Written by Tarhan Gorgun
"The natural distribution is neither just or unjust;These are simply natural facts of the current state of humanity. What is just and unjust is the way that institutions deal with these facts". Tarhan GorgunGood and Bad
The first fact to point out is that every person carries the potential to do what we globally accept as “bad” when the right conditions are met. You may think that you wouldn't, but think again... The research and history will prove you wrong.
Since the time of the tribes until the nations of today, the social hierarchy has been deciding what is “good” or “bad" for their ingroups by considering the needs of the hierarchy and the rest of the social order.
Today, the concepts of what is good and bad are almost accepted on a global level by all societies. Namely stealing is bad, raping is bad, killing is a special case and it is recognized as a bad component only on an individual level...
Some countries practice the most distilled and efficient version of laws, human rights and judiciary system to reduce the occurrence of what we call bad acts and events. On average, humanity is improving in regards to many aspects of life that we identify as “good”, today. However, some countries are stuck on the status quo situation where goodness only exists for the hierarchy.
The question is,” are we good or bad”?
I will discuss this significant question on three levels. On an individual level, on a larger social level, and regards to philosophy and psychology of what we have established as understanding of “bad” and “good”.
Am I bad?
Let's talk about what we consider good or bad on an individual level.
Well, I'm not that good. Even though, I meditate everyday to be able to make conscious choices. But, still, I am not good enough. Because I have the potential to do wrong if the circumstances are right .
That being said, being good on an individual level is just a balance and alignment of our choices, actions and our deeper commandments framed by the laws and order, ethics, and human rights that we have developed .
When our commandments and actions align in a certain energy, then we thrive and vice versa we feel anxious, depressed or angry and it is more likely that we will make bad choices and impulsive actions during those periods of life.
Many people have their commandments programmed on ‘bad’ set. So, for them compassion is not an issue nor being good or bad. Indeed this statement does not exclude religious people.
We are neither good nor bad. Indeed, we are human who consist of an intention to evolve towards a higher empathy and compassion level towards each other.
However, we are just not there yet and we don't know if we will continue to improve our good ethics on a global level in the coming future. I believe that we will.
The Fundamental Irony
Let's discuss the meaning of bad and good on a macro scale, things get interesting here....
In prior stages of our evolution, we have developed tribal rules, and rituals to protect, increase the level of connection, and ease or address some of the unacceptable behaviour that could arise in an ingroup.
Those early seeds of rules and rituals transformed into today's laws and orders. They also manipulated the root conditions and evolution of the statements of belief systems where killing and many other inappropriate and harming acts to another party are almost accepted as bad and a punishable act.
This statement is correct only if the act is done on an individual level and the ancient so-called holly scripts offer various "bad" and "good" selection for different races and believers.
Where is the irony?
The existence of killings on macro level that are happening daily around the globe are much more destructive and painful, or literally more evil than that of individual level killings are causing.
Larger scale killings are happening due to the existence of active armed groups, conventional wars and wars between nations. The irony is when killing is fired by the power of belief and allowed by the loyal ideology, it makes these killings acceptable, or even accepted as act of honour by both sides of these parties.
Imagining a global "goodness" and "justice" in current world order is similar to imagining a democracy where slavery is legal.
Compassion
Lets talk about compassion ! It means concern about people, caring about their well being.
When we study babies we realize that babies will cry if other babies cry, or they will feel uncomfortable near a suffering adult. Here we can understand that we have a natural compassion, tendency to suffer others' sufferings.
Question arises: how broad does this compassion extend?
There is a moral instinct of compassion in us but it is very limited in its capacity. Our natural instinct guides us to be more compassionate to our ingroups and actually to be cautious of others.
Today if you walk on a crowded street of a popular city, I wouldn't feel threatened by strangers unless you have social anxiety disorder.
On the other hand this was not the case for different indigenous tribes, we know that the response to individuals from other tribes is almost never peaceful or compassionate. The act of going into someone else territory would have been a suicide.
I would like to talk about feelings. Disgust is a universal feeling for some substances, smells or situations, such as faces, rotting, bad smell . We are also often disgusted by other people.
Did you know that it is easier to get disgusted by somebody that belongs to an outer group?.
One study analysed the relationship between the disgust feeling and inner and outer groups. The study showed that people who get easily disgusted by universally disgusting things have higher capacity to be disgusted by the outer groups. People who are more sensitive to disgust showed more reaction to immigrants, homosexuals, and any other outer-groups. It is also known that making people more disgusted makes them meaner towards the outer groups.
There was a study made to see how people feel towards outer groups in conditioned circumstances. In this study two different groups of people were brought together in a fart sprayed room. The outcome was a meaner treatment to outer groups. We may argue from here that our emotion of disgust has some relations with how we feel and respond to outer groups.
It is not that simple of course! We do feel compassion for strangers as well. News, and pictures of suffering individuals would make us feel sad too. Because through pics and stories , even though you will never see those people you feel like they are a bit from the inner group. This is the same technique charity uses, they use a picture or a story to create compassion for attracting help for strangers.
This is the pure outcome of globalism and the connection it brings to humanity through technological tools and global ideologies. We can also argue that compassion is a must in order to develop morality, especially the global morality that we need. This compassion will be possible through the global injection of the strategized unity story.
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