Was Adolft Hitler evil? What about Atilla the Hun? And Robespierre? Moving on now, was Gandhi a great person? Was Dalai Lama? And Albert Schweitzer, was he great too? My guess is, your answer was a resounding 'Yes!' to all the above questions. Which leads us nicely to the topic of contention today, what makes a person a 'bad' and what makes them 'good'?
It so happened that during one of the late night study sessions which one's time in university is renowned for, I completely lost it when one of my roommates compared someone to be as evil as Hitler. Yes, my dear readers, me, the peaceful, calm-loving author of your beloved blog can lose his marbles on occasion, too. I really don't know why I did that, for I don't particularly approve of his genocide of several million Jews. However, I flared up and went about defending Hitler, the human.
"Awww...isn't he the cutest little mustachioed German!" - Notte Me
But, come to think of it, he couldn't have been inherently 'evil'; I mean, he was once a kid enjoyed his chocolate ice cream and went to school, did homework, and cheated on tests and probably wedgied, what with his funny-sounding accent...point is, he was a normal human being (for relative values of normal) just like you and me, so, what made him go about killing all those people?
Assigning an 'evil' tag ( for people like Hitler) or a 'great' tag (for people like Mahatma Gandhi), and 'HolyMotherOfGodHowTheHellIsThatEvenPossible' tag (for people like Rajinikanth) is just an easy way to explain away things and get back to the our normal cocooned life. It brushes away the underlying meaning of what made those people do what they did and blames the person itself, which, as you'd likely know, is so much easier than blaming society.
Rajnikanth. Who's superhuman smile doesn't vanish with his make-up.
But, 'What does their immediate society have anything to do with the heinous acts they committed?', I hear you ask, knowledgeable reader, or I would, if were in hearing distance of you, and you were actually asking that question. But, bear with me just a bit longer and we'll get there.
What if, all our actions were somehow governed by the environment which we were part of? Our present existence, our very thoughts at this precise moment is a function of ALL our past experiences, every single one of them.. Maybe me choosing a Dairy Milk over a BarOne has to do with my mom buying me more of the former when she felt like being nice to me, and that particular brand of chocolate is associated with happy events in the distant past, still causing me to go for it now, so many years down the road. (Well, more like a few months, but you get the point.)
Similarly, Hitler (yes, he's going to be our prime example today) must have undergone a plethora of experiences which led him to develop his anti-Semitic views. It can be argued, of course, that other people underwent even worse treatment and depravity and ended up making their lives better than Hitler's. (Not very difficult; come to think of it, its pretty easy to not kill 6 million people). But, then again, every single of these others did NOT have the same experiences as Hitler did. So, the various ways in which ALL of each persons' previous experiences combine with each other is completely different from each other. Now you get what it means when people tell you that everyone is unique.
To drive in the point a bit, lets take 5 different life experiences. These 5 events can combine in 120 different ways (I'll spare you the math). So, assuming that several people underwent the same 5 experiences in different points of time, each of them could have shaped up in a 120 different ways. And thats only 5. Think about the magnitude of the possibilities if you consider that EACH moment represents a life event.
After thinking about the magnitude of the possibilities.
So, each of us are startlingly, almost disturbingly unique in their our own way. So, seeing that your current outlook on life is influenced by all your past experiences, the way you react to something now will be COMPLETELY different from the way another person would react to the exact same scenario. One man's teddy bear is another man's handgun, so to speak.
Maybe one choses the evil side over the good side, given the same set of circumstances, based on their inherent nature? What about emotions? Surely that has to be inherent. I mean, happiness at being appreciated after having won an award or being distraught when a loved one dies can't be predetermined; its just a feeling, right? Well, as the more observant of you might have guessed, wrong! Sure, YOU can't quite be help the way you feel about something now, but that could only be because you were programmed to feel that way.
Remember those nifty little things called DNA? Yup, those double-helical beings! They carry codes which are passed on from generation to generation, while mingling with one other person en route(Yes, I'm talking about the birds and the bees.) So, imagine this: several hundred thousand years ago, when our species was in the stages generally referred to as the cavemen, two of them, lets call them Ook and Aak, went out hunting wild game after several days of starvation, and our man Ook runs a spear right through the eye socket of a giant bear, killing it and managing to provide food for their entire community for the next few days. On seeing this act, Aak high-fives Ook and pats him on the back for having achieved an epic kill. This prompts the release of serotonin, a neurotransmitter, which, on flooding Ook's body, make him feel wonderful. And this happened to continue for several generations and it slowly became ingrained that appreciation by others causes the release of serotonin, which we now think makes us happy.
Looks more dead than happy to me.
In case this doesn't quite clear things up, let me now propose a different scenario; one of 'sadness'. Going back to our thousand-years-ago scenario, lets say Augrook, one of the members of a tribe was killed by a jackfruit falling on his head while he was taking a leak under one of the trees. Apart from teaching a lesson in civic sense and cleanliness, what this probably caused was worry in the minds of all his fellow tribe members, because now they had one less person to hunt for food with, which meant that their chances of survival just went down a notch, so they felt 'sad'. This, you guessed it, continued to happen down several generations, leading to people feel sad when someone near and dear to them dies, because they were completely selfish and cared only for their own survival!
Now, we already discussed about how all the life events in an individual's past can influence his present decisions. Add to this mix the fact that each person has parts of the genes which were handed down for SEVERAL HUNDRED THOUSAND YEARS, which were repeatedly subjected to change each time one of the ancestors mated with someone else. The umpteen different ways this could combine is too mind-boggling to even think of imagining!
So, are people inherently evil? Or are they inherently good? Neither. People are just a probability distribution.
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