Well both in fact. How does a high school teacher become a vicious drug lord? Is Walter White of “Breaking Bad” a positive or a negative character? Both, as are you, as am I. You’re regulated by your situation, society, surroundings and the story you get tangled up in or choose, so the cracks of your bad might never really show. This doesn’t mean that you’re completely virtuous nor that there is any virtue in being a harmless pushover. It just means you haven’t had the chance or necessity to “break bad”, you haven’t been faced with the road that offered no other way. Until you can see and admit you’re capable of bad, even if you never act on it (especially if you decide not to act on it) you won’t respect yourself, not really.

The bad, sinister, rotten parts of us are always there, they are beneath the civilized surface that acts according to the laws and customs that govern our societies and the ingrained higher sense of what is right, moral, just and true which is superimposed to any manmade law. But all things have dualities. The dark is necessary for the stability of the light. Systems are protective and tiranic, nature gives life and takes it in an instance, it feeds you and uplifts your being but can flash flood you or freeze you to death just as easily, mothers nurture and inhibit. If you think you’re all good, that you always have been and always will be only good and on the side of the light, if you think there are no circumstances where you can go bad, feeling just victimized by the dark of the world – you know nothing about yourself or the world. It is all contextual. If you were now stuck in the midst of war you cannot presume you would really act the way you believe yourself you would speaking from the war free zone on soft cushions in your living room eating readily available food, healthy and safe. You cannot know who you would become under different circumstances until they present themselves. There is a book called “Ordinary Men” speaking about German policemen at the beginning of WWII. They weren’t young kinds recruited by a new dogma and brainwashed, but men who grew up without being fed this ideology. If you want an obedient soldier, you need to get them young. Fully formed people in their late 20s and thirties are much harder to control and use. The policemen were sent to Poland to “make peace” and as time passed the atrocities they did, these ordinary men, become more and more gruesome, to the point that it made them physically and mentally unwell… yet they continued. The strange thing is they were not there by force, they were told they could leave at any time, and all of them stayed because something else happened within this context – The comradery and shame of leaving your fellow men to do the atrocities alone. Horrors that are the result of misjudgment most often don’t hit all at once but are result of a series of bad decisions and giving a bit more of your moral ground each time, until you suddenly find yourself in a situation so far removed from what you thought you were capable of that u cannot fathom it.

In a peaceful environment your good if you are kind, not harming anyone and working on creating things and supporting the good. In different circumstances the ultimate good might be to do one bad deed to stop the cascade of multiple horrid events. Does doing a bad thing make you bad? No. Good people do bad things when they are backed into a corner and are aware of the monstrosity of it. Some solutions will not be pretty but they are necessary. Morality has a universal tone to it but it has a contextual undertone and they might not match. Don’t judge those who’ve been open enough to share their bad with you as well as the good. They might have not known better, had no other choice or you don’t and can never know the whole story. There are very few things that happen in completely light or dark spaces. Most of life will be wandering through the grey zone, working tirelessly to turn your face more towards the light. Morality is not that much a compass as a sunflower.