The Good and The Evil

I was sitting on my dragon hovering near our wall thinking “they found me, somehow they did”. Dragons and other flying creatures were popping into the space around me, most carrying warriors on their back. They were quite a distance away yet but they will be closing in soon. I wondered how long our defense shield would contain them … It will… For a while it will but the battle is unavoidable.

“Blow them”,- said the voice of our great wizard in my head. It sounded a lot like the voice of Dumbledore from “Harry Potter” or Gandalf from “Hobbit”, I thought. “The more you manage to blow up now, the less we will have to fight later”. And I thought that was a pretty good idea. And it may also slow them down a bit and give our guys more time to gather, perhaps.

I thought all that in a split second and did exactly like the voice suggested. An explosion of magic light rippled the surface of the wall and rushed out, destroying and blowing away everything in its path.

And our dragons arrived popping out of the wall, both them and warriors on their backs sparkling bright in the cool light of the morning. We rushed all together down the wall to the foot of the mountain where the battle was starting.

I watched in amazement how every our warrior was matched by an equal warrior on the dark side. How they battled and hanged in balance and I realized something deeply that I thought about before but never felt on such a profound level.

We are bound to a balance. We cannot destroy the dark and the evil. If we were to do that, what would that make us? We would not be good anymore. At least not all of us. The destroying part would be then the dark side, our friends would become the evil ones, the light would be subverted. We were bound to keep a balance, a precarious balance with the dark side forever if we wanted to keep the light of good in the world.

The evil does not have such qualms. They would destroy us and not think twice about it. In fact, if they destroyed the good, the lesser evil would become the good, you know. The evil would split into really evil and less evil, creating this surrogate good somehow.

I walked up the city wall on the hill, watched the battle and wept at this realization. And then I realized also that this, what I just imagined, might have already happened. We may just be the lesser evil. The thought horrified me.

And I woke up.… -->

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The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom

I just watched the BBC Series The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom from 2007. The three one-hour series present a very interesting insight into one of the facets of our society. The basic idea of the movie is to describe the origins of two ideologies of freedom that dominate the world: the positive and negative freedom. The positive freedom is based on an ideology, on an all-encompassing idea that drives people forward, like in Soviet times, for example, while the negative freedom basically justifies “everyone for himself” attitude, promoted by the “free market” ideologists. The interesting part is that the authors conclude that both ideologies cause societies to end up in the same place eventually and then the positive freedom society at least has some ideology while in the negative freedom society people lose all purpose in life.

An absolutely hilarious piece of news from the movie:

… the game theory/free market model is now undergoing interrogation by economists who suspect a more irrational model of behaviour is appropriate and useful. In fact, in formal experiments the only people who behaved exactly according to the mathematical models created by game theory are economists themselves, and psychopaths.

And so it is a very interesting series. Highly recommended.… -->

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