The Yin and Yang of life

Who are you? Are you a blank slate? Are you a result of your environment? Are you an innocent bystander with no responsibility for your motivations and actions?
There is a hard truth we all have to grapple with. We are not innocent. We are not blank slates without responsibility. We all have deep hidden motivations/ personalities that would shock us if we really understood them. You can't truly know who you are until you investigate the darker impulses that reside within all of us. If we were put in certain unfortunate situations these "evil" impulses would become self evident. One only needs to look into history and ask why the masses in Germany followed the Nazi ideology. Were those people different from us? no, they were fed false and pathological ideology and were able to justify their unconscionable behavior. We are all capable of incredible evil.
The truth is that we are all capable of good and of evil. It is not until we truly understand who we are, that we can come to terms with and deal with our own human nature. It is only when we understand what we are capable of that we can understand what being kind/virtuous/self-sacrificing really means. Life is tragedy, we must learn to accept our predicament and consciously choose to put aside our evil impulses.

This inescapable truth should be used as a reminder of how easy it could be to slip into chaos if we don't fight the good fight every waking moment.