The Cyrus/Yaeger 'Evil Inside' Poll

1970: Ep #1020 - Cyrus muses that 'we all have evil inside us'
and it's best that 'we just admit it and let it out.'

Do you agree?

American Indians had once said     'When you are borned, there are two dogs inside of you. One is good and one is evil.  Which one do you feed?'  I myself have always feed the good dog. 

I don't believe in the religious concept of "'evil" as something that overwhelms a human soul.

People who behave in evil ways are either mentally ill, and thus deserve no blame,  or else have deliberately chosen to disregard the welfare of the rest of the inhabitants of the Earth, and  thus deserve no mercy.

People who behave in evil ways are either mentally ill, and thus deserve no blame,  or else have deliberately chosen to disregard the welfare of the rest of the inhabitants of the Earth, and  thus deserve no mercy.

Have you ever followed those ideas to their logical conclusions? 

There is, of course, no such thing really as "evil".   The concept of "evil" implies that some people do harmful things because of some mysterious quality in them called "evil", that makes them do bad things because it's their bad nature to do bad things.    That simplistic assumption leads to masses of crappy melodramatic television and books, etc., and leads to the average person being satisfied, without having to think about it, that she/he is "good", whatever that is, just because he/she isn't out doing bad things for the sake of badness, while twirling a moustache and cackling maybe.    Oh, and religion thrives on it.

Every scale has a plus side, a minus side, and a "zero" point, right in the middle.     I believe most of us hover right in that area of the zero, neither very "good" nor very "bad".    We only start going either way after being presented with a crisis or big challenge, probably.    In an unchallenged state, we're pretty much positioned at "neutral".

As for the idea of "evil"... people do things because of complicated motivations.   You can slap the man-made label of "evil" onto behavior, but it doesn't illuminate anything if you do that, and the only point of talking about something like "evil" is to understand it better, so we can do something about it.      The label is an individual judgment.      Look more closely, and bits of the behavior will turn out to be done out of conditioning, narrow perspective, unawareness of there being other choices, no sense that thinking actions through before making them is needed or "cool", a twisted nature from real traumas, lack of smarts to cope with it all, bad education, or any of a hundred other things.

None of this lets anyone off the hook.    The point of looking at it this way is not "forgiveness" but accuracy, so such people can be dealt with knowledgably and realistically, instead of being treated as the Devil who does bad for badness's sake, or as some simple cancer to be cut out with some crude knife.   We also need to start acknowledging that whatever "those" people have inside them, we all have... it's all just arranged differently and in different amounts, depending on the individual.

You aren't "good" just because you don't do "bad", terrible things.   It's not a simple automatic either/or thing.      We need to look for recognizable things in those who do harm, and realize we do harm ourselves sometimes, without wanting to look it in the eye.     Once we get that, and face it, we can deal with the real criminals better.

American Indians had once said     'When you are borned, there are two dogs inside of you. One is good and one is evil.  Which one do you feed?'  I myself have always feed the good dog.

I heard that line in a movie the other night... and all I can remember watching was Ronin on TV. Was that in it?

American Indians had once said     'When you are borned, there are two dogs inside of you. One is good and one is evil.  Which one do you feed?'  I myself have always feed the good dog. 

I heard that line in a movie the other night... and all I can remember watching was Ronin on TV. Was that in it?

it sounds like something from Billy Jack(loved that movie) but i don't think it is
i don't know how i really feel about that question you can learn to be "evil"
but how does that explain those they never learned it and are kinda like The Bad Seed
another great movie

As for the idea of "evil"... people do things because of complicated motivations. 

People do "bad" things because they hope to get something "good" - money, pleasure, relief, respect, power, etc.

That's the difference between goodness and badness. Good things can be done for goodness's sake, noone does bad things simply for badness's sake.

Goodness stands on it's own, badness cannot.

Like you, I've heard it from a movie.  But which movie, I can't remember.

Like you, I've heard it from a movie.  But which movie, I can't remember.

Terry308 and arashi, was it "The Missing"?  The line is spoken by the Indian brujo to Tommy Lee Jones' character.  I just saw it and think the movie had two dogs fighting inside it-- one good and one bad... and the bad dog won, lol.

Someone posted a transcript here:  http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/m/missing-script-transcript-cate-blanchett.html.  Do a page search (Ctrl + F) for two dogs and it will jump to that scene.

Could be, maybe I saw it in a trailer, I've never seen the movie myself though.