Immoral/Evil

This is an age of hyperbole. Everything is bigger, flashier, “more unique”. And there is a quick slide from what used to be gradients to absolutes .

This is easily demonstrated in the current description of “bad” things. We can all pretty much agree that “bad” means something we do not approve of (although what that may be might vary considerably). But there is a tendency for ‘“bad” to slip from “disapproval” to “immoral” to “evil” .

You can easily try it yourself. We may agree that illegal drug use is bad. Yet depending on circumstance, it rapidly becomes immoral, then evil. Then we must expend our energy to vanquish it.  We lose our center in an overbalance about something that may not be very important in the larger scheme of things _ trivial stuff like sex, rock and roll, clothing.

The world is complicated but except in special (personally defined) instances we prefer to understand it in binary black and white. Any other approach is too slow and confusing. I realize we are wired for this biologically. We are, after all, often confronted by clearly marked divisions – awake or asleep, fight or flight, be or not be.

We should always retain the flexibility to redefine, and to be aware that such clear judgments are in fact a continuum. Shades of gray. More than that, on a complicated matrix of interest of intersecting evaluations .

Everyone knows that. But time is short, life is frantic, and slogans are easy .