Forum Post: A Story of Love, Good and Evil

The purpose of this dialogue is to determine whether humans are by nature good or evil. The audience is those among us who are not aware that this was an issue. I thank you for your participation.

The myth adopted by the Christian religion and its relatives is that by acquiring knowledge, humans were cast out of a "paradise" where they could live forever. Buddhism, as well, has much on the topic of why problems exist in the world.

What these myths refer to is a conflict between the concept of love and the goals of society, which seems difficult or impossible to resolve for those aware of it. One admonition of the ancients was to "see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil", but like all methods to address the problem this had only limited success.

To love someone means to place their wants and needs above all else. This has significant implications, including that you should attempt to reach your own maximum potential so that you may assist that person. In a society which rewards being good, the ideal state would be one where your own goals do not conflict with those of society.

However, in the search for ways to benefit someone you love, you may encounter a way to prevent yourself from hurting them by building a hidden weakness into your mind that allows yourself to be controlled by others. Consider the following questions: If someone imagines you to be happy, are you? If someone imagines you to be unhappy, are you?

These questions, as well as the desire to benefit the person you love, can lead to unexpected conflict when you an encounter a common situation: a large number of people who are wrong about something in a way that hurts society. Uncertainty about how such a situation can arise leads to questioning whether the more intelligent members of society have the desire or ability to prevent such events, which affects whether one should lie about being good to most benefit the person you love, due to the inability to answer the above questions about your happiness. At this point, you are cast out of "paradise" until such point in time that you can forget that this problem exists or convince yourself that it leads to no negative effects on society.

However, most people cannot convince themselves of this, and as a result are unable to gather the strength needed to correct these problems as they appear since they see no end to their efforts from that approach and no reward, which means doing so would not benefit the person they love. The conflict between the concept of love and society is clearly evident, and can only be resolved by fixing the underlying problem that leads to the above contradiction or by determining that it is impossible to fix due to a lack of desire by society to do so.

Thank you for your attention up to this point. The underlying problem can be stated, in one form, as "the tendency to assume that people who are more intelligent than you have already figured out all the answers to succeeding in life." The reason this doesn't work, quite simply, is that there's no completely reliable way to figure out who is the intelligent person with the answer without thinking through the same problems they did to arrive at a solution on how to succeed. Society has never been perfect, and each successive generation will habitually test, reconfirm, and contradict the assumptions and norms of previous generations and systems of knowledge.

It is said that people become wiser as they grow older. However, this is just as imperfect a way of determining how to succeed as any other and so it is important for people to learn this "wisdom" as soon as possible, because democracy, commercial markets, and many other ways of polling society assume that people make decisions with accurate knowledge of the consequences of the collective opinion on worth without regard to age or any other distinction between those who respond.

This leads to the method of addressing both this underlying problem and also the unemployment and general economic injustice that currently exists in the United States and much of the rest of the world: http://www.change.org/petitions/the-people-of-the-united-states-have-faith-in-the-human-race-by-fixing-unemployment

The existing writings on that topic should be sufficient to convince of its effectiveness in reducing unemployment. This dialogue goes beyond mere economics and instead concerns the hidden problems that result not only from the easily understandable situation of people in poor financial condition with the desperation that can result, but also the underlying willingness of the most competent members of society to address this type of problem and other problems which can have unexpected consequences for even the most well-meaning member of society.

Simply put, when correcting these problems is not rewarded by society, then anyone who appears to be good can be treated as dishonest and evil due to the very real possibility that they are. Furthermore, if society does not adopt this change to enhance the collective intelligence of the human race, then anyone in love with another person and aware of this issue will have no reason to feel any more internal conflict about ignoring this problem and will in a very real sense be "evil" in the classical sense of the word, despite the lack of any way to prove this and appearing at every level to be as good as any other member of society who ignores these problems.

So if you ignore this message, nothing much will change. Problems will exist in the world like they always have. But the concern expressed by people toward those problems will be fake, and the most intelligent of people will do only as much as is necessary to prevent you from being able to decisively conclude that they are being dishonest. This will, of course, include the full use of the state to inflict violence in a way that seems to an honest person to be very unjust. Wealthy people, as always, will live a life of comfort while the poor are afflicted by crime and poor health.

The choice is yours. Are humans good or evil? If you wish for them to be good, sign the above petition or offer a convincing reason why it is incorrect. If you wish for them to be evil, no action is necessary: you need only to read this message without replying.

About the author: I was going to say something about myself but it didn't really fit. I currently have no income and sleep at night on an embankment above a freeway. I have done everything I can to ensure that my future depends on someone whose appearance I have never seen and whose voice I have never heard, and another person about whom I know almost nothing. Although I didn't watch The Hunger Games I have read the book Battle Royale which is similar.