Best posts made by Alex Balint

@TheGoldenMole most of the time, the shadow cannot be seen from the perspective of the person themselves, they become incapable to see it and the negative behaviour becomes unconscious.
It is often the extremists who believe they are fighting for a cause of utmost goodness that commit the most evil crimes (as we see it) but they don't know because it is so in their sphere of understanding, which is shared by their society
But then, we have a much more generalized similar attitude, in many concerns: take killing animals for instance(tough subject many don't want to consider), it is considered good. What? Then when you expose animals' suffering and emotions to them they say it's at least necessary. Ok, but science doesn't back this, by meat causing cancer. But then they agree with you, and say their change cannot make a worldshift, because in fact it goes much deeper into their attachments, eating is a form of connection, and one subconsciously realises they would break that connectionwith some people.
I'm quite angry with christianity saying we don't have to think about it, we just have to follow what the custom is and that is the path to redeeming your sins, when the church is sometimes the most unaware of societal structures

@pe7erpark3r said in Is Evil Learned or Inherent?:

@Berin said in Is Evil Learned or Inherent?:

@Indrid-Cold You may disagree with what I said Indrid. It is always good to have the counterpoint and a pleasure to receive your notes.

Life is ripe with suffering and tragedy, as it is, but what brings people to their knees, what brings us to desperation and contempt is suffering intentionally brought into the world, by other's and ourselves. Soldiers often experience PTSD not after having seen incredible evil in front of their eyes, but by seeing the evil they are capable of themselves.

What hurts us most is the suffering that didn't have to be, that was caused by someone willing to hurt others. We have seen immense evil done in the past century, by the third reich, and multiplied even by all the communist empires the world has seen so far.

If we were truly born evil, then the suffering we cause would be tragedy, it would not actually be evil, because it would not be intentional. For anything to be evil, it needs to stem from a decision. Thus all evil, without exception, is freely committed and not innate.

In fact, recent study shows that taking, for instance, sth that is considered bad, like addiction, in the moment they are supposed to choose whether they want to subside to that addiction or not the part of their brain responsible for awareness and decision-making is being shut down, that is the basis of addiction. So, we say they should simply remove their harmful habits, but complelely dismiss that it is not exactly possible with an atittude of "it's their fault"
As with soldiers having PTSD as a result of perceiving themselves as bad, the actual issue in people not being able to change their habits is the constant thought of "don't do it" as if we needed to resist our internal self which would naturally behave as bad. That is what we are taught, because parents usually don't differentiate between a bad action and a bad self, such as when a kid breaks a plate and her mom says: "bad girl, you're so (fill in the blank)"
That is the fundamental issue with society, and it is actually internalised, and creates ego: ego can be wonderful and the only way to experience reality, but a major setback too, if we identify with the negative, dark, at a most subconsious level
That's what we need to look into
That creates why we act evil, because that's what we believe at our deepest level about ourselves(even religion talks about the originary sin), how could we not mirror that in our actions?