Why There Cannot Be Good Without Evil

There cannot be good without evil. This is one of the most important lessons that I have learned growing up and I will keep this close by me as I get even older. Conflict between two ideals is a great place to find meaning and lenses for us to view our world.
I had this conflict with myself starting at a young age. This conflict came about when I started thinking about what I wanted to do with my life. What should I be doing with my life? One of the strongest places this has shown up in my life is the struggle between science and history. Our modern society has glamorized science and scientists, and from an early age I was also certainly the same way.
When I was young I wanted to grow up to be a scientist because scientists could do no
wrong. I read many books and filled my head with knowledge of the solar system, physics, and whatever else I could get a hold of. My parents were perfectly fine with this, they just saw that my grades were good and I was smart. What more could they ask for?
As time went on eventually a shadow started to loom over the perfect realm that I thought had existed.
I was now starting to read more advanced books at this time and I was rather disturbed by some of what I had found. I knew that bad things had happened but I always had thought that this was solely the work of evil people, and you do need evil people to do terrible things but you need something else. You need power. Not just political power but technological power. Could Hitler round up and kill millions of people during the stone age? Of course not. He was able to enact the holocaust because he had trains, guns, radio, gases, tanks, and many other things. I realized that science and innovation were not infallible. Everything could be used for good in the hands of the right people, but the exact same thing could be used for evil in the hands of the wrong people. This was a wake up
call.
As I got older I generally accepted this as I got older and once again I heard the call for scientists and I came back to my former love of science. However I also found history. My love of history came because of many things. I had fallen out of reading nonfiction and instead had picked up fiction books. I read many fiction books of many genres but my some of my favorites were about how science fiction fails. I, Robot in particular was one of the most powerful books about science I have ever read. It showed that we cannot control our technology even no matter how many laws we put in place. Other books like 1984 and the hunger games also show innovation at its finest, but it is put to use for terrible things. Ultimately fiction showed me the major concerns that I now have for our own world.
I also read other books as well and a lot of them were fantasy or historical.
These books helped me see not only the causes of conflict but also the ends. Lord of the Flies, depicted a world without technology and yet conflict still emerged. According to these books humans were the cause of our problems.

With all of this that I learned, I was at a crossroads. What would I want to be known for? I could be innovative but would the benefit for society be worth the inevitable results of my advancement? Eventually I decided that being a historian would be cooler than most people think. While a majority of society generally does not think that history is important, the truth is to the contrary. History is riddled with mistakes and pitfalls but also by studying it we could find the signs of these pitfalls and even if they are pitfalls at all.
Society as a whole needs to realize that science is not perfect. Through our glamorization of it as an infallible enterprise people have stopped questioning it at all and are being force fed headlines and red herrings. Ultimately we need to understand why conflicts arise and how evil is carried out. Only once we grasp this, then we can have a more prosperous
future.