What men should be focusing on instead of trying to achieve the unachievable.
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Every day is a “bad” news day: corruption, tax fraud, shadow economy, organized crime, refugee crisis, discrimination. How can you possibly be “good” in a world that is big, bad and scary?
One might assume that humans have an inclination towards either too much selfishness (which is bad) or too much altruism, or not enough of either (which is tragic). A summary of latest research findings on nation’s moral worldviews, conducted by YouGov (2015), proves that people do tend towards goodness despite being natural-born dualistic creatures!
Even infants, not that they know it yet, have a reliable “truth” indicator and an inborn sense of justice, since they “assess individuals on the basis of their behavior towards others”.
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It shows that nearly half of the American public (45%) strongly believes that bad people are quite rare, and make up less than 30% of the population. This is the most commonly held belief. Overall 60% of Americans think that goodness triumph over evil in the world. Only 19% of Americans think that people tend to be bad. Unsurprisingly, the poorer Americans are less likely to think the world tends to be good.
Putting aside dogma-biased inferences, none of us can be characterized as good or bad in absolute terms, overgeneralization is rather pointless to discuss further, although our complex, oftentimes challenging behavioral patterns can be identified, categorized and explained by Western science and Eastern philosophy.
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A number of revealing social evaluation experiments carried out by Yale University in the US, published in the journal Nature, confirmed that even infants, not that they know it yet, have a reliable “truth” indicator and an inborn sense of justice, since they “assess individuals on the basis of their behavior towards others”.
We may start practicing “moral flexibility” by recognizing we exist as the integration of variable forces and accepting Yin (shady side) on equal terms, so we can aspire to become a well-balanced individual.
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Adults, as opposed to infants, create and enforce norms of “truth.” According to Dave Grossman, an American author who specializes in the study of the psychology of killing, the human population can be classified into three separate groups based on their natural instincts and desires: sheep (basically law-abiding, productive citizens) – 98%, wolves (above-the-law, aggressive sociopaths) represent just 1% of people and sheepdogs (those who “walk the hero’s path”) – 1%. Grossman’s analogy is also applicable to moral choices, dilemmas and ethical confrontations that we, as a society, face every day.
In Taoism, the Yin Yang (two relative aspects of the same phenomena) theory provides yet another classification system of balancing the human dichotomy: it’s about wholeness, not perfection. Any imbalanced state (deficiency/excess of Yang or Yin) is traceable and treatable. We may start practicing “moral flexibility” by recognizing we exist as the integration of variable forces and accepting Yin (shady side) on equal terms, so we can aspire to become a well-balanced individual.
Today’s moral laps and leaps likewise CPI index really, but one-way ticket to Metropolis is a total and absolute utopia. Realizing that even Superman was morally-ambiguous makes you want to leave the planet Earth, until your perception finally catches up with the dysfunctional reality that we made slightly more functional over the centuries, – all is good, relatively.
I think the hard part for me is believing that ‘wholeness’ is equal to ‘perfection’ – you’re whole when you’re perfect.
Awesome piece! Really interesting.