Evil a Learned Behavior

“Evil, a Learned Behavior” What is evil? Is it characterized by a desire to cause hurt or harm, “an evil mood”? What causes people to do evil? The strong feelings of hatred and dislike that builds up in all of us or simply that all our emotions are constantly on the dark side for such a long period of time. What is right from wrong when the hate in our hearts makes us all make terrible mistakes and commit evil. The writings of Confucius say, “There is no light without darkness, no positive without negative, no good without evil.” Throughout the history of humanity, humans have committed inconceivable and unthinkable acts of cruelty towards one another. From the brutal wars during the times of the ancient Greeks and Romans, to the modern area of ethnic cleansing and genocide one cannot help but wonder what is the root cause of this evil. Unthinkable numbers of human life has been lost in every corner of the world from the genocides in Armenia and Nazi Germany to the guerilla wars in Vietnam and Cambodia and presently to the devastating conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Sudan. Evil is a learned behavior which is illustrated in dictators, school violence, and classical novels such as Lord of the Flies by William Golding and Night by Elie Wiesel. Humans are fundamentally good, and then are corrupted by their environment. It's because of evolutionary purposes. Every organism wants their species to continue (if they don't, they die off and aren't here any more). The same goes for us. If our species started off fundamentally evil, none of us would be here right now. People would've killed each other off instead of working together in communities to survive. It's the same as any other species that has made it this far. All characters, wherever they come from, may not be born evil, but they live up to this evil behavior eventually. According to Freudian theory, violence is a basic human instinct, described as a redirection of our self-destructive impulses

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