Good X Bad – What Is It and Does It Even Exist?
Previous articles from the series
- Truth
- Life Pillars
- Everything is Scale
- Sadness
- Good X Bad
Introduction
Everyone knows those words and presumably even its meaning. Very few though have given them serious thought, despite the frequent usage. I’ll try to share my point of view that have been established with help of my good friend @hr1.
The misconception
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People tend to think that things have set Good/Bad quality. What I mean by that is that they think that truth about what is good and what is bad actually exists. Well it doesn’t. What more, to an extent even Good and Bad doesn’t exist outside of our elusive minds. Let me elaborate.
The Good and Bad from the point of view of the Truth
I strongly recommend reading the article about the Truth that I have already linked twice. It is a cornerstone of the philosophies that will happen in this article. Done? Cool. If you do not agree with the Truth how I explained it feel free to polemize with me even under this article. If you do not feel the need I take it as an agreement and we can continue.
The only viable point of view in deciding whether Good or Bad really exists is the Truth. We could also call it “the universal concept” in this case. Good and Bad cannot exist without a subjective point of view that it would be anchored to. When it is anchored to the universal truth, what effectively happens is that the subjective point of view is anchored to an objectivity. From the point of view of the universal concept all the actions are just actions. Infinite amount of 1 and 0 in infinite amount of branches leads again to only 1 or 0 at the end. In other words, the action, be it anything, just happens. I wouldn’t go as far to say that nothing changes, because it might very well be wrong, but definitely nothing bad or good happens neither. This should prove that Good/Bad ultimate does not exist when the universal concept is the point of view. But people (me included) still use it. Why is that so?
The Good and Bad from the point of view of the individual
Why does the humanity keep on using tool that presumably doesn’t exist? Well because everything that is in our minds does exist at least in that limited environment (be it good/bad, value of cryptocurrency, you name it). Not that it would exist directly, but it does exist through a symbol, a representation of an idea. So there has to be something that people gain from having such a symbol in active usage.
Being able to label something as Good or Bad saves tons of our processing capacity. Every human being has various things that trouble/piss/worry him. To him, those things are Bad, despite the fact that the things are not Bad at all from the point of the Truth. By being able to do the shortcut and realize that the thing is unwanted and that defensive measures have to be taken saves a lot of energy. And vice versa of course. Also, using those easy words people can easily transfer the meaning to others, instead of lengthy explanation that could cost even more resources than just the time.
People also have the tendency to combine the actions that are happening with subjective point of view. In other words, people willingly admit, that “Bad” stuff is happening to them. Negative actions happen to everyone. No one is absolved. Instead of trying to find peace with the negativity that is affecting us, it’s much easier to just internally (but even externally) complain that Bad stuff is happening. This have a serious negative effect on the well-being. Actually no positive outcome occurs when people take personally actions (thus labelling it as Good or Bad) that are happening. In order to preserve the well-being it’s necessary to eliminate that and take actions as they have happened and as they really are without connecting it to the subjective level.
As in every (not only) metaphysical article, this is just my point of view. I would be more than happy if you shared your point of view. Actually… I insist! :)
When I saw the title of this article I jumped on it immediately haha. I love thinking about things like this and your point of view is pretty similar to mine. I also do not believe that good and bad are real things.
I read your first article on truth and got a little bit of understanding about your pillars of life. I think that those pillars plus emotions are the reasons we label things as either good or bad.
As you said, there are only events that occur and those events in and of themselves are neither good nor bad. They’re just things that happened. But we tend to associate good and bad to those events based on past experiences (pillars of life). You seem to be glazing over the fact that humans are very EMOTIONAL creatures. The subjective meanings that we assign to these events are, in large part, the reason most people keep on living.
We’re only human(for now) and the vast majority of humans NEED emotion to validate whether or not their lives are worth living. Without the subjectivity, we’d all just be a bunch of mindless robots executing programs in perfect sync with one another. Nothing would mean anything, not even death (which I actually think is quite overblown).
The emotion, the subjective, the volatility is what makes life interesting. So yea, there is no good and bad but it’s just a nasty side effect of what makes being human any good. Sounds to me like it’s time to learn how to control your emotions so that everything is subjectively good.
Perfect comment! It’s awesome that you went through the previous posts.
I totally agree with you. As you can see the series is still just commencing and emotions will once definitely be discussed too (in one form or another). I get how from only those few articles it may sound like I glaze over many more things than just that, depending on how "deep" one wants to go :P.
That is totally my goal for few years now:P One can always improve there.
Btw cool idea you proposed at your blog! Will drop by later
I actually just started a blog that is aimed at tackling thought experiments like this. I'd love for you to check it out. Keep in mind that it is new and I hope to post more and more content on there and on steemit. You can find it at ascendhumanity.com