Tony Atkinson
1 min readApr 23, 2022

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Nonsense, of course. Good and evil, right and wrong, are entirely dependent upon which side of any given fence you happen to be standing on. Hitler believed himself a good man, so does Putin, so does Trump. Tyrants, dictators, warlords, serial killers, all believe that they're doing the right thing, or at least not the wrong thing.

History and the world are both full of people desperately trying to do the right thing for themselves and/or the people they care about. But what's right for you and yours isn't always right for me and mine. So there's conflict, and people get hurt. The winners get to do the judging, until another lot come along, beat them down and judge them in turn.

Applying your moral standards to people from the past is merely a cry of vae victis - 'woe to the vanquished.' Applying them to other extant cultures is a statement of your own perceived superiority, and liable to be taken as a threat.

Humans are pack-based, territorial hunter-gatherers. We are also apex predators. We are supposed to live in small, spatially-separated tribal groups with limited or no contact with other such groups. Having so many of us crammed together, seeing the faces of strangers every day, keeps us in constant 'fight or flight' mode and has, effectively ,driven us all mad. Our best hope is that the oncoming climate change disaster sends us back to how we should be.

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Tony Atkinson
Tony Atkinson

Written by Tony Atkinson

Snapper-up of unconsidered trifles, walker of paths less travelled by. Writer of fanfiction. Player of games. argonaut57@gmail.com

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