The Clashing Clan and Og's Woolly Mammoth Dilemma. Yeah, that's where this blog goes.

By the third blog post you picked a subject touchy enough to insult almost everyone. And it's only uphill from here! I like your style.

Absolute good and evil do not exist. No magnificent proactive force of good grants people courage, selflessness, kindness and hope. No despicable reactive force of evil tempts people with cowardice, selfishness, bitterness and despair. No; good and evil are such subjective concepts they differ from person to person.

Caveat: Sometime in the future we may discover some latent quantum forces simultaneously inspiring kindness and cruelty. But RIGHT NOW I know about nothing of the sort.

"Where did these concepts of universal 'good' and 'evil' come about," you ask, "if they are in fact just opinions?"

The answer is not religion. And even if it was, I wouldn't waste my blog post bashing the one source of happiness for millions of desperate people around the world.

No, it goes back farther than religion. All the way back to the first societies--hunter-gatherer clans. Once humans had "defeated" the different species, inter-tribal competition started. So right here, some 100,000-200,000 years ago, humans started to demonize other humans. That is the first, more obvious half of good and evil: favoring your "team" and antagonizing "rivals." So right here is an example of the utterly subjective side of good vs. evil. Every clan has a different take.

But in order to survive, everyone in the clan had to work together. This is the origin of the other half of good and evil: societies cherish constructiveness and demonize subversiveness.

Here's an example. I am Og of the Yug clan. I have just killed myself a big, juicy mammoth. I have 2 choices: (1) keep the mammoth to myself and have enough food to survive for a month, or (2) share the mammoth with my clan, feeding everyone for a week, and creating additional value because, say, Zog and Zogette know how to knit mammoth fur into clothes. Everyone survives longer and happier, and I make quite a few friends--friends who will give me their mammoth in the future.

Which do you choose? Option 2. That is because humans, as social beings, understand that selflessness is the best way to ensure long-term survival. But we aren't born with that. We have to learn it. So our natural selfish inclination (very evident in the "everything is mine" stage of toddlerhood) always tempts us. And what does that sound like? That sounds a lot like God encouraging while the devil tempts. That sounds a lot like Karma. That sounds a lot like Confucian deference. See? It manifests in every culture. So *drumroll* selfishness vs. selflessness come the closest to a universal concept of good vs evil.

So, "good" and "evil" apply to inter-clan warfare and intra-clan social behavior. In my opinion, for humanity to succeed we must abandon one of these concepts. As I'm an ardent pacifist, I bet you can guess which one it is.