What about evil? - part 4: yes, we've been here before

OK, no one can complain at this point that this is a really depressing blog. It's about evil --- remember?

Another factor that inhibits universal -- or even regional, or localized -- agreement on bad behavior, is the range of difference between those who tend to construct and hold their beliefs from a more conservative end of the spectrum and those who draw their perspectives from a more liberal mind-set.

Those inclined toward the conservative end see the highest ethical and moral values embedded in the long legacy of the great thinkers of the past, those who have formed the primary thought structures of their particular culture. People who find their comfort zone in this range of the spectrum feel that the accumulated wisdom of our humanity must be preserved or we are lost. Ideas and behavior that appear to question, threaten, modify, or supersede the culturally established and accepted truths and patterns of thought and action tend to really bring on the anxiety attacks for people of this persuasion.

The more one moves toward the liberal end of the continuum, the more comfortable one becomes with incorporating new wisdom, alternative views, global and universalist thinking into the pool of our collective ideosphere. Change becomes a good thing; "new" and "innovative" take on glowing qualities of virtuous splendor.

On the down-side, at the more liberal end of the spectrum, the shortcomings and faults of past generations seem more apparent, the need to transform and revise them more insistently felt,  One also gets increasingly claustrophobic even thinking about the conservative end of the spectrum, which seems to be stifling the life out of our humanity.

How each of us sees the world, from our particular vantage point on this sliding scale between conservative and liberal, affects our basic assumptions, values, priorities and underlying conceptions of life which, of course, affect our perceptions about what constitutes bad behavior. 

What a conservative views as evil isn't going to always correspond with what a liberal considers evil. In fact, what one considers evil, the other could consider as the greatest good. Think: "national defense" versus "global peace". OK, so that doesn't sound that bad -  it's not so much the concepts themselves as how we each characterize the intentions of the other side.  Think: "warmonger" versus "complicity with the enemy". See what I mean? Evil is not such a simple concept!

These different approaches not only affect how we decide about behavior, they can affect what we decide is bad, unethical, criminal and evil. The decisions we make are themselves affected by the methods and means we use to reach our conclusions. It really isn't a matter of "just the facts". As quantum research has shown, the perspective of the viewer alters the results of the experiments! How we look at something changes what we see.

what about an intervention? - see next blog