Someone I knew recently, seemed to have this confusion, whether has she become a good girl, or a bad girl. I was intrigued, because not only her, I have the same question myself. Am I a good person, or a bad person. That question is difficult to answer; or should I say, impossible to answer in the view of a society and the world.
For one, I'm defiant that one can ever say there are perfectly "good" in this world. You can be a very pure and socially perfect person on the outside, but inside there would be some sort of bad intent that we will never know of. Such as the person fantasizing a person he likes? Being jealous? Cursing and swearing inside his mind? Under the religious teachings, you have sinned. So does that make you bad? Not exactly.
I'm evil, yet I'm a saint as well.
Perfectly congruent, there can never be a perfectly evil person. Osama Bin Laden has killed tons of people through his jihad war and yet he is still hailed upon the people in his circle. So is he truly bad? To his society no, in fact he's a great saint!
In some ways, this all just kind of shows, it depends on what you define good and bad as in what aspect in what society. If you define good and bad to be similar with the religion's teaching, then killing 1 ant would have made you a sinner in the most strictest sense. Yet if your religion is in the sense of maybe, satanist? (Not too sure about it's values though), killing anything or anyone won't have mattered as long as it's for your survival. In the view of law, manslaughter is not exactly a crime, meaning it's not wrong to kill in your own defense. To the society, maybe killing a devilish-like person is good, but to the law you have committed felony. Overall, there's just too many ways to decide on a person's good and bad. If just murder and taking another person's life itself is confusing, much less needed to say for behavioral actions and lifestyle. For the sake of this post I'll use clubbing and becoming "loose" as the main act of "sin". Clubbing in the sense of frequent clubbing, become loose as in becoming willing to commit sexual acts under both parties' agreement.
In case you're wondering, he isn't real.
There's this show recently which I chanced upon, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Dr Jekyll is the perfect doctor who goes around the world savings lifes in the day, but he "turns" into his evil form of Mr Hyde when it approaches night. In a sense, both Jekyll and Hyde are the same person, just that Jekyll is the view of a normal socially accepted good person, while Hyde is the peak of evil for that same person. Everyone has a 2-side inside them which is both moral and barbaric and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde shows a good amount of it.
More rather than Mr Hyde being an evil being that kind like possessed Dr Jekyll, it should be more appropriate in saying, Dr Jekyll is allowed to be released and not be constricted by the social norms that forms "goodness" and that creates Mr Hyde. Imagine that within ourselves in the line of clubbing; guys in the normal period of day time would not dare to molest or touch a stranger, but at night in clubs the grabby paws go around flipping asses and skirts. We know what we are doing, yet we do it. Such is a paradox of human. So am I ok to say that guys who does that are bad? Not exactly, because in a sense, this is as insignificant as killing an ant, no one would be bothered, not the law, not the bouncers, nor gods. If anyone who killed an ant will go to hell, by the time of rapture, hell would encounter overcrowding.
In present society, it is almost impossible to regard anything as good or bad. Most of us don't even take the notions of religion to question. Religious notions, are at best a guideline to form a social norms. In return social norms will influence the law and thus create out statures and various crime definitions. So is clubbing and having ONS (One Night Stands) bad? Not exactly. It's not a crime in anyways and the law can't do anything about you destroying the other person's family and your own family.
Have you been a bad guy for clubbing Woon Han? Or are you simply Horny?
However then, why is it that different people have different outtake on such actions then? I used to despite people who craved to go clubbing and sighted them as loose. Now I changed my opinions and think that it's a perfectly normal place to go for socializing and finding your other partner, even if it means starting from an ONS. Just that because I'm part of the "loser" party, I can never get anything out from a clubbing event. It's just jealousy acting in and I should known it long ago. Similarly many people who views clubbing in the narrow minded view of mine in the past would dismiss clubbing as "bad" as well. Until they start to go to clubs and understand the fun in it (or the nature of it for me), people will always view clubbing in a bad light.
Of course, in no way am I justifying clubbing. Conservative people will still view such things as bad whereas the more open people will view these conservative thoughts as bad. It's the same way to how people view homosexuality, Christianity condemns it, modern society is open to it.
Therefore, it can be amounted to say, the current values of good and bad, lies strictly on your country's law, and social ethics. But law has its loopholes too, so law is not foolproof as well. Law allows the really cunningly evil people to get away, as long as you have money and wits to get you through the loopholes. There is still no way to simply allow law to judge a person's good and bad.
If you realized (which you should have by now), nothing can judge good or bad, only yourself and it's a very fine line to which you can dictate the line between good and bad. All at the same time, this very fine line will shift along with time as you change whatever you believe in. Probably the closest thing that can be defined in words your level of "bad" would be social ethics, since it's the only thing among religion, law and any other aspects in live that shifts your own behavior. If socially, people regard clubbing as bad, then you can be damn shit clubbing will eventually be bad. If rape is astonishingly socially regarded as good, you can be damn sure tons of weird maniac out there will start raping.
He's too outdated,
It's too rigid,
It's too confusing, but it's the closest we can get.
Now, even if we get the definition of knowing what is bad within our own little minds, can we keep ensuring that we do the right thing? Nope. Passion, Agitation, Aggression, Carnal, Anger etc... emotions makes us to think beyond our own moral limits and we will change to become like Mr Hyde, totally letting ourselves off and becoming free of the social righteousness shackles that both society and ourselves installed. Young punks due to anger will kill each other on Halloween Night in Downtown East just because they stared at each other. What else can't happen?
So deep down inside, when you have done something and you start to ponder, whether you have done right or wrong, and is it good or not. Think it through inside whether you have really turned "good" or "bad". If you think you're good, let it remain. If you think you're bad, admit it yourself then; the scale of "good" and "bad" is not for others to decide but yourself.
Maybe the ancient Chinese people have got it very long ago...
Has is ever occurred to you why the Chinese chose to use a "Nu 女" and a "Zi 子" together to form "Hao 好"? Does "Nu Zi 女子", girl equal to good?
Just from what I heard (not wikipedia). Girls of those time shows an image of "good". Obedience, Chastity, Virtue and also, for looks. Girls have naturally better looks than guys. Guys on the otherhand, won't have the various characteristics that a standard "good" girl in the past would have. Guys will flirt around, be rebellious and rowdy.
However in current society, things are different. :/
How about "Bad" then?
坏
This "huai", is more meant for the meaning of things become rotten, spoilt etc. The original way of writing is
壞
The side is a "tu 土", which means ground, earth while the other side is "huai 褱/怀" which means embrace, hug etc. 2 reasons why it's written so:
One is due to the sound of "huai", it's similar to the way it's written.
Another is for meaning. As something is spoilt or rotten, like our bodies when we pass away, it will be buried and cover by earth, or in a sense "embraced" by earth. If not, it can also mean that if a person becomes bad, he/she will be died and hence buried? I'm not sure. I doubt it'll be that creepy in a word though.
But of course, the "bad" we have been referring about, isn't being rotten, but more like behavioral sense. It would be more apt to use,
恶
This "e 恶", is made up of "ya 亚" and "xin 心". The "ya 亚" may stand for "哑巴", which means mute. "xin 心" would refer to the heart. So it could mean that "evil" is in a sense a silent thought that happens in your heart, or something that no one would know.
Goes to show that, whatever you feel is bad or evil, is up to you. :/
Even the Mao approves of it.
2 comments:
about the 恶 word, if u said the upper character means mute, then i would carry on to think that evil is wad mutes the heart, a.k.a the conscience, as when u commit something against your conscience in a way u shield your heart from the act. u become detached so as to not feel bad.
my take on the hao word is that when u bore 2 children, 1 guy 1 girl, as portrayed by the nu and the zi, it's a good thing, u know like long feng tai, xuang xi ling men literally.
like u said our sense of good and bad is defined by how the society as a whole view this quality. it is an interesting topic to me because like everyone else, i am also conflicted by whether every action i do is good or bad. there was actually many studies on that by philosophy experts in the past, even in those B.C. days. at any point of time in history, whenever there are people questioning the teachings of religion, these people will start to question wad's good or bad. this is especially so since religion tried and still try to govern people and their actions. "Thou shalt not covert thy neighbour's wife." Vice versa, when people question whether their actions are good or bad, they turn to the judgment of other people; their elders, like those shamanistic tribes; their peers, as in social conformity; their leaders, as in the government, the monarchy; their religion. And so on.
i read a bit of some article that studied human behaviour and how they judge their own actions. this boils down to the state of mind, your conscience. ultimately you may choose to believe your religion's judgment to be the right way, or your own judgment to be the right way, and in both cases there are no right or wrong. to be honest what can be good for something will always be bad for another. it is always that case. that's why people feel so conflicted all the time. and this points to another thing which i was interested in for a long time, the yin yang symbol. it is not a symbol of a balance between good or bad. it is simply a balance between 1 side and the other. and yet there is a little bit of yin in yang, a little bit of yang in yin. there will always be 2 faces to it, and a balance of 2 faces. you can never be too right or too wrong. but that is a discussion for another day.
Lol peng now you said on the chinese words, yeah I think it's kinda accurate too. Too bad there's no one who can really say why the chinese symbols are written in such ways. :/ We can only give our unfounded guesses.
Good and Bad, to be punishable or not punishable has been a debate for a damn long time as what you said. I do not know the history of it but the look at current society seems more confounded towards the social etiquettes (from how i see it anyways). Seldom would people now refer to "higher beings" for the notions of good and bad but rather, more to themselves and how it's shaped. A person grows up shaped by his environment and society, thus his sense of good and bad would be shaped up by his environment and society... so in the end won't it be more precise to say good and bad is determined by the habits and ethics of the masses rather than yourself?
It's a strange sense in that being bad, doesn't mean you are punishable, examples like the many people that go scotfree after committing crimes. So punish doesn't equal to bad. If so, what is the meaning of even defining good and bad since there won't be any acute outcome to it. In this sense I may even crazily agree with what Hitler has done to "purify" the society through his gas chamber techniques, just because he found it right.
In the end, I feel there is a need for a right and wrong so as to allow punishment and penance from the person who has done wrong. People can commit things that have gone too wrong and if it's allowed to go free that would be too unfair to those who suffered in stead of his "rightness". But due to the too many varying definitions of it it's impossible to set it up. Therefore it can only be said that it's a dead end.
Having the balance has been one point of mine, never do things too extremely in anyway and never believe in anythings too affirmatively, that has been something that I too believe in. But that's only me. I can't alter anyone's else idea of balance.
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