Bad is like darkness

Some kids are scared of darkness. I know I was. Not always. Until 7 or 8, it never bothered me. And then I remember catching a glimpse of a very very scary TV show, the phantom at the opera or something like that, and then, suffered from nyctophobia for a short while. I had to make sure to turn the lights on before stepping too far into a room or a corridor! As I said, after a short while (maybe a year or so), it went away, totally dissolved. How so? I am not sure. One guess would be that I was distracted by my favorite grandfather passing away from a sudden heart attack at the young age of 53. I missed him. Couldn't cry then, but, turned much wiser thanks to the grief of such big loss. Well, wise enough for a 9 year old. 

What is darkness? Lack of light. Was is evil? Lack of good. Does darkness exist? Does nothing exist? Clearly not. It is the lack of something. Similarly evil doesn't really exist. It is the apparent lack of goodness. And what is that? Simply confusion. Ignorance. 

Yet, we hate to be confused. We hate uncertainty. Many of my retired (yes, older) friends prefer to be certain that evil (beyond ignorance) exists. I am not sure I know what kind of comfort they get from it. Maybe they don't. Maybe they like the pain such a belief must inflict. We heard too many times: no pain no gain. Is it true? But, we talk about that elsewhere (you say you wanna gain, say no to pain!. Here, let's just focus on the good, the bad and the ugly.

Before going to far, please note that we are talking about an immortal question. How to live a good life? Ethics. Axiology. A big disciple, an area of study for philosophers and common folks alike, like you and me. We all want to be good, do good. Or else, we know, we will suffer. And, we prefer to be happy. 

Maybe you are familiar that we already figured out the nature of light thanks to many of us working so hard about it for so long: Newton, Young, Maxwell, Einstein, Feynman, just to name a few with big contributions to the field. Light is an electromagnetic way and most of it is invisible to the human eye. A regular wave like a sine wave has a single frequency: how many times it wiggles up and down, completing a full turn every second. And instead of talking about frequency, we can also talk about its inverse: the wavelength. And that's a simple measure of distance between the two successive peaks of the wave. Higher the frequency, lower the wavelength. Red light has lower frequency and therefore higher wavelength. Violet the other way around. By the way, frequency is also strictly proportional to energy. Red has low energy and it won't give you much of a tan. Violet and ultraviolet, meaning, even higher frequency and therefore energy than violet, will burn your skin fairly quickly. And all the other colors we are familiar with fall somewhere between red and violet. 

Well, not quite. Black and white, the two colors all of us know so well, do not even exist literally, or physically! Oh, they are very real to you and me: in our minds, they do exist. Yet, physically speaking, black is simply lack of light, or our inability to detect all the light we can't see. Because, the whole universe is full of light. There is not a single spot without a form of light, a few frequencies of light at least. But, of course, the human body and human eye and the human brain have their limitations. Obviously. But, just because we can't see it, we wouldn't believe that it wasn't there, would we? Well, many of us still say: I won't believe it until I see it. In case of light, please believe me that there is no such thing as black light. But, no. Don't take my word for it in case you don't already know this. Study a bit of physics. Say pick up a short book by Feynman, one of the best teachers of the subject. Or watch a few YouTube videos on physics. It's wonderful.

Coming back to black and white: they don't exist. But, how about white? White is also a construct of our minds. When our brains cannot resolve the bright light composed of a few frequencies of light, say, red, green and blue, we are blinded by that light and we call it white. We can't discern, with only our eyes mind you, between all that red, green, yellow and blue, in other words, bunch of frequencies, in fact, many many frequencies, that it would be very hard to count, we call it white. 

So, the daily concepts of good and bad (apple pie is good, traffic jams are bad) are like black and white. There is a deeper truth to all of these (the sugar in the pie is something my body craves, and I feel bad when I am late to the office and feel like I hear the judgments of my colleagues let alone my boss!) 

Did I convince you that bad doesn't exist? It is not really real? It is to our perception, to our minds. But, it is only ignorance. We can't see the good in a situation and we call it bad. Just like not seeing all the light in the sky and call it black. 

I doubt you are convinced. I have many good friends who insist they are not. So, let's continue in another page on bad intentions!.