racist and homosexual persecution on a global scale: why not? If we’re prepared to torture and kill for authority why wouldn’t we be okay with making life hard for people who differ in tiny ways from the larger population?
You are not a good person
If you live in the first world you’re spending, what, less than 10% of your income on charity? That’s ridiculous. Thousands of children die every day from starvation and you’re spending your country’s valuable currency on a bigger TV, on brand name clothes, on DVDs, CDs, curtains, chocolate bars, croissants and payments for your car. You’re spending over 80% of your income, besides savings, on stuff you don’t need to survive.
And you think you’re a good person just because you’ve never raped anyone? Because you’ve never killed anyone? Because you’ve never stolen anyone’s stereo? It just means you’re slightly less evil than those serving prison sentences. Bravo. You’re still a bad person. I’m a bad person. Sam is a bad person. Bill Gates, for all his philanthropy, is a bad person. My personal hero, Steve Pavlina, is a bad person – he does great work but I’m guessing he’s not spending the bulk of the half a million dollars he must earn per year on charity.
With the exception of, I don’t know, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Ghandi (when these last two were alive) we’re all evil.
Why we should remove the labels
As far as it’s practical I ignore the labels of good and evil. Sometimes I will, for the sake of easy clear communication with people, describe some action as evil – but that’s rare and it’s even rarer that for communication’s sake I’ll call someone evil.
Besides us all being immoral anyway (and thus the categorisation of ‘good’ being pretty redundant) there are personal development benefits to doing away with these labels.
Making ignorance less acceptable
The moment we call individuals ‘evil’ we throw up our hands and say: ‘don’t understand them and don’t want to – they’re just different from you and I.’
You see this in newspapers all the time. If an article is about an ‘evil dictator’ then you can bet it will be a report with the sole aim of inciting hatred in its readers. If the article is just about a ‘dictator’ there’s a greater possibility that the article will be more thought-provoking.
In history, too, the same thing happens. Hitler is ‘evil’ and thus little of what a person studies on World War II offers any effort to understand Hitler or Nazis. In some parts of the world homosexuals are called evil and that follows that no effort is spent considering what homosexuality is actually all about – and on occasions it has even meant people throwing up their hands over the AIDS virus and saying ‘don’t understand it and don’t want to’. If you think it’s a plague that’s caused by evil people, that primarily affects evil people, you’re immediately less inclined to give it any thoughtful consideration.
Increasing the capacity to forgive
When you appreciate how weak the human conscience really is, and how flexible our notions of right and wrong are, you’ll find it easier to forgive people. And forgiveness is there as much for your happiness as it is for the well-being of the people you’re forgiving.
Increased humility
The altitude up on the moral high ground might give your ego a pleasant dizzying feeling, but you’ll just feel more detached from the people you perceive to be all that way below. Detachment can lead to loneliness and loneliness can lead to suffering. When you recognise the looseness of morality and immorality you’re less likely to be sanctimonious and more likely to be at peace with others.
Ultimately…
You can be a right-wing tabloid-reading armchair moraliser who has a high opinion of himself but is grumpy and despondent with others all the time. You can be a criminal who thinks all the do-gooders are hypocrites and that it’s a dog-eat-dog world and that, given you love yourself more than everyone else (like everyone else loves themselves more than everyone else), you have the right to survive and find happiness no matter who you hurt.
Either of those stances assumes you’re right and that others are beneath you – and that’s a very frustrating position to be in. The smarter approach is to step out of that duality: think less in terms of categorising good and evil and you’ll be smarter and more at peace with everyone else.
Check out the other articles in this series: Part 2, Part 3.
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