tomorrow is our permanent address

The story I was supposed to write for English but have not yet bothered to start, oddly enough, got me thinking about evil. I don't know why, since the English thing was supposed to be about love. Maybe it's just another application of entropy. If there is love, there is evil.

But I can tell my friends thought me very weird when I started talking about evil.

According to August (I didn't have a dictionary at hand then and I don't know the dictionary definition of evil since I never needed to look in a dictionary to know the meaning of the word evil), evil is defined as "the existence of moral torpitude in the human soul." That's according to the 1970 dictionary. Now, in terms of computers and science and other stuff, the 1970 dictionary is pretty much outdated, but probably not in the case of evil. Well, maybe yes in the case of evil, since to catch up with the few good people and the many people who think they're good evil probably has to mutate, to evolve, like viruses. But the general idea of evil is the same.

Some think of evil as simply the absence of good, the same way black is the absence of all colors of light. But the colors of light are only absent because the black material absorbs it. So- good is only absent if it is absorbed? Or is my simile wrong? And is it a physical, so to speak, absence of good, like a patch of cold air on a warm night, or merely a state where good is absent? But a state wherein good is absent is only apathy.

There are two ways I think of evil when I think of it as something that exists in the human soul.

When I'm feeling particularly cynical, I like to think of evil as an inborn trait. Children are all, in the basest sense of the word, evil. They are selfish, they only care about what they want, others and others' emotions don't exist to them. Those that are evil think the same way: everything they do is centered on themselves, on what they want, on what they believe to be right. The rest of us evolve, are influenced by society, the rest of us control or at least limit our selfishness. We are taught to think that centering everything on ourselves is wrong. The criminals are the only ones who don't grow up, who never learn.

And when I'm not, I think of it as influence from outside factors, such as the culture and the environment people grow up in. Thanks to that, I can safely say that evil depends on the person. For instance, now we are taught that killing people is "wrong", that it is "evil", and we all know that killing someone is a major offence. Okay, fine, it is punishable by death, and not just by being kicked out of school. But for those who go by Machiavelli's principle that the end justifies the means, killing a person is not "wrong", that it is not an act of "evil", since it was done for good reason. And there were times ever so long ago that killing people to get what one wanted was acceptable, and it was called human sacrifice.

The complete nature of evil is secret. Like goodness, it does not seek to be known; like goodness, people try to learn it; like goodness, it is debated upon; but unlike goodness, it is not praised.

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Cynicism comes hand in hand with evil, so small wonder I was so cynical during the Miting de Avance, despite Art (the Champacers will understand what I mean, Art today was completely comically hysterically insane): I had been thinking about love and evil and love and evil all day. Well, I wasn't thinking about love and evil all day, I was trying to think about a story for English, which involved love. Epal lang ang evil.

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But even all that evil and all that cynicism cannot darken my mood. Generally when I'm cynical that means I'm in a good mood, and that good mood was made even better by my friends (especially Macoy, Edz, Anna, Abby, Tricia, Chii, Jenny, Thea, Guia, August. And that's in no particular order, but I did save the worst for last. (No offence August.)) and my family. I swear, discussions about Geom., Physics, and Biology can work wonders. Or maybe that's just because I'm a nerd who relates everything to lessons, and everyone else is amused by me.

And save is not the right term for that.