Telos Initiative
Telos is a term used by the philosopher Aristotle to refer to the final cause or purpose of something. Our telos is to seek truth and cultivate wisdom using dialogue and rational discussion. The podcast will cover a wide range of topics in various genres and we hope to grow with our audience toward our ultimate purpose in this mystifying existence.
Telos Initiative
Episode 8 - Good and Evil
Have you ever wondered if evil is simply the absence of good? On this episode of the Telos Initiative podcast, Angelo , Chris , and Matt tackle this profound question. Together, we traverse the intricate landscape of morality, dissecting the role of intention in our actions. From natural disasters lacking malicious intent to the moral weight of historical deeds, we explore the fine line between being morally good and merely effective. The conversation also takes a critical look at moral responsibility and the complexities of involuntary actions.
Moving forward, we explore the spiritual dimensions of morality, delving into how our inner light or darkness shapes our impact on the world, echoing biblical wisdom and personal insights. With reflections on spiritual practices and the evolution of religious traditions, we contemplate the cultural distillation of ethical principles and the origins of goodness. This engaging exchange not only grapples with the role of spiritual orientation in daily life but also examines how historical and cultural contexts influence our moral compass.
Finally, we engage with philosophical heavyweights like Thomas Aquinas and Plato on the nature of the soul, contemplating its journey through life and its relation to the body. Our exploration doesn’t stop there; we also discuss the balance between mercy and justice, the interconnectedness of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, and the transformative power of life’s challenges. Through thought-provoking reflections and examples, we navigate the duality of human nature, emphasizing the conscious choices that shape our moral landscape. Join us for a journey through the spectrum of good and evil, and perhaps discover new insights into your own moral journey.
Hello everyone. This is the Telos Initiative podcast. I'm Angelo Cole,
Chris:I'm Chris Vigil.
Matt:And I'm Matt Maes.
Angelo:Today we're going to do an episode on good and evil, and this is our first podcast officially with video. So bear with us. We're still somewhat amateur at some of this stuff, but we're figuring things out as we go.
Chris:It's okay because we know all of the knowledge in the universe.
Angelo:But now you get to see what our beautiful faces look like that's right and so okay. So good, bad and the ugly.
Angelo:Which one are you?
Chris:I think it's pretty obvious
Angelo:the ugly Anyway.
Angelo:I guess the obvious question to start with is we have to define our terms, so what is good?
Angelo:and evil
Matt:are good and evil.
Chris:I've heard that evil right is the absence of good. Okay, I mean, if that sounds familiar to me, I can't remember where I heard that exactly.
Angelo:It's probably something out of Christianity, most likely. I've heard something similar, most likely. Um, I've heard something similar. I want to say good has necessarily has to do with action, so good is often what we ought to do, and evil is intending to do the opposite of that. I would say evil is the tricky one because it's not necessarily something that's just wrong. It's something that has to be intended to be wrong. So I wouldn't classify something that causes suffering as evil. So like a tornado tornado causes a lot of damage, it wreaks havoc, causes a lot of suffering, but tornadoes aren't evil because they have no intention to harm it's um.
Chris:It's a natural phenomenon, right, even if it does all that damage and causes all that suffering, it's a natural thing acting of its own right that's.
Matt:I think you're touching on something as well in terms of human motivation, like in terms of something that's it's good, we could say is well ordered and well intended, we could say well executed, intelligent, all of these right qualities.
Angelo:Right.
Matt:And then on the flip side of that is say, like the unconscious, the unconscious coming out, like, say, when someone is very angry and spilling out their anger on all kinds of other people, would that person consciously choose to be angered versus a higher, better motivation if they could? Right, because if you have that anger and it's coming through you, you're just like you know, it's like you're being overtaken by some possessed by something that then comes out on on other people
Angelo:yeah, that's fair.
Angelo:You don't have controls of some of your impulses, so I guess that calls into the question. Perhaps there's a degree of good and evil,
Matt:oh, most definitely
Angelo:perhaps, however much moral responsibility you could attribute to a certain action, that determines how good or evil that action actually is and in terms of degrees, say we have two ways of talking about good.
Matt:We have the morally good, have two ways of talking about good, like we have the morally good, and then we have something that is good as in well-ordered or considered like, if you are, if you have these two clans and one of them and both of them are attacking each other and say this one is able to take down a lot of warriors on this side and ends up producing a lot of more resources and things like that, more leverage for them, you could say that that is relatively good, although it's not morally good although it's not morally right to be destroying all these other people.
Matt:Right so say if both of them were to work together towards a greater aim like they were able to, to team up and find a way to produce even more resources, create even greater flourish together, wouldn't that be even better than the relative good of attacking each other and measuring?
Chris:in this, um, it's kind of zero-sum game between each other are you kind of saying that, something like the nazis were good soldiers but they were good like not. They were evil, an evil army of people.
Matt:Yeah right, yeah, like good, like good. That's a great way, that's a great example, like great in their capacity for what they're doing, like well executed in the way in what they're doing, while being morally reprehensible right, right.
Angelo:So there's levels to it. Yeah, so that you can be good, complex, good in the immediate, bad for a larger group of people, which also calls into question at what level does morality count? Almost, you know, we criticize the Nazis for their evil because they committed a genocide, so that's on the level of like a national atrocity or an international atrocity. A national atrocity or an international atrocity, so the level of being a good soldier is kind of a more localized, so you could almost say the larger of the group that you're affecting, perhaps the more good of the, the action or evil the action can be. Perhaps that's a tough one.
Chris:So is it just a numbers game then? Right, that's kind of what you're purporting. So if, whatever, if I move my hand and there's like a butterfly effect across that affects hundreds of thousands of people, right, but it's that action way more.
Angelo:But it would have to be intentional too, right? You would have to consciously. Oh, okay, right, because if you accidentally do something and it kills a bunch of people, I think people are less likely to hold you morally responsible. They might still be like hey, you did something, you messed up, but you didn't intend to do that, so they'd forget. Be a little more forgiving than if you intended to hurt a lot of people.
Chris:Well, we do charge people with involuntary manslaughter right, right, I think.
Angelo:I think the reason that that counts is because you should be, you should take a certain amount of care in your actions so you would also charge someone for neglecting their child. There's a degree to which you are responsible for your actions, and so, even if you un, an unintentional consequence happened, you, if you're responsible for making sure those things don't happen already, then you're held more accountable than you know. If it wasn't your child and you didn't even know about them, and then Right.
Chris:I know that sounds like a tough situation.
Angelo:Got to come up with a better analogy.
Matt:But now we get to accountability, like there's the intention and then there is what came out of it Right. And when you recognize that, then there's the capacity for adjustment Because, say, you erred on this side accidentally. But then being able to to recognize that and to own that and not to just say, oh, you know, making, making excuses, and say like, oh, I didn't know. Therefore, you know, just sweep it under the rug, you know, because what does that do? That? Just well, writes it off as that was all right.
Matt:And so then what stops you from making that happen again?
Angelo:right.
Matt:Right. Because, then you just repeat the same exact cycle. But then when you own that, when you have that accountability, you can, you can adjust and you can create greater action in the future.
Angelo:Yeah, I think if you pay attention to a lot of uh the legal system and the defense cases that you see for people who do atrocious things, a lot of the defenses are trying to take accountability and onus off of the uh the perpetrator right. So, for instance, you might plead insanity. Well, insanity means that you weren't in your right mind and you clearly didn't have enough control or awareness of the situation to truly understand what you were doing.
Chris:So the intention is kind of taken out of the equation, so you didn't have good ordered cognizance if you're insane, right but if you don't have that right, good order does not mean you mean you had bad order, I mean you know, it's different when you're right talking about insanity during a case, but Well, I think we also need to be careful when using the word good, because good isn't always necessarily the opposite of evil.
Angelo:when you use it in that sense, good can just mean good versus bad, like you know, can have a poor judgment versus good judgment. Good just means you're um, it's a qualitative, qualitative element, element, yeah, so um. I think that's where the semantics of it gets a little tricky. But Good in a moral sense is a little bit different.
Matt:Well, that'd be like noble, Like nobility Right, like morally ordered Mm-hmm Right.
Chris:Well, we think so In the right path. So Well, when you think about nobility, how would you define that? I mean just because, yeah, take us through that. You think about nobility, how would you define that? I mean just cuz, yeah, take us through that like nobility yeah, well, well, and I would also pair that with integrity.
Matt:Right, so you are your, your words, your thoughts and your actions directed towards moral good. Right, where, when we say good, like we've shown we can go in all these different directions. You could be good in your capacity of doing a morally reprehensible thing. Then you're. It's like you know, doing doing your job that's not exactly ethical, doing that in a way that is effective but not morally right. You're not looking out for other people. Actually, there's a verse in the Bible that really speaks to this. I think it's Matthew 6, 22.
Matt:It's the eye is the light of the body, and when that eye is light, then your whole body is filled with light, but if that eye is darkness, then how great that darkness is. Now that's that's, that's a compass and that's also a warning. It's like if you, you know you're filling yourself with what is good, then, like all the things that your eye shines upon, you can make good right the world around you, the good shines through you, right. But if you have that darkness, and that darkness is consuming you and pouring through all of your actions, then that's the lens through which you're going to see the world, that's the lens through which you're going to affect the world, right? So? So the quality of your soul and the quality of your, your eye determining the impact that you have on the world, whether that's positive or or negative
Chris:right
Chris:and that's just not just like a state of being in the here and now.
Chris:I think that's over time, right, that's, that's your
Matt:oh yeah
Chris:The way I see it, because I had that, um, well, matt, I shared with you a few weeks ago, I had that vision of the toroid emerging from the human spirit and I kind of had this.
Chris:I analyzed what that meant for me and how, like, once you know, it was like my time compounding in on itself. Compounding in on itself in one side represented all of the time that I spent oriented towards the good and the other half, you know, whatever amount of time I'd spent oriented towards the evil, um, and that was kind of like the final judgment of my own soul, like kind of what it looked like in terms of a diagram, um, interesting, but I do agree, like you know you, you can't shine, you can't let that goodness shine out from you, unless you spend time oriented towards it. You know, and since we're philosophy, spirituality podcast, I would say, like looking at good things, like jonathan peggio and the christian icons of jesus, mary and the saints, or spending time in prayer, that's really important to orient yourself, to take time to orient yourself.
Matt:That way then you can take that orientation out into the world right, you know, I found this, this, really fascinating too, in terms of different, um, like different religions, by the way, thank you. Thank you again for sharing that, the vision that you have, tori, that's amazing. Um the self, the, the self-awareness of different faiths. Over time, it might be more specific.
Matt:Like like with christianity, we had the crusades right we can all look back at that and say, hopefully, hopefully, all of us can say, well, probably going around and killing people who weren't christian may not have been the best thing, may not have been the best approach, even though the intention of christianity, the good, the good-naturedness that we hold at the center of christianity, we know as good right now. I would also look at, you know, like norse religion. Look at it's a, it's very complex, like if you look, if you look back, if you look back at like all of the, the lore, there's a lot of stuff that is in there that's like not, it's kind of morally reprehensible as well, you know. But if you talk to people today who celebrate that and hold that, you know, like I do, we can look, we can, we can look back at and see what is valuable there, like what is relevant now, what endures over time that's good right.
Matt:So there's that self-awareness, right, being able to look at that and be like, hey, you know what, being able to look at that and be like, hey, you know what, we don't have to buy into a thing just because it was written down by all these people a long, long time ago and just hold tradition just for its own sake. We can look at it and say, really, what's the straight dope, like what was valuable there that we can still hold on to well, discarding what is not really relevant or is morally reprehensible I really like this notion of uh carrying this through time and uh learning things through tradition.
Angelo:um, I think, uh, it calls into question this idea of objective versus subjective morals, where, if you're not basing your morals on this sort of collective democratic process and we're all just subjectively kind of coming up with these things arbitrarily, what is the source of goodness, what is the source of where this idea of what we ought to do coming from? I think a good place to start is to think about the idea of what's passed on through cultures and how you can almost take a moral outlook from one culture and then compare it to another, and when they unite, you throw some things out, some things are kept over time and it's sort of distilled, and then you do that with another culture and you do that with another culture and over time, um, you kind of through trial and error, get a sense that, um, some objective morality is based on this distilling process across time. Um, that's just one idea that I've had.
Chris:I know, jeez, I mean you know, I mean humanity has come a long way, I mean right. So we're on this virtual podcast right now where we have these recording devices, camera and mic, and we're talking about these heavy ideas that have thousands of years of history behind them, like the idea of the good, the idea of the evil, ethics, um, the soul, right. We wouldn't have a concept of the soul right now if it weren't for, um, the ancient egyptians, right, doing their death rituals and mummifying their pharaohs and their kings, and and um, I mean, we're still doing that and hopefully, you know, doing this, as we collectively do things like this together, we can continue that process and hopefully it continues after our death too. It's just I, you know, we just wonder where it's all kind of going.
Matt:Right.
Chris:Cause we're constantly distilling and recreating.
Angelo:Yeah, like this idea of the soul. The soul is the part of you that's that moves you, the invisible breath, so to speak. It's also in Greek psuche, which is the root word for psyche. It's the part of you. I like to think of it as the part of you that chooses, the part of you that expresses onto the world, expresses onto the world and um. I always, like, am fascinated by the notion that the soul lives on after the body dies. It's, uh, interesting to think about where that comes from. Why do we think this part of us that chooses and and um does things in the world? Why does it? In what sense does it remain active?
Angelo:if it has nothing to express through.
Chris:Okay, so in what way does the soul remain active in our reality?
Angelo:Our present is probably what I meant the soul living on after the body dies.
Chris:okay, so I think you know I, I mean, I brought this up with you guys in the past, but, um, just to offer my own definition of what the soul is, that the soul is the element within us that encapsulates the eternity of our immaterial being. So like, there's right, the material world. But the soul is immaterial and once you pass on it enters into an eternal state. Like we're not in an eternal state now, we're experiencing the past and the present and the future in a certain way, presently, here and now. But once you die, that sense of past, present and future ends and it enters into the eternal state it's a tough one to mull over.
Angelo:I mean, thomas aquinas would say the soul doesn't really make sense without a body, his notion of the soul even. Um, plants have souls, animals have souls oh right.
Angelo:Well, um, and it's just, to what degree do you have this? This part of it's almost like platonic. In a sense, the soul is a form, like Plato's forms. So for those of you who aren't too familiar with Plato, so Plato has this idea that there are these things called forms that are sort of the highest ideal of and purpose of what something ought to be. So take a circle, for instance. A circle has a form and there's a. It's this idea of this perfect circle, and every circle in our reality isn't perfect, but it ascribes to be that form, and the closer it gets to this higher ideal, the more of a circle it actually is. So you can say like something that's a little more squashed, it's not a perfect circle, it's starting to lean away from being a circle, and so Thomas Aquinas would say that's kind of what the soul is.
Angelo:The soul is the part of you that you're ascribing your perfect, ideal self right. It's the part of you that you're ascribing to be your best purposeful ideal. You know what is a man? Well, a man is like a rational being. So the what's the man supposed to be? What ought a man to be? Man ought to encompass the fullness of his rationality and his, the fullness of his body, the fullness of being able to think and create and have relationships and love. All of that is sort of this soul or form of the man, and every man is striving to be that you know it's, it's on, it's like.
Matt:I love thinking about the meaning of words well, I know we all we do. But the word incorporate, oh yeah, corpus, the corpus, the body, right. So we have the potential and the soul's desire to know itself, to know its full self, right? So then it comes into the body and goes through this process. We go through the process of living and experiencing and bouncing around between all these experiences, and sometimes we don't know the point of them. But then we take this thing from over here and bring it over here and we have to go through this process of dimensionalizing ourselves. So we start off from this bare zero. You know, you're a baby, you don't know anything. You know, all you have is this awareness and intuition and curiosity, and you're brand new to the world. Right, and as you're going through and you have this unfolding and you're, you're testing things, yeah, you're testing things and you're growing, you're going through and you have this unfolding and you're, you're testing things.
Matt:Yeah, you're testing things.
Angelo:You're growing, you're, you're evolving those little kids are picking things up and putting them down and picking them up and putting them down yeah, like watch a movie over and over and over like the same movie, yeah it's like learning rounding yourself out you know, dimensionalizing yourself in all of these different ways so that the soul inside of you can know its true self through living that's really good.
Chris:I like that and I loved your process of dimensionalizing. That was good.
Angelo:I've got another word for you remember when you remember something like your arm is a member and you have to read. I've got another word for you. What's?
Chris:that Remember. When you remember something, yes, you're taking it in Like your arm is a member and you have to read oh yeah, You're making it a part of yourself.
Matt:How often? Yeah, no, that's great. How often has this happened with you, where we all like to listen to different podcasts, different speakers, and when they say something, it's less like you're learning it for the first time and more like something that you already know, that that person just brought into awareness, something that could be deep in your subconscious, that that person just brought up to the forefront.
Angelo:Yeah, it's almost like you knew it the whole time and something about the way they formulated it.
Matt:You're like oh my God. Yeah, you're like, that's right.
Angelo:Insight, insight, insight, which is another fun word, insight, yes.
Matt:Yes, it is.
Chris:Yeah, so many fun words, antediluvian, I don't know what that one's at all.
Matt:Plus did not want that one. Now you gotta. I don't know what that one's at all. Plus did that one have on it. Now you've got to.
Chris:It's a fancy word that means something really old. Whoa, that's a fun one, yeah.
Angelo:So I guess, back on the topic of good and evil, we had a podcast before where we were talking a little bit about beauty, and goodness is one of the three transcendental values between truth, beauty and goodness, I like, and we also talked about the power of three and I like to attribute those three transcendental values to the domains of uh, being, knowing and doing, being be associated with beauty knowing being associated with truth and doing being associated with goodness and action.
Matt:Okay, being doing doing so, yeah, so they're all.
Angelo:They're all in a sense sorry, they're all in a sense interrelated right. So the truth is good to know and the truth is beautiful beauty. There's a truth to it and it's also good, and goodness is true and beautiful and they round each other out through relationship with each other.
Matt:so this is a question I wanted to bring up with you guys, since we're talking about good and evil, Like what do we do when people don't play by the rules?
Chris:Put a head on them.
Matt:Right, put a head on them. But so to the example from the last podcast we kind of touched on this a bit where you have the guy in the show who had the evil guy at his throat with the sword. He spared him, he turned around, he dropped the sword and then he gets stabbed in the back. He gets stabbed in the back. So the guy who was morally good did the maybe not smart thing to do and ended up paying for it. Now he can't live anymore.
Chris:Now he can't do any more.
Matt:Good, he got stabbed in the back because he was he did the right thing right because he did the right thing. So what do you do? So they have to be able to balance each other out so that the evil is brought into equilibrium. Right, there has to be learning, there, there has to be like what's the place of justice and judgment that brings goodness and equilibrium. That's the intelligent thing to do.
Chris:So I live in a paradigm right that says I have to do the right thing, um, even if that means I get stabbed in the back because I am not the equalizer, I am not the one who dishes out justice, you're not the judge and, and you know, I can dish out mercy accordingly, like human to human, but not true justice, not the beautiful eternal justice I do think there is a balance there too between justice and mercy.
Angelo:Yes, the christian is called to forgive. So and turn the other cheek you're supposed to when you get stabbed in the back, not just forget about it and just say, oh yeah, stab me as much as you want, but you're not supposed to hold it against them.
Chris:You're, you're supposed to move forward you, you need to learn to right. So like oh, you stabbed me in the back. Maybe I survived that, maybe I don't, who knows. If I do, I can come back and say can't let you do that again. Yeah, can't let you do that to anyone I love either.
Matt:Right, that's right. You gotta have that. You gotta have that capacity for fierceness, right, right, even if you're not just going around swinging your sword at every single person just out of possessed aggression towards others. It's a controlled capacity for aggression.
Angelo:In the, our Father, you say forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.
Angelo:I think that tells you a lot about Christ's message, about how we're called to forgive others, not just for our own sake and our own paradigm, but also how can you expect to be forgiven for your own mistreatment if you can't even do the same for your brother or your enemy? So there's a lot of wisdom packed in there, I think, but it's probably the hardest thing to do because your sense of justice wants to take over. You want to say, hey, I've been wronged, where's my comeuppance?
Chris:wronged. Where's my comeuppance? You know so we've said on the podcast before right you, you're um. What, how's it go? Your branches cannot reach up into heaven unless your roots go down to hell, into hell. It's young right yes, yeah, um.
Chris:Yes, yeah, I would say, you know, for better or worse, right, I've had some really dark experiences and it is really sobering when I look at someone else you know who I feel is wrong to me in some way and I get that sense like, oh, I need justice for this thing that was done to me was wrong to me in some way, and I get that sense like, oh, I need justice for this thing that was done to me. But it's extremely sobering to take a second and be like you know what? I haven't done so many good things before. In fact, I've done some pretty terrible things behind certain people's backs and I should keep that in mind, you know, lest that double sided sword start swinging the other way. Well, it's a double-sided sword of justice well it's.
Matt:It's interesting like I'm gonna go in another dimension, dimensionalize this.
Chris:Yeah, like when dimensionalize the heck out of us living heck out of us.
Matt:So so in the on the subject of magic, right, you have different types of magic and specifically talk about like black magic, like if you, if someone is like trying to cast a spell on somebody and do harm to that person, there is like what you do to that person then can end up coming back to you, oh, right like it's karmic sort of thing exactly right. So like, if you're trying to put a hex on this other person or whatever, then you, you know there's, there's a duplicity to that.
Matt:Maybe that maybe your main, maybe not that's the right word, but like a reflection reflection, yeah reflection yeah, a good karmic reciprocation yeah, that's a good word, right, but if we're thinking to the motivations behind someone doing evil to someone else, like what, what is it that is lacking in that person that has caused some rot within them that if there were flourish there then that wouldn't exist and in fact, that would transmute that into good. So then if you're doing something good to that, like you know, have you ever noticed this where you could have someone coming at you in an aggressive way or they're, you know they may be very angry and they're just spewing stuff off or whatever, and you end up you treat them with class and kindness and good regard. It's kind of disarming, because then it's like the fight doesn't exist, there's no right you know it's like why?
Matt:why are you trying to fight me when I'm trying to do good for you? You know why are you trying to fight me when I'm trying to? You know I'm, it's actually to your benefit to befriend me. Sometimes you learn that as a kid, right?
Angelo:Uh-huh, you get bullied on the playground and then the bully is disarmed.
Matt:When the kid kind of does something nice for them or doesn't react negatively to their bullying, they're kind of like this isn't working the way I want it to and it elevates you above that zero sum game too, because then the whole thing, and for you know, for people watching the zero sum, is the idea um, it's a thing called game theory, where say, the idea is, if I do something, if something good happens to you, then that is bad for me, or if something good happens for me, then that's bad for you, and it's you know you end up in this.
Angelo:Nobody wins.
Matt:Yeah, I mean, there are certain games that are like chess there can only be one winner of a chess game, right? But I would dare say that most games are collaborative games, right? So it actually ends up working out better for you to work together towards something so that's I think, that that can.
Matt:Maybe, maybe that's a lot of it. The differentiation between good and evil is, in terms of evil, everything is a zero-sum game there was this with good, you have the capacity for collaboration right and so then, oh my god, maybe that, oh, wow, maybe that is the conflict right there, maybe that's so much of the conflict. Right is for this side. Everything is competitive for this side. Everything is competitive For this side. You can see collaboration. But in the conflict, you end up getting caught up in this zero-sum game by default.
Angelo:Well have you heard of. I think it's called the Parable of the Long Spoons. Have you heard of that?
Matt:Oh, I think you've mentioned it one time. Oh yeah, Probably mentioned it on one of our former podcasts I've definitely heard this from your voice before.
Chris:Absolutely, and I remember I was weirded out by it.
Angelo:Yeah, if you didn't hear one of our last podcasts. Basically, there's a circle of a bunch of people and they all have long spoons. And there's a circle of a bunch of people and they all have long spoons and there's a big chasm in the center and then a tiny pillar with a bowl of food and their spoon. If you they reach in and try to grab some of the food, they can't feed themselves because the spoon is too long, but they could reach in and feed someone else. And so the idea is, if they can all work together and cooperate, everybody can eat. But if even one of them starts fighting, there's a chance that nobody gets to eat. There's just too much chaos and, yeah, maybe someone knocks the bowl over game over, yeah, so it's a.
Matt:It's a parable about cooperation yeah, well, and then through the problems, you can see where, where you may need a solution to right. So, and there there's the silver lining of issues actually existing, because then you know, going back to the bumping your head against all these experiences in life, now that you've encountered that, now you can conceive of a way to approach it in the future. You can even teach that way to others so they can say you know, hey, have you ever dealt with this? This is what I did, this is what my friends did that helped us to get past this.
Angelo:And then there you go there was this website from a long time ago that I went to. It had like a little game on it. It was a game where you had two characters walking up to this machine and they would both have to put a coin in and you would get to choose whether you put a blue coin or a red coin in. If they both put blue coins in, they both got two coins out. But if one of them put a blue and one of them put a red, the blue one would miss out and the red one would get two coins, and if they both put in red coins, then they both lost.
Angelo:So it was kind of a test on morality where you would play with you know, the computer or somebody else and you would both. If you both could just cooperate, you would both make a bunch of money. But if one of you puts in a red coin, even once the trust is broken and then you're both losing money or trying to see if you can get the other person to lose money or something, and it depends on the temperament of the people you play with. So it's kind of a game in trust. Now, the rules of the game were never stated that you had to out-compete the other people. The idea is you can make as many points as you want and everybody can get all the points if you just cooperate. But if one person makes it competitive and tries to get more out of the other people, the game breaks down it's like what I was also think of is the chinese finger cuffs, like what happens?
Matt:you get both your fingers in there and you try and pull it apart, you know, and what, as we all know, happens? You're stuck, you know. But if you release the tension right, then it can loosen up and then with that you can remove it, you can remove both your fingers from it.
Chris:I liked your. Spirituality is a collaborative game, I think. Okay, so back to your example of the Hex caster, the black magic user. Right, we want our spirituality to be away from that. Right, so we want our spirituality to be good, true, beautiful. So we could say that trinity right, that's the holy trinity of things. So we could say that Trinitarian spirituality is a collaborative game, and I wouldn't give honor to the darkness by giving it such a good name like that. So I would say, like, dark spirituality is a zero-sum game. Yeah, you know, the whole thing actually kind of reminds me, and I forgot where I read it. Maybe it was Theology for Beginners by Frank Sheed, I don't really, but he said something like material possessions divide when they're right, divided amongst other people, but Spiritual gifts and graces they multiply as they're shared with others.
Angelo:I mean, if you think about it, going back to the idea of beauty, truth and goodness, it all seems that there are things that we collectively orient around. So when you pursue truth, for instance, truth is like the ultimate goal of epistemology right it's? We're all aiming to know the truth and ideally you're never going to individually know everything. But if everyone is oriented towards truth, they're all going to be on the same page and moving towards, um, the best thing that they can be moving towards epistemologically right. If they're oriented away from truth, it becomes diabolical. Diabolical means to break apart, it means they're all going to individually have their own ideas. They're all going to be separated, they're all going to decay and and it's the same for beauty and it's the same for goodness.
Angelo:So, beauty, we are all oriented in, towards this sense of uh. I like to link beauty with life. We're all oriented towards a higher order and higher um being um, higher, higher living. We're all trying to uh, ontologically be, be closer to, to living our best life and uh, goodness is action, right. So we're all trying to do the right thing. If we're all oriented towards goodness and helping each other, it's collective yeah okay, you're oriented away from goodness.
Angelo:It's diabolical. You're going to break apart. You're going to have your this is my moral sense versus your moral sense, and there is no, uh, homogeny. Yeah, what do you think about that?
Matt:so I think that's a lot of information so it's being able to being able to see the good within people.
Matt:I want, I want to go even deeper a statement earlier about doing a good thing for someone who's being aggressive.
Matt:When, when you're able to recognize what is treasured within somebody and say, when you're evil and you're aggressive and you're, you're callous and like you feel like no one has seen the true me, no one has seen the true values than myself, no one is shining a light on that. And then you come along and you see that you see the good within that person, you see that that person has inherent worth with them. And even going back to the archetype conversation, where that's, this sovereign, is like your true essence, that's, that's like your true self, where you hold the truest best intentions, your greatest wishes within yourself. And you come along and you shine a light on that Right. You say I see, you see that like there's you know this word that Is flung around and spirituality, but it's actually very deep the word namaste. What that actually means is that I see the light inside of you. You know Like I see that, like I look, and I see the light inside of you. You know Like I see that, like I look and.
Matt:I see the inner you Right Is what that actually means. So it's actually very deep. When you say that, you should say that with intention, you should say that when you actually mean it and that person can tell that you regard the virtue, you regard the essence within that person.
Chris:I think that's great. I also think that's a really difficult thing to do, yeah, unless you are well-versed in orienting yourself towards the good, like we spoke of in the beginning. Sure, yeah, the good like we spoke of in the beginning, sure you know? So, gosh, make sure you're practicing good orientation uh, you know, towards the good, the true and the beautiful yeah oh now work hand in hand, right?
Angelo:so you, in order to be able to do good, you have to understand how to do good. So you got to know the truth and then, yeah, you gotta, you gotta be alive to be able to do any of those things, so you gotta orient yourself in in all dimensions of course, yeah, and here's.
Matt:I love thinking about the origin of villains, like in, you know, in some stories we get we get to see how that person became who they became, and it pretty much always starts from a place of innocence.
Matt:That person started out, as you know, as pure and blameless and then something atrocious happened to them and they weren't able to process it and it carried with them. And then they take that, they take that, they take that wound and they push that out as pain onto other people. Right, and there's I love um, what's this video? This this guy pointed this out this really profound, like they, the difference between the the villain path and the hero path, being at the intersection of what you do in those moments of pain. Right, because you could take that pain and you could say, like this happened to me and I'm going to take this pain and push it out and make it other people's problem.
Matt:Right, then that's uncontrolled aggression. That's you taking this eternal wound within your Well, you're self-perpetuating that wound right, and pushing it out onto other people. Or you can say that this happened to me and you process it and you say I don't want this to happen to others, if I can help it Because I know what it's like. You know, like people end up becoming addiction counselors. More often than not have gone through that themselves, they've gone through right themselves and been able to come out on the other side, and you can then speak to that person who's going through that same experience, because you yourself has passed through.
Angelo:Yeah, I think that speaks to the idea that you can transform something negative or evil in the past into something positive. So someone who's been a drug addict, that was a horrible time in their life and probably when they were in the thick of it they didn't know how to make sense of it and they struggled. Once they made it through, they know the way through and they can pull someone else out of that or at least help them and in a way that someone who's never been through that could ever understand. And so that's, that's, uh, the beauty of, uh, the beauty of the, the fallen world, I guess, is how I would put it and and looking at the different shadows, like going back again to the, the archetypes, where you have the inflated and the deflated.
Matt:Sometimes it's good to listen to what those voices have to say, just so you can get a sense of what they sound like. So when you encounter someone who is in one of those polls you can say I've heard that voice before inside of me.
Angelo:True Right.
Matt:You don't have to embody that voice, but you can at least know what it sounds like. You can at least know how to speak to it, because you've spoken to it yourself and being able to find that center within yourself.
Angelo:I think it's good to maybe touch on this problem of evil. A lot of people fall away from their belief in God because of the problem of evil. They say how can a good and loving God allow so much of this evil stuff to happen, so much of this evil stuff to happen? And I think you know, nobody really has um the answer. But I think a good response to that idea is this notion of perhaps the evil in this world is opportunity. Perhaps when you see someone else suffering, or you yourself have been through suffering, that can be used to bring people up and bring people closer to goodness. You know, an innocent child dies, their family is suffering. What is the response from the community in that situation where? Where where's the goodness and the hope that comes out of that? And that's what've got to pay attention to. There's a lot of tragedies happening. You know hurricanes and wars and things like that, but if you pay attention, there's always goodness and light shining through each of those situations.
Matt:I was so hoping we would get to this question as well. Get to this question as well and so we have these.
Matt:So we have the, the poles of what is good and what is evil, and we have duality in this world, where we're in the middle and we think of this world as a spectrum of possibility, a spectrum of things happening right, but there's, but there's an order to it. There's a, a direction, there's a, there is a higher and a lower. There's a, there's an order to it, there's a direction, there is a higher and a lower, there's a dark and a light, and we can choose to go through those experiences and move towards ascending towards the good, while having an awareness and having our having our roots in the you know, knowing of the fallen world. Right, we can, we can choose which one of those that we want to feed into. We can choose which one of the, you know, which one of those we want to, we want to move towards. Yeah, well, there, there's a tension there and I think there's going to be a tension there.
Chris:Choose which one of the. You know which one of those we want to, we want to move towards. Yeah Well, there's a tension there and I think there's going to be a tension there presently, right for all of us in this time and space, and that tension is going to be there till our last breath, whenever that's going to be. But there's always a call upwards and there's a call downwards. And I've've noticed, and I had this thought fairly recently, when I was, let's say, engaging with the darkness right, that was like falling. That was fairly easy. I could just fall from one place to the next and it was, it was easy um answering that call uh to to transcendent goodness. That's more like climbing a mountain, you know, um interesting, and sometimes it's it's it's really difficult, sometimes it's just a nice hike, but it's it's an effort, nice hike this is good this is, this is so easy, it's good.
Chris:Yeah, sometimes, like you know, hey, there you go, it can't all be.
Angelo:Uh, no, I totally agree and I like your use of the analogy of the mountain yeah that's a common theme in.
Matt:Uh, yeah, in symbolic representation of journey yeah, and our, our perception of experiences like this too, because, say, say, you're in a situation where this person, say, outclasses you in a lot of ways, or they're just upskilled in a lot of ways and you have to rise up to meet that right Now.
Matt:on one hand, you can feel like, oh, you know, I feel put under by this person and like, oh, I just can't sit, whatever. But the benefit of that is you have a model of a higher standard In your immediate sense that you can learn from, you can reach up and you can pull your damn self upward To meet the standard of that person. Right, if they're generous, they could even be trying to teach you.
Angelo:Yeah, be a mentor.
Matt:They could be teaching harshly perhaps, or come off as harsh, but you know they could be trying to make you aware too, because really it's just ideal if you have two people who are very upskilled and very, you know, very competent and good at things, that are operating in tandem together. And there's disjointedness when you're you know, when you, when you're like trying, you're trying to come up at you and you're just getting, you know you're trying to meet this person but you you seem to be failing, but you're learning, you're bumping your head against mistakes and all those kind of things, but you know you still kind of keep that true north of upward ascension right, but then that person has to have the empathy that you are on that journey of upward ascension, you know. So there can be that. Know you have to have at least an alignment of intentions and values so that you know you can.
Angelo:Right.
Matt:We got to have a framework first.
Angelo:You got to have a framework in order to even recognize that that person is upward from you, or else what wears up.
Chris:Exactly Right.
Angelo:So, and that's the truth, right, the great magnetic pole that your compass is aligned to, that's right, gotta have a compass, gotta have a direction.
Chris:So how about cause? Since we set out to define what goodness was at the beginning of the podcast, we could try. Goodness is the eternal pattern of transcendent moral ascension. Transcendent moral ascension.
Angelo:Transcendent moral, ascension, hmm.
Matt:Hmm, like good. Like good in the face of the circumstances around you. When you hear transcendent, I think in not necessarily in spite of, but, but regardless of the circumstances around you that your compass, that your orientation is good yes, it reminds me of um a line from the ancient one from dr strange Strange, where she says we never truly leave our demons behind us.
Angelo:We only learn to live above them. Alright, well, I think our time is just about wrapping up. Yeah, that was good. That was a good podcast. That was really good, really good.
Chris:That was like the best good, the goodest good, the goodest good.
Angelo:The good the true and the beautiful.
Matt:Now we've just Thank you, we've just descended into cheap humor. As we do, as we do, we're so good at it.
Chris:It had to Chip Pumer.
Angelo:As we do.
Chris:As we do.
Angelo:We're so good at it. It had to come out sometime All right guys Well thank you all for joining us here and listening to us ramble on about good and evil, and I appreciate you staying this long. If you're still here, please like, share, subscribe, do whatever you can to support our podcast and we will see you next time, all right, it's been real.
Matt:Awesome. Thank you everybody. It's been really really awesome, yes.
