Fair warning - some of you might not like at all what you are about to read.
I am beginning to think that the greatest battle of it all is not the one between Evil and Good. Throughout history, humans have created and amplified a narrative based on their perception of what was good and what was…opposite of good. Evil. We created myths, divine characters, cosmic stories, and epic battles. We infused our own personal stories with the good and evil parameters, navigating between what is metaphorically expressed as light and darkness. On a more down to earth level, we implemented rituals, rules, and laws to condition and enforce what was considered right, just, good…versus what was the opposite.
But here is a twist.
All humans are born good. Something happens after that and we begin to experience suffering which does turn to “darkness” - or in other words, anger, despair, fear, etc.. Hence, we fall into our own narrative of good versus evil. In some cases, genetic divergences from the “norm” may lead to what we perceive as evil actions or evil people, but if you were a highly intelligent being from a hyper-civilized future you would probably instantly detect the biological anomaly at play and probably have multiple means of helping such individuals. The point is, there is no such thing as the pure evil we have been persistent in describing throughout time and in almost all of our cultural narratives.
For a very long time I considered GREED to be the greatest evil humanity has ever faced, but I really have to take my own cues here. Greed is a symptom of deeper pathological issues. Not evil. Feels evil to us, those affected by other people’s greed, but in itself is simply a hyperactive fear of loss and probably a bunch of other behavioral and neurological variables. This, of course, would also change the way we approach it, and eventually treat it in order to help individuals affected by greed have a chance to integrate in society in a healthy and truly happy way. If you think that millionaires and billionaires are perfectly fine, then you haven’t met enough of them - because they can be just as miserable as any of us, mere mortals. Or even more so.
So if good versus evil is not the real battle of humanity and driving most of our personal and global conflicts, what is? I think I found it.
Passivity.
If we think about it hard enough, most of the problems humanity is facing are solvable problems. Instead, we turn them into debatable problems, and then we analyze them for months, years, even decades. What we could solve in a year, we take ten election cycles to accomplish. This happens at individual level, at community level, and at global level.
Here is the real kicker though. Being trapped in the good versus evil narrative, most of us believe that we are good. Only a very few humans on earth would believe to be evil and truly enjoy remaining evil. The vast, overwhelming majority of us, sincerely believe that we are NOT evil - and we would be right. This is where the problem emerges.
By believing that we are good within our collective and personal narrative of good versus evil, we also believe that being good is doing our part within the battle itself. In other words, us not being evil is sufficient to win against evil, and therefore nothing else could be warranting any other expectations of us.
By taking a morally passive stance, we feel as if we are righteous and also on the winning side of the battle, by virtue of being good - or rather, not being evil. But are we really? Good? Not evil? Is it possible that our passive approach is a deficiency rather than a virtue?
In this struggle between being active and being passive with regards to our own community, society, and the world at large, taking the passive stance effectively slows down and limits our collective and even individual potential for transformative problem-solving.
Recall for a second how long it took us to “grant” voting rights to women. Analyze the trends in the workforce to pinpoint discrepancies in how workers are being paid based on their gender, social status, and even geographical location. Same human beings - different artificial variables employed to slow down and even limit personal growth. Consider the trail of blood money in your own retirement fund where some of the stocks managed by your index fund outright sponsors the war machine. Our own pension funds often sustain the killing of human life or the destruction of our environment while we play golf, watch TV, have a beer, or get a spa treatment. We are not actively evil. We are passively not doing the evil deeds ourselves. We could say that through our passivity, evil prevails, but we would be only partially right.
Evil does not prevail, it fills a vacuum of goodness. Filling that vacuum with goodness can be instantaneous, and just as turning on a lamp inside a dark room would flood the space with light, turning on our “goodness” in our community and our world would fill our personal and collective space with hope, justice, fairness, and everything we value and cherish to be of universal virtue.
Yes, greed and corruption are at play, but what truly enables greed and corruption is our personal and collective passivity, leaving a vacuum of people power to be filled by what a morally healthy individual would call “evil.”
So if turning on the light can instantaneously brighten the space, how come we cannot turn on the goodness and instantaneously eradicate greed, corruption, and violence?
Well, because of the shape of our “space”, specifically our socio-political space. If by this point my words have made sense, you can continue to read, but if you disagree with my assessment I would rather invite you to a conversation about the subject to explore your point of view. If my above assessment makes sense to you, what will follow is how we change the parameters of our predicament, and begin to build the strategy for turning on the goodness in the functional way - the way that fills our collective space, not just our own private room.
Please subscribe to the Project FORWARD blog or its Substack to read my upcoming article on Micro-Activism in an Entangled Macro Strategy. This is where I will turn my analysis into a “what next?” larger question about the practical steps we can all take to solve the passivity problem and how to get to the “all” part of this problem. After all, we are ALL a part of this world and our existence in this life is as relevant as it is consequential.
Substack Link: https://projectforward.substack.com/p/greatest-battle-of-it-all
How to help: https://www.project-forward.org/how-to-help
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