Traditionally, people have certain moral codes which differentiated what’s good and what’s evil. Most of the time, this distinction is black and white, and the society enforced a strong control over the boundaries. As time goes by, people developed several ways to metaphorize the concept of good and evil.

One interesting thing to see as a metaphor is the concept of good and evil. This has been a seemingly perpetual source of debate among philosophers. They tried to explain what’s good and what’s evil, but they forget to see the meaning of these concepts. They seem to take for granted that in this world exist two different –if not opposed, concepts of good and evil.

Moralists tried to argue about what’s morally good or bad. Ethic philosophers debated about what’s ethic or not in defining both the good and bad. Some believed that the opposition is god-given, while some believed that it’s men-made.

Cultures viewed this opposition between good and evil differently. Most cultures don’t really argue about what is good and what is bad. People traditionally believed that good and evil is defined on the basis of some divine set of rules, and they don’t question its values. Despite of the virtue in this, and the fact that it works over the ages, people still haven’t grasp the meaning of good and evil. They simply define the indicators for good and evil, and tried to live with it. And so it’s interesting to see how this metaphor of good and evil in cultures lead to a transcendental meaning of good and evil.

Chinese people, with their symbol of yin and yang, saw good and evil as two different and mutually independent concepts that complement each other to create a perfect unity. In their perspective, neither one of the parts are inherently and completely good or evil. It’s all about what’s suitable according to the need of the people, as nothing is completely good or evil. Good and evil is being in a dynamic dance to complete each other, and life is all about the seemingly nonexistent line of balance between the two that created completeness.

Another culture metaphorized the good and the evil as a line. There’s good on one end, and there’s evil on the other. An end exists to make the other side exists, and humanity is located within the line. It’s about degrees of evil and degrees of good in a social spectrum. Again, the ends of the line reflected what the society deem as good or evil.

Other culture viewed good and evil like the cycle of day and night. There’d be periods of good as there’d be evil periods, and men are to stand watch –and to survive, the periods. Just like hunters in the field, men are to find their way in the everlasting celestial dance.

Neither one of the three aforementioned metaphors of good and evil could be really accounted for being truer than another. I mean, it’s all about how a culture viewed an abstract concept. It’s already a good thing that they could create more-or-less down to earth metaphor out of this great debate of good and evil. It’s just about what’s familiar to the culture, instead of what’s universally seems to be true.

In the contemporary Jakarta, it seems that one of the common metaphors of good and evil is the two sides of a coin. There’s good on one side, and evil is on the other side. This metaphor connotes two different faces of a single entity, and it’s a very Javanese conception of existence. Javanese people also have the myth of a spiritual twin that coexists with each individual, and is taking care of the physical twin.

Another contemporary metaphor is about how good and evil is branches on a road. One branch led to heaven, and the other leads to hell. In this metaphor, they talk about choices, one choice is deemed better, and being proliferated among the people, while the other choice is highly discouraged. In this metaphor, people talks also about reward and punishment. A rather traditional mode of social control, I say.

In short, there are various ways to see both good and evil, and neither one is inherently right or wrong. It’s just a matter of blind men trying to understand an elephant. And just as sighted people could see how incomplete their perception of the elephant might be, so there are philosophers who constantly reminded us to guide our blind brothers to understand the elephant more completely.

So Hegel used the metaphor of bud, flower, and fruit to comment our vision of good and evil. When the bud is replaced by the blossoming flower, we could say that the bud is false and the flower is true. But when the flower withers to be replaced by the fruit, we would say that the flower is a false existence and the fruit is the truer existence.

And yet, we who are familiar with plants would see that the bud, flower, and the fruit are all false indicators of a plant’s existence. The truer meaning is that they’re just indicators of the plant’s development. We can’t say that a plant without a flower is not a plant, nor could we say plants without fruit are false plants. We already know how to define plants more universally.

Nietzsche might suggests people to go beyond what’s interpreted as good and evil, he urged us to transcend the limits of socially accepted norms and boundaries in order to understand life. It’s a virtuous suggestion. But still he doesn’t define the core meaning of good and evil. What he defined, is the fact that good and evil is just another societal concept.

The extent of this particular article is to discover the essential meaning of good and evil, as free as can be from social and societal aspects. From the metaphors, we could see the qualities that gave shape to the concepts, but they don’t say what forms it. And that’s exactly what lies beyond our daily meaning of good and evil.

To return things to our contemporary Jakarta, especially its metaphor of good and evil, I really think that the metaphors are highly affected by religious prepositions. Well, I think culture and religion is highly intertwined, and they are highly interchangeable, if you get my meaning.

When we talk of two sides of the same coin, we could somewhat say that it’s two faces of the same person or two natures of the same person. And I personally chose to think that good and evil are natures of man. Men are inherently good as they are inherently evil. Most people wished to forget that completeness implies having both sides of the coin. A coin can’t have only one side, can it?

Being both good and evil doesn’t mean neutrality. Come on people, if you speak of neutrality, it implies a spectrum, and that’s on another metaphor. What this particular coin metaphor meant is the fact that men have the potential to be good or evil.

In this perspective, it doesn’t really matter if you’re good or evil, as long as you remember that there’d be someone on par to balance you out. So if you’re a very evil genius, you’ll somehow meet a very good genius that would fuck up your every plan so it won’t cause more grief than laughter in the people’s heart. There’s always a good side to every evil things, and there’s always evil side to every good things. And it’s men’s responsibility to maintain this balance. The final cause of Javanese philosophy of life is to understand the nature of existence in its unity between the creation and the creator. Only by understanding the meaning of good and evil, could one begin to understand the meaning of life itself.

But somehow people just want to see the lighter side of things. This very wish to remember only that men are inherently good is then celebrated and glorified in texts that gained dominance in the world. And in Jakarta alone, I could talk of several metaphors that only speak about the goodness of men and somehow overlooked the evil twin. And to speak generally, there are more good guys’ metaphors than evil guys’ metaphors in the popular world. Good guys got talked about more often than their evil friends. And these evil guys are to be spoken of as a warning for others.

The contemporary road metaphor just talks about that very thing. Its primary assumption is that men should pick the better path that would lead to goodness, instead of taking the evil path. By taking the good path, you’ll end up in a better place. In short, you’ll be rewarded for every ‘right’ choice as you’ll be punished for every ‘left’ choice. Pun intended.

In this particular road metaphor, you could also see how life is seen as a journey to find an ultimate goal or a better place. This implies that life is not necessarily as good as one might wished of it, or in other words, life sucks. Only by doing good things could one make this world a better place. And there’s virtue in this, though I don’t really think it would do any good anyway.

This common wish for a better place is one of the things that made this metaphor is celebrated more than the coin metaphor. Other aspect is the fact that a dualistic choice is pretty much simpler than maintaining precarious balance. And don’t forget of its perspective of the neutrality assumption of men. Besides, this metaphor doesn’t really talk of understanding life, it only talks about finding a better place, this dream seems to motivate better than the guide to understanding life.

To complete the road metaphor, people also developed stories about how good deeds brought handsomely rewards, and evil deeds brought only grief –if not death. Currently, this metaphor gained a prominent position with the presence of soap operas. And in fact, it also gained prominence in religious shows and various mass media.

In the soap operas, especially in its religious version, they classically –and constantly, talks about this ‘right turn’ of life, and that’s just the reason why the road metaphor gained prominence. The way the director depicted evildoers’ death is more horrid than vulgar, from exploding graves to maggoty carcasses. Most of the time, they glorified the good way of life as they are exaggerating awful ways to die.

Unfortunately, these shows always depicted stereotypical kinds of good and evil. Most of the time, good people is depicted as some oppressed guy that live his simple life in the light of some religious belief, while the evil people is depicted as those who live an egoistical hedonistic life, a cynic, far from being religious, and so on and so forth, till they die a horrible death.

This deliberate dichotomization might intend to show the extents of being good or evil, but it doesn’t really fit in the world where good lived with evil such as our world. And although being good and evil could be operationalized in observable indicators, could going clubbing –in opposition to going to the house of worship, be said as evil, as it’s opposed to good?

Religious shows always talked about choices. One of the common themes is about what one should do when facing a complex problem. The best option, in their regard, is to consult the [most of the time religious] texts or other more knowledgeable people. If these two options are unavailable, then one is to pick a path that’s less controversial.

So let’s say that I’m stressed out as hell. Should I go clubbing or should I go to the church? If I’m to consult the bible, it suggests me to go to church. And it’s said that I’ll have my moments of peace there. Without the availability religious texts and more knowledgeable person, I’ll pick something less controversial. And let’s say that Jakartan people chose clubbing than churchgoing in times of stress. We just have ourselves a paradox here, people. Personally, however, I’m not going either place. I have my third option which is sitting in front of my PC and doing stuffs I like with cigarettes and some drinks to accompany me.

To return things to the case, we live in a complex life where good things live peacefully along with evil things. Some times, good people kill evil people and some times evil people kill good people, but they usually live alongside. We just can’t tell which person is good and which person is evil. We can’t really say what’s good and what’s evil as well. Everything is a simulacrum of good and evil.

And when everything is a blurry gray, instead of stereotypical black and white, people suggest avoiding it. Can we really avoid our life? We could hang out with only people who engaged the same ritual with us, but are they good or evil? Is the ritual good or evil? Are we good or evil? We can’t really say. Perhaps it’s not controversial, as it conforms to the commonly accepted things, but does it mean good or evil?

Just because everyone practiced it, that doesn’t mean it’s good. It might be evil, but the people just chose to overlook it –or they might have other justifications for it. This is one of the things why we currently condemn cannibalism as evil. And in the light of cultural relativism –and then value pluralism, we couldn’t really say that it’s either good or evil anyway. We could choose not to practice cannibalism, but we can’t say that it’s an evil thing to eat your enemy, further, we can’t say that it’s evil to o clubbing every night.

The road metaphor and its derivatives don’t really talk about this. Unfortunately, I can’t really say that this mythical metaphor is either good or evil. I mean, it’s just a matter of how a culture viewed something. And despite of its logical fallacies and other value-laden things, it’s essentially just a theory about something. And as far as scientific thinking goes, you can’t have a fully complete notion about something with only one theory.

That’s why people developed new ways to see good and evil. That’s why we know words like /wrong/, /false/, and /bad/ along with their opposition to ease our thinking. The problem then lies in the usage of these words and the new extension classes of these words.

Problem is what’s not good –although it’s not necessarily evil, could be said as wrong, false, or bad. The opposition is then imbalanced –if not confused. Words like wrong, false, and bad is used more or less freely to judge things that’s defined as not good.

In its development, we could see how we invented a new opposition for good. Instead of good/evil, we now use the opposition of good/not good. And the word evil has a new place in our mental dictionary, and it even has a new opposition, which is evil/not evil. Unfortunately, this new opposition is still impaired. If we could say that what’s not good is wrong, incorrect, false, or bad; could we say that what’s not evil is good, true, correct, and even right?

Most of the time, people would confuse the answer. It seems to be a common sense that what’s not evil doesn’t have to be right. It could be wrong, it could be false, it could be incorrect, it could be sinful, it could be almost anything, but it doesn’t have to be good.

It’s still a gray area out there. And this article is still trying to grasp the essence of good and evil. Now, despite of the perspectives of good and bad, people idolized one thing instead of the other, that one thing is being good. There should be a reason behind this idolization. In my opinion, people favored good and demonized evil because of this idolization.

Let’s try to take on the aforementioned metaphors, in order to understand the nature of this idolization. With the Chinese, it’s about yin and yang. Yin is the passive female principle of the universe, characterized as female and sustaining and associated with earth, dark, and cold. The other side is Yang, the active male principle of the universe, which is characterized as male and creative and associated with heaven, heat, and light.

For the Chinese, the dynamic between the two is needed to sustain life. They are believers of balance, or so it seems. But let’s see the associated concepts, before we’re to leave this part. By being earth, dark, and cold, as opposed to heaven, light, and heat, especially in the fact that yin is female as opposed to yang is male, we could see that there’s this subtle favoritism over one thing.

A complete life needs both male and female, heaven and earth, light and dark, heat and cold, active and passive. If we’re to believe that there’s no favoritism here, then we should forget that females are lesser people in traditional China. Or at the very least, they’re needed to sustain what males created. It’s true that life can’t exist without females, but most traditional cultures would avoid being female if they could help it.

Then there’s old Latin culture that chose to see good and evil as a spectrum. This, IMHO, is the most neutral perspective of the three. And since our modern culture mostly consists as a result of the renaissance, it’s no wonder that this Latin metaphor dominated the western world. The only problem in this metaphor lies only in the usage of their labeling words: dexter versus sinister, right versus left. People don’t say extents of evil before good, they say good before evil, as they say right before left.

As men is mostly dextral in motoric abilities, we could see how they viewed the left hand as lesser to the right. This association is already an ordinal scale by itself. In our contemporary word, thanks to political scientists, this association is revived in ideological spectrum: right being democracy and left being total socialism. And this could also be confused with the word /right/ that means correctness, morally good, satisfactory, and other ‘good’ things. We could see the favoritism in this metaphor too.

And the third metaphor is of African origin. As hunters, African tribesmen hunt during the day and watch their camp at night. Thus we could see why they associate day with good, and night with evil. In truth, this night/day opposition is universal enough for every other culture on earth. People tend to see the nighttime as a period of evil, mainly because most predators hunt at night. The darkness aspect of night is also associated with evil because of it.

By the associations, we could see that people often viewed being good as being better than evil –no pun intended. This favoritism deliberately existed because of some reasons. There are so and so reasons why people loved light better than darkness, as they loved good better than evil. I think there’s a certain thing inside the concept of good that made people worshipped it more than they worship god.

By their mode of social control, people forced other people to be somewhat good. Traditionally, the reason was to ensure social order which in turn led to the survivability as a clan or group. This doesn’t really mean a universal good whatsoever. What’s implied is order to ensure social functioning, as social functioning assures survivability. Goodness, in this aspect, is seen as the ability to conform to the whims of the elders and the values that worked for their ancestors ceteris paribus.

As cultures grow, so does the coverage of the concept. Being good grows to be a certain set of values which include a better side of life. Somewhere along the line, being good grow to relate with the heaven –an ideal place to live happily and peacefully, perhaps it’s because people wished to live in a better place. Stupid perhaps, but that’s just what happened.

To make this review more complete, let’s take a look at other metaphors that talked about good and evil. One of the common themes could be found in stories about heroes and their adventures. Themes of heroes could be found in almost every civilization that ever existed, and so we could suppose that they represent a more or less universal concept of good and evil.

In the epoch of heroes and villains, heroes would represent good and villains represent evil. Heroes are definite victors while villains are definite losers. Heroes will be celebrated long after his death while villains will face damnation. Heroes will live prosperously, and villains will be toppled down and crumbled before his treachery.

For me, this represents an innate human wish to be good instead of evil. They don’t really say of a heavenly good or evil. People wished for a better place to live, and they think of several set of actions that perhaps would ensure enough survivability to maintain their existence before they could find that better place. One who practiced these sets would be deemed better than those who against it.

We could see condemnations of evil things in many various cultures in different myths. Good seems to always designated to be winners. Even a hero with evil or dark attributes could be called as an anti-hero. But villains with good or light attributes couldn’t be said as anti-villain. Heroes will be heroes because they are the idealized version of a man.

Villains, no matter how good they are, will always be villains because they simply are the darker side –if not scapegoats, of the society. In the end of the stories, villains would die a horrible death or they’ll turn and help the good guys, only to somehow live anew as another hero of another story, or die another pointless death. Either way, they’ll get forgotten sooner than our hero.

Let’s sidetrack a bit. The tales of heroes and villains are the color of today’s life. To every story, there’s a celebrated hero –or at least someone we could sympathize about, and a damned villain who we would hate. The heroes would face trials and tribulations, to emerge victorious. And if a hero should die, it died a glorious death, the kind of death that made people mourn for its absence.

Stereotypical heroes and stereotypical villains, the way I see it, is not a symbol of good against evil. It’s simply a symbol of men’s wish to be good instead of evil. No, it’s beyond our daily notion of good and evil, it’s more like man’s wish to be an ideal version of itself instead of a condemned version.

As you could see, any evil character is always depicted as a somewhat impaired person. He might be ridiculously strong, he might possess whatever strength the hero has, but a villain will always have some highly exploited weaknesses that would be revealed somewhere near the end of the story where the hero is depicted to fight his final battle against our oppressed villain.

While heroes also have weaknesses, they could overcome it and turned victorious. Villains, however, lived with their inner demons at best, or even succumb to it at most. And if we’re to take our mind deeper to its meaning, it’s the capacity of overcoming his inner demons that made the heroes as what they are. The inability to do this, on the other hand, is what made ordinary people turned into villains.

People wished to be good, because being good would bring higher respect and then favorability from the people. And being favored would bring fame and higher enviability. Goodness, in this perspective, is more like a Marxian capital. It’s more like power or money, and it explains why people so wished to be good. It doesn’t necessarily resemble something of transcendental good, but as long as it’s seen as an idealized state of existence, it will be seen as good.

Being evil, on the other hand, is similar to having less capital. And having less capital would lead to the brink of marginalization. Being evil, in this perspective, means whatever things people don’t want. As people hate poverty, so they hate marginalization. As they hate being left, so they hate evil. As they hate evil, so they associate dreadful things to it.

So heroism means about ideal states of men who tried to ensure survivability of mankind. Heroes live to promote humanity, as villains live to degrade society. Heroes are figures men wanted to be, as villains are figures men wished to discard. They signified the expectation people have for themselves. Within their conceptual existence, people promote something over something else in order to prolong humanity.

There’s also this theme of catastrophe, from Noachim flood to some alien rampaging through the universe and destroyed earth. This particular theme promoted the perseverance of humanity in the face of destruction. Men would always win –or at least die a glorious death, because men are the scions of humanity. It’s fairly logical, as cats would be scions of felinity if they’re sentient enough.

What’s interesting in the theme is the idea that men would endure. Of course it derived from the dream of immortality, and as a collective, the dream of eternal peace and prosperity. Heroes, when facing catastrophic condition, will be depicted as trying to find a way to save mankind –thus humanity, from extinction. This means that an ideal human would uphold humanity even in the face of trouble.

Despite of dramatic exaggerations in such epochs, each and every one is subtly asked to put humanity over anything else. Traditionally, people were asked to put the clan over one’s self, then after we grow this far, we’re still asked to put some greater imagination over our selves.

And so, if trying to be an idealized version of humanity is good, and if doing less than that is evil, then I guess men are inherently evil, because we’re nowhere near our idealized version of ourselves, and most of us are lazy enough not to strive for our idealized state. Then being rich is good, and being poor is evil. Not in the physical state, perhaps, but at least it exists in the realm of ideas or in religious spiritualism.

I’ve heard the notion of being spiritually rich somewhere in some –or perhaps several, religious texts. I believe it’s an interanimation of some sort. I don’t know which one comes first, but from what I observed, being spiritually rich –as opposed to materially rich, also provided means of escapism from the real life. Promise of salvation, perhaps, that if one’s poor and yet not tempted, he might earn his place somewhere far off, eternally. But I’m not talking of religions here, though it’s quite interesting how religion seems to echo the cultural voices of men.

But to conclude things up, I think you could get my interpretation of the concepts good and evil. Good is a representation of the ideal state men wished to live, it’s an idealization of men’s existence. Evil, on the other hand, represents a contradictory state where men are going further from its idealized state. Good gained dominance over evil because of its favoritism and the glorification by the society. People promoted good because they believe it would make their life better.

Not just that. People, collectively hold this firm believe in the existence of humanity. Humanity as the ideal set of attributes that made us human, is the ideological set of belief that made us what we are, and it exists beyond societies. And come to think of it, our sentience as a collective created humanity while in return, humanity shaped our sapience.

Society is made out of some unspoken social contract in order to promote survivability. Humanity, on the other hand, is made out of some invisible imagination of our sentience. Just as society is an imagination of living as a great group, humanity is an imagination of living as an ideal human state of existence. The difference between the ideal kind and the ideal self is that the former is the societal aspect while the latter is the individual. An ideal human kind, no matter how absurd it might seem, consists of ideal selves.

But what’s important is the fact that people promote good over evil because it’s the mean to survival. Good, as nothing more than means of survival, is a worldly concept. It’s neither divine nor transcendental. In fact, it’s a very primitive concept which rooted from the early human years in earth. Somewhere along the line, people hallowed this concept to a mythical realm where it stood until now. Good and evil, survivability and extinction, a longed one and a feared one.

This exaltation, the transfer from a human realm to some divine realm, came mostly of the fact that primitive philosophers are often seen as mediators between men and god. People need to consult with the gods in order to make their existence worth while. A man with greater wisdom is often considered god-sent because of his virtues. And it’s this aspect of seemingly transcendental virtue that possibled the association between that man and their god.

We would today call as scientists, theorists, and other elite attribution for people of competence, but primitive people would regard them as shamans, people who could talk with the spirits of knowledge and wisdom, people who read the signs of the wind and said the words of god through their mouth. It may or it may not be words of a god, but since it’s of mysterious origin –as they haven’t known of cognitive sciences, and it holds great virtue, people heuristically chose to see it as the words of god.

Further, men feared god more than anything. As god is mysterious and all powerful, they would fear it more than anything visible. People tried to please their god because they fear its wrath and long for its benevolence, thus they would consult these god-sent people when they are to do something of greater magnitude. Primitive as they are, they already understand that an action with greater magnitude would create greater impact to the society.

And the idea of betterment pushed people to take the best course of actions in order to achieve a result of positive impact. People struggled to do their very best in order to become something they wished for. This need is based on the motives of self preservation. By becoming something greater than itself, men wished to elude mortality.

Heroes go to heaven, that’s the original preposition. Essentially it means that an ideal person would live in an ideal state of existence along with other ideal people. Just like Viking heroes are sent to Valhalla to live forever [and party forever more] as they wait for the Ragnarok, so does this idea found fruition in contemporary religions.

The Chinese and traditional Latin people have a certain mode of glorification for people whose deeds are exemplary. These people are not only going to heaven, they become gods in the myths. Apotheosis is the Latin word for it. By being gods, people expected them to watch for the rest of mankind and guide their path.

This idea is a hyperbolism from the myth of heroes in the culture. Heroes, as powerful as one can be, are still human. By being gods, these people of stellar performance transcend the mortal realm. By being gods, these people attained an extremely high enviability from the common people. And so people struggled to excel them with the hope that they’d be gods as well.

As opposed to elitism in the used-to-be feudal world, religions try to reach as many people as possible. Religions tried to communicate that there’s a hero inside everyone if they’re to practice a set of heroic attributes. As we could see by now, heroes and good guy are the very same set of ideal self that promotes and ensures the survival of humanity. Religions claimed that good –faithful, people goes to heaven, a promise to elude death –and extinction, in its widest meaning.

Heroes are elitist concepts, while good people are socialist concept. Heroes connote a long-winding road of trials and tribulations, while being faithful connotes only a limited set of daily rituals though we do understand that it also implies an adoption of some principal philosophy of life that may or may not suit the needs of the people at different cultures. While they essentially spoke of the same thing, for some reasons people viewed them differently. While heroes are seen as worldly victors, the faithful is a future citizen of heaven.

But this doesn’t mean that religions don’t promote heroism. Glorifications of certain characters made them seen as heroes of the religion. And though I would say that they only promote their religion as opposed to humanity, we know that religions essentially upheld humanity as well.

And for some reasons, the religious heroes are depicted as having the better side of things –or the favor of god. The war could be seen as some purgatory or some purification –to remind people of their communal dream, but it somehow overlooked that religious wars are about fighting others over some confusion.

But in the light of this, good is not some certain end of meaning, it’s a symbol that stands for another mode of an enviable aspect: the ability to obtain and maintain an ideal self and an ideal state of existence. This ability is an enviable thing because of the glorification in it. If nobody said anything about having an ideal being and state of existence, things would go differently. The world will be overrun with evil, as a writer might put it.

The idea of good is favored because of the promises it brought. And so people traditionally think that if they could surpass their existence, they could elude death. Nobody said anything about an ideal being wouldn’t die, they just imagined that it would. It’s based on this dream of immortality that the concept of good became an enviable commodity.

At the very least, it creates envy in people to have their tales sung by bards in the local pubs long after they die. As a mode of promoting this idea –especially given the fact that heroes and good people do die, people developed an idea that an ideal being would live in another place, an ideal plane of existence where they’ll live eternally, happily ever after.

The very idea of immortality is also confused with god. Although they used to think that god is a formless powerful being that resides in the seemingly eternal nature, they started to see that perhaps it is an entirely different anthropomorphic all powerful being, somewhat an ideal human being that transcends and governs their heroes in an ideal plane of existence, a king of kings in heaven. In this light, god is still defined as an ideal being, but somewhere along the line, this concept grew to resemble human and humanity. Perhaps it’s humanity that mimic god, or perhaps it’s god that mimic humanity. Either way, god and humanity became a single entity in successive cultures. At least, they do hold same attributions. Without these embedded attributes, the concept of god became formless beyond all languages. And people just don’t want an indefinable god.

In essence, men are economic animals, trying to fortify one self with as much attributes as possible, in order to gain enough resource to stand for oneself. This fortification includes justification and other cognitive operations that built a necessary condition for sufficient attribution to stand for oneself. Another implication is that everyone is doing the same thing. The burden of upholding humanity is then distributed among the people who wished to live eternally in an ideal plane of existence as an ideal being.

This phenomenon created a marathon to chase after personal dreams and the communal dream, and series of other phenomena that result in today’s conception of good and evil. While the primary objective was survivability, men found new ways to make survivability more assured. And comically, one way to solve a problem is to find harder problems to solve.

Either way, men came to this idea of an ideal state of existence because of certain reasons. First, this world seems not as happy as one might wished of it. Two, providing a working structure of the society with more passive social control over the populace, along with rationales to explain the unknown nature and reason of their existence. And in such condition, even a promise of a better place is better than anything. A dream, as imaginary as it might be, is better than a handful of sand. And so, people dreamt of a better place and a better self, to fit in the representations of the mysterious world out there.

And thus, good and evil exists as a symbol for the hidden goal to retain humanity. Philosophies of ethics and morality, in the traditional sense, attempted to explain why an action is more proper while another is more improper. They provide the rational suggestions of what course of actions should be taken in the face of problems. Traditionally, all these necessary dimensions of living is covered in cultures, and then in religion.

Due to the unquantifiable dynamic of today’s life, since the society proliferates faster than cognition, we need more thinkers to think for a certain aspect of life. They especially think of a particular aspect, not a dimension, for a complete way of living in this highly demanding world.

And to close this article, I think it’s quite interesting to see that more complex societies demand more explanations, while they essentially constantly erasing the essential parts of their life. And by the essential part of life, I’m referring to the immanent need of an ideal self and an ideal state of existence. They’re growing to be less complete everyday, thus they demand for more completion from others. And in this noisy hubbub, they seek more and more enviable things to fortify themselves with.

In the light of this condition, it’s interesting that despite of some material wealth, people still yearn for some metaphysical assurance. With the object of the metaphor shifted from immaterial enviability factors to materially enviable concepts, the core concept of humanity should’ve changed as well. But somehow it’s still exists as is.

Perhaps men are incomplete because they are alienated from their essential existence. This incompleteness –if I could say, results in more thirst and craving for completeness. The many shifts of meaning and essence made this condition worse, since people couldn’t really find the dreams they used to dream together. People grow detached from one another, and so they wished for togetherness more than anything. Unable to find comfort in their individual dream, people looked the other way to material possessions, especially since they are today’s popular object of enviability.

Although the craving for material objects is today’s trend and today’s center of gravity, the original concept of humanity perseveres, perhaps because it’s definitely a transcendental concept of existence. Dreams don’t demand anything; it’s there to be an envisioned end. People might still know their end, but they just don’t know their path. In this myriad of confusion, the more you drink, the more you thirst. The more you try to be the ideal person you wished to be, the further you stand from it. The more you try to uphold humanity, the more you endanger humanity.

Then the solution to this confusion lies not in the texts, because they are prone to hermeneutical and contextual confusion, but more in essential ideas that exists beyond the extents of the confusion. In understanding the nature of things, we could begin to find our way back to a continuum where we used to dream together. And understanding the nature of things, in this contemporary world, demands the willingness to objectively judge things that doesn’t fit our misinterpretations.

You just can’t have too much irony in life, I assure you.