The world is full of evil. It's everywhere, and it's not hard to find. From the smallest thing like stealing someone's wallet to committing genocide, all you have to do is watch the news, or read a history book to see that evil is something that everyone has to deal with. It's part of being human. And yet, there's still snippets of good too, although sometimes they can be hard to find. They're there though if you look. Like the motorbiker who stopped to walk the old lady across the street, or candy bombers of Berlin. It seems like there's a balance of both in humanity, constantly battling each other for the upper hand. Mainly, is humankind inherently good or bad?
Imagine this: a young boy of about thirteen, is living in a setting that doesn't suite him very well. He's uncomfortable, and strongly dislikes all the rules he has to follow. One day his father, the town drunk, comes along and kidnaps him. He takes the boy to his cabin and locks him inside everyday while he goes fishing. Being the town drunk would require getting drunk a lot, a task which he fulfilled every night after dinner, followed by having violent nightmares. Long story short, the boy fakes his death, finds a slave friend, they build a raft and go floating down the Mississippi River in search of adventure. We've all read Huck Finn in high school, and even if you don't remember the book in detail, we all know the basic story. Now, these "adventures" that Huck and his friend Jim go looking for often turn out to be quite violent, sometimes deceitful, and almost always involve scheming. The point is that they always involve something that we have been taught was bad. The Duke and the King for instance: their whole thing was that they'd lie to a town to make a profit off of it. And the Grangerfords and the Shepardsons, a family rival that had been going on for so long that it's become tradition. Almost every place that Huck and Jim traveled to or sneaked through, they ran into some sort of scum. The humanity that they faced was inherently evil, with only bits of good like fairy sprinkles on a Satan cake.
Despite the Satan cake, more recent literature says that humanity is inherently good. By literature I mean movie, and by movie I mean Guardians of the Galaxy, and by humanity I mean sentient humanoid life forms that represent humanity in a comical sort of way. The main back story is that a group of out casts and runaways through a series of events finds themselves the only thing standing in the way of a maniacal and bigoted sociopath with the power to destroy the galaxy. Throughout the movie they always met with selfish criminals with only their best interest's at heart, and just when all hope seemed lost, they all got captured. Yet at the end of the movie (spoiler alert), the galaxy pulled together as a team, and defeated the crazy antagonist. Why this is relevant, besides being an awesome movie, is that people as a group, humanity (or the representation of them) pulled together for everybody's benefit. I'd consider that inherently good, despite earlier misunderstandings.
There is one last thing to consider though, and that's a real life experience. It's been a hard nine months for everyone, but this has to be mentioned for a question like this. We all know the events of December 13th in detail so I won't go into any background or flashbacks. But it did make me think, is humankind good or evil? For a long time after we got back to school, I did think it was evil. I thought of all the comments on the news web pages, trying to twist our life changing event into their agendas for gun control laws and new security policies, and it honestly made me sick. They were turning a student's death into a political statement. I couldn't and never will see any good in that. I saw people judge and bicker over who was in the wrong, and I even saw a few people say that it had never happened at all and that it was staged. I honestly couldn't see anything good come out of that day. As 2014 switched from first to second gear and eventually into third, more school shootings took place, Ebola broke out, the city of Ferguson turned into a war zone, and Robin Williams is dead. Yet, recently, I've found the courage to finally look back on December in detail, and what I found was not ignorant party members tweeting from the comfort of their homes, nor did I find any news outlets milking that Friday just for a good news story. Instead, I found teachers caring for their student's well being. I found parents being more supportive than most of us have ever known. I found law enforcement from every city on the front range making sure that we all got out safely. I found students helping each other out, supporting each other. And if that's not inherently good, then I don't know what is.
So is humankind inherently good or evil? Some literature says good, a lot of it says evil. We all have different experiences that shape our lives and our perspective of the world. Just like some literature pieces are more optimistic than others, some people are more positive than others. Life is what makes you. We've all met our Grangerfords and our Shepardsons, our Dukes and our Kings. We all have taken at least one bite out of the Satan cake of life. My previous bite left a very sour taste in my mouth. However, I was able to find sprinkles somewhere in the cake. So I think humanity is inherently good. It may be hard to find, but it's good.
