Good & Evil: Archaically Invalid

A Few Words for Intellectualism

Perhaps its just my immediate setting — The Bible Belt; South Carolina to be exact — but the influence of the obsolete belief in Good And Evil over my peers is disturbing.

I say this not only from a philosophical standpoint and not only from a yearning for broad intellectualism, but from a desire for pragmatism as well and, consequentially, ease, maybe even peace. It is too often that a consequence is blamed not on a cause, a reason, but on a “he’s just a bad person.” 

Except he’s not “just a bad person.” That’s the simplest minded statement ever. “Bad” doesn’t even fucking exist. No more, at least, than the actual vulgarity in my use of the word fucking, which is none. They’re ideas. Good and evil are ideas as is any vulgarity attached to words. Hell, vulgarity’s an idea ‒ the very meanings of words are just ideas! And ideas, essentially, exist only within the beholder’s mind. Relative to the individual, an idea is internal, not external, and thus cannot be validly applied to anyone outside that individual himself. He can share his ideas, sure, but that doesn’t mean the recipients will hold it at the same value as he does.

So the defeat of good and evil is only simple hierarchical logic. And once embraced, the world becomes very interesting. You’ll wonder why, you’ll search for causes and for causes for those causes and so on. Why did men hijack planes and kill three thousand people on 9/11? What made them like that? Why does that kid continue to spiral into substance abuse? Why did that mugger kill Spiderman’s uncle, even though he didn’t need to?*

And you’ll spawn thoughts that would once have seemed inhumane, but only because “humane” is a word who’s traditional connotation is soaked in the illogically shed tears of emotion (and is, itself, just an idea). You’ll see murder not as a moral crime — for you’ll have outgrown the invalidity of morality — but simply as the death of one organism at the hands of another, and, hopefully, as an unnecessary societal crime for which your life will be inconvenienced.

You’ll be at the forefront of progress, just like Galileo when through reason, not ideology, he came to the conclusion that the Earth is round, or like the early doctors who defied religion in diagnosing diseases as diseases instead of “divine punishment.”

The full potential for human enlightenment is unfathomably grand, but we must first as a majority cast away our predispositions before we can reach that potential.

*shoving old men away from a car doesn’t seem like it’d be that hard.