So, I know, I'm a horrible terrible person, still awake at 4am when I have to be at work at 8:30. I just finished reading Lord of the Flies, which I started this evening at tango. Yes, I was reading a book at tango; I've been in that kind of mood this week. Golding (the author) says of the book, "The theme is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individaul and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable." I could quote more from the afterword, but I won't. The only other line I'd like to quote is from the book, "Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!" People often wonder why I claim to be "the evil twin" or "an evil person" when I clearly act in a good way almost all the time, live a fairly religous life, try to set a good example and be mostly responsible, etc. They probably think to themselves, "oh, he must be a bad boy underneath or something," assuming they take it as more than a joke. What do most people know of evil? Truly, there are "evil" people who desire death, destruction, decay, whatever you will along those lines. But the root of human evil, the evil that you or I might recognize in oneself, is a burning selfishness, a longing beyond reason for happiness and joy. A desire to do whatever feels good in the moment, have no cares for the past or the future. To some, those desires are to shoot stray animals, speed recklessly for the sake of speeding, or burn things. To others, those desires include having massive amounts of sex with anyone they can get their hands on, eating delicious foods all day long, or sleeping day and night. And to others, those desires include rampant and careless acts of compassion, generosity, and love, joining the army and traveling the world to zealously defend one's country, or forcing one's system of beliefs onto everyone around in order to "save" them. I do not mean to say that soldiers, missionaries, arsonists, people who abuse animals, hedonists, and gluttons are all evil people. I mean to say that the root of evil is giving in to selfish desires whatever they may lead you to do. Trying to find happiness is not evil; trying to find happiness without thinking or caring about consequences of one's actions, is evil. We often think "anarchy" and "evil", "amorality" and "immorality" are radically different, but Golding's point, a point made frequently and often by political and social philosophers, is that they are inextricably linked, by reason that we are social creatures and define our humanity, that which enables us to do "good" and "evil", by our rationality, our ability to think. By defining morality/amorality/immmorality in a structure of laws or rules, social impositions, do's and do not's, we must define the struggle to be moral as a struggle to maintain social laws by our intellect rather than give in to natural laws by our instincts. The internal struggle of mankind, that which some define as "good against evil", is redefined in our culture as "rationality against impulsiveness". And so, by this definition, an impulsive life is "evil" and a rational life is "good", and so also a life of impulsiveness tempered by rationality is "evil" and a life of rationality tempted by impulsiveness is "good". I have lived a life constantly considering the rational side of things, but it has always been to take the decisions brought to me by my impulsiveness and act upon them based on a rational assessment of the situation, my desires concerning things in the present and future, etc. I need a job so that I can be with the woman I love, to make us both happy. Do I have a job that does that? No. I need to organize my life in order to get this done. Have I organized my life in this way? No, I've organized it in almost the opposite. The only things I could claim as victories for my rationality are my faith in God, which honestly goes beyond reason anyway, and my faithfulness to Grace, which hasn't been easy and hasn't been flawless. And so I consider myself evil, because it's that or I'm really really stupid. And you wonder why I find it a reason to despair that so many people go through life without thinking?