Tuesday, March 03, 2009

random thoughts ftw

is there even such a thing as evil. or is that just a word that was created to make situations seem easyier. cause its so much easyier to just call someone evil and blame them for the worlds problems such as osama bin laden, or hitler, then to possibly look at all the peices that might have casused things.. but do you think someone can actually be fully evil? that there is actually posible for that person to not have a single "good" thing about them? to be full of evil like grendel from the story of beauwolf(sp?). i dont know. i think people can do evil things. but i do not belive that someone can fully be absolutly 100% evil.

it makes me wonder. hypotheticaly say someone like hitler ( cause he is such an easy example). was born in a much more loving family then he was, was tought by thoes around him to treat others with kindness, and if he himself was more accepted in his society would he still have turned out the way he did? and if not, then was he himself was not evil? could it be that it was society that created something evil? cause how can someone be born like that.

and then i think that if evil can be created. if little pieces through out someones life can make them like that. then how can we say someone is evil, how can we just point fingures at one person.

is there even such a thing as evil? or was it just simply created so people can be manipulative. "oh him, hes evil"

i donno, its late and this does not make much sence. but its a random thought and i had to write it down somewere before it turned into one of thoes things that seems like a good thought then you forget what it was the next morning.

3 comments:

Bryi said...

I was just thinking about this today, actually. I was briefing a book about Hitler from the library, and the blurb on the flap addressed him as "the enigma of ultimate evil". I was thinking, you know, I don't think there's such a thing as ultimate evil, just as much as there's no such thing as ultimate good.

I believe that "evil", so to speak -- because evil, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder -- is a combination of nature and nurture, just like everything else about human personalities. I don't know much about Hitler's childhood, so let's take your average serial killer: bad childhood, probably beaten by his father, disliked by his peers. But also probably had a mental problem that obfuscated any chance of him having a normal life -- if it had just been the bad home life, he might have turned out strange, but certainly not evil. Make sense?

Evil, to me, is a question of moral relativism. Hitler firmly and unequivocally believed he was doing the right thing, and certainly wouldn't have seen himself as evil during his heyday. That's why it's called Aryan Supremacy; the supremacists believe they are better than someone else. But as outsiders or the victims of Hitler, we believe he was evil.

In stories, we can have demons and such, which can be avatars of ultimate evil...but I don't think that phenomenon can happen in the real world. I agree: no one can be fully 100% absolute evil.

Bryi said...

Also, I think it is easier to blame "evil" than anything else. A lot of people just want to be able to say a certain person was evil, so it wasn't the fault of society, or family, or themselves, if the individual turned out badly.

"Oh, Jack the Ripper is evil. He mutilates prostitutes and is too smart to be caught. What is the world coming to?!"

"Oh, Hitler is evil. He indiscriminately destroyed millions of people for no good reason. What is the world coming to?!"

"Oh, terrorists are evil. That means we have to go and kill all of them because they're scary and don't believe the same things we do. What is the world coming to?!"

People ask all these questions, and panic that the end of times is near because of all the "evil" in the world, but never ask why there is "evil", or what they can do about it.

Man, you're prompting lots of insight from me tonight! I must be a leaky faucet.

jarjar_head said...

I'll go with Occam's Razor on this one. 'Good' and 'evil' do not exist excepting their concepts. They are merely labels.

~The Muse

P.S. 'Evil' is a great way for the 'good' to slander the good. Just a thought.