Do good and evil exist?

Those who know me know that I would say: “well, it depends”, and it is because everything in life is relative, isn’t it? Once someone even asked me if “killing” was, therefore, good, as if I were invariably going to answer “no, of course that is bad¨…

But what happens when you have to do it in self-defense? or when you have to protect someone else’s life from an aggressor? Is that wrong? You may say, “But that is different!” What changes? the context? In reality, what is altered is our perception of the same event, in the face of an incident that the brain decides to judge based on our mental models.

Now, I am not saying that the act of taking someone's life is good, what I am trying to explain to you is that everything will depend on our culture, our experience, and those social agreements to which all humans assent. The event by itself, cannot be assessed without evidence, without context, without knowing the full version of the facts, does this sound familiar to you? This is precisely done in a trial.

And you will say , “OK, my friend , where are you going with all this? because you are losing me… ” Wait a moment and I’ll clear it up for you. Just as everything depends on the social and individual interpretation that we build in our mind, it is possible that we are making judgments in the wrong way, based on everything we think is wrong… for example? Let's use a hypothetical situation: a person because of their religion may not be able to eat a certain type of meat while someone with another is forbidden to drink coffee, others will find forgiveness for their sins by paying money, there will be some religions in which polygamy is allowed, and it will be the case for some others who have sex simply for pleasure, to be considered sinners.

Why is all of the above "wrong"? ... I went through various dogmas of different religions in those statements. And at least for one of those you probably thought, “No, that is ridiculous!”, but perhaps, also for one of them you nodded saying, "Yes of course, that is wrong!" So why would we judge a third party and not question our own beliefs?

If you wonder why I talk so much about religion, it is because regardless of which, they are the great educators of the world; that is to say, they are the ones that have transmitted the basic concepts of good and bad generation after generation. Let's leave that for a moment and move on to another point. What about ideas like "you're wrong because you voted for such party", "you're wrong because you don't believe in god", "it's wrong to quit your job and become an entrepreneur"?... and the list goes on, but the problem with these judgments, both religious and those in all other contexts, is that they deny us the possibility of understanding an alternate reality, of generating new ways of seeing life and continuing to grow.

The next time you are tempted to say to someone, "You are wrong, my boy," ask yourself a simple question: what if I am wrong? What is it that they are seeing and I am not? Could we be humble and empathetic to try to understand their experience, their context and their beliefs? ... If we don't question everything we think is wrong, if we don't learn from others, if we don't allow ourselves to create new judgments, we will be condemned to a life that society has shaped for us. I just watched the series "Unorthodox" on Netflix and it shows this process of confrontation with our beliefs and our mental models, I recommend you watch it too, and I hope that we all learn to be the first critics of our lives, dare to question and change what we thought was immovable, because remember that everything depends on the brain that interprets it.

Finally and as the meme reads: “You’re not afraid of failure; you’re already failing. You are afraid of success.” So, are you up for it?

Credits

Imagen: Freepik.com | Usuario: @nensuria