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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3478503" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'd imagine that on the whole, we are all alot more evil than we'd like to think that we are.  Most of us are probably good on a day to day basis, at least in a passive way.  But few of us are probably actively seeking out good to do.  We are much more likely to be just going with the flow, and this doesn't really prove anything other than that we are nuetral and we live in a society with good tendancies (so that doing good is easier socially and consequentially than doing evil) and that we have lives of relative comfort and ease so that doing the 'right thing' is easy and doesn't cost us much compared to what we have to give.  Unless we have evidence that when the chips are down and doing good is difficult and costly, or that we are the sort who actively seeks to do good for our fellow man on a regular basis, then just who are we trying to fool?I've seen good done, and it is often a hard and costly thing.  People die for it.  I can only wish to be and strive to be that good.  I certainly don't feel 'Good', even if I want to be.  At least the evil people here, if they are serious about it, are honest in their perfidy.  Or if they are not, then they at least better than they think they are and thier is some hope for them.  And I've little cause to believe that a good portion of the society isn't indeed actively evil.  Maybe it is only 5% here in our mostly enlightened corner of the world, but we've all met them - verbal abusers of thier children, abandoners of thier families, casual theives, casual liars, salesmen that lie to thier customers, employees that lie to their bosses, cowards, substance abusers, abusers of women, the socially manipulative, gossipers, serial and socially destructive promiscuity, vandalizers, racists, mysogynists, haters of men, continually in a state of wrath against neighbors or even strangers they've never met, and all sorts of other evil so petty and so common that we don't normally think about it.  I'm inclined to think that most of the suffering in this world comes from the petty evil, and not the maniacal or diabolic comic book villain that has a hearty laugh over exterminating a rare song bird to make a few million.  Perhaps the few that self-identify themselves as evil, are identifying with the archetypal villain and thinking that it would be cool to be 'the villain', but I'm more worried about the rest of us that are petty in our evil and even oblivious to it, than the guy that styles himself Darth Vader or some such.</blockquote>

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