WHICH IS IT?

My mind is the battle ground between the forces (thoughts) of good and evil. The battle is one that has been on-going since I developed the ability to comprehend, at say 4 years old. The truth is that ‘good’ has legitimate claims to my mind because being good is in every man’s (and woman’s) essence as at when created. Evil first infiltrates the mind of an individual through the genes of the parents, if science’s theories are anything to go by.

The challenge of discerning how to balance one’s act so as to be adjudged ‘good’ by general consensus is made stiffer by the fact that outside religious and to an extent, cultural contexts, there is really no parameters to measure the level of good or evil of an entity, save for morals. However, morals as a parameter for measuring good and evil, is not definite as there are certain situations where morals contradicts itself. This is aside the fact that moral as a word has a minimum of 5 definitions in the dictionary.

Religion and culture cannot be considered adequate parameters for judging good and evil because they cater to a select few that subscribe to the beliefs and are not uniform in all cases. How then do I figure out who is winning this battle for my mind?

The first real memory I have of wrong doing, is being influenced by an older cousin to go into my mum’s purse to bring him some money. As a reward for doing that, he would then give me a minute percentage of this money, just enough to buy myself a couple of toy cars and candy during lunch break at school. I was only 5 years old at the time and I thought it fun and games until the day our scheme was detected. Before that, I remember being fond of a distant relative of ours who was at least 12 years older than I was because she always did some things to my body that made a sweet sensation surge through my body. I was only 4 years old at the time and so, when she wasn’t around, I tried to re enact this feeling by doing to my sit mate at school, what she (my relative) did to me.

As a result of my experiences some of which I shared above, I would have concluded that time and knowledge are the agents of evil, if I didn’t know better. But still, have you ever wondered why certain leaders like Mugabe, Mubarak, and Gadaffi to name a few, were once celebrated as liberators by their people, only to become tyrants after sometime? One thing is for sure, time corrodes values. How else do you explain this phenomenon?

Since we are all subject to time, is the battle between good and evil a lost cause? Are we destined to be bad? The truth is that life is not in black and white and as such, we can’t just assign behaviors and characters, the good or bad label. I have always proposed that before we judge why someone does what they do, we have to understand why they do what they do. A lot of people go about doing stuffs that we might judge as being evil but in their hearts, they are doing good judging by their own value system. This takes us back to the problem of how to discern good from evil. A lot of manipulations are ongoing because everyone is looking out for their own interests. The media, education, politics, and even religion are all instruments for manipulation and via these channels; ideas are forced down on us.

What we need is selflessness first (love). More importantly, we need to attain a state of collective consciousness as only by collective resistance, can we fight against these manipulations. I have tried on my own and have failed every now and again, as I’m sure a lot others have experienced too so, Which is it, good or evil? I choose good.