Good Vs. Bad: There are More Than Two Sides to Anything

“The two brothers represented two ways of the world which are in all people. The Indians did not call these right and wrong. They called them straight mind and crooked mind, upright man and devious man, right and left”.

Those lines are an excerpt from an Iroquois myth entitled “The World on the Turtle’s Back”. It states that two twin brothers, one upstanding and the other devious, shaped the world as we know it today, that the world is balanced only two ways… straight and crooked. I disagree with that. The world is full of people who are either truly neutral or quite chaotic.

Think of a simple farmer who wants nothing more than to support his family. Say a rebellious hero, maybe of the famed Robin Hood, requested that he hide on the farmer’s property. Now, the simple farmer knows of the great deeds of Robin of Locksley, but he also knows that, if Robin is found on his property, he, the farmer, will be imprisoned and his farm will be razed, the fate of his family unknown, but most assuredly dark. Is he of the “straight” or “crooked” mind if he refuses? For caring more about the sake of his family than helping a supposed “hero”? He is neither, neutral. He is one of many people who are true neutral, simply trying to get by in life. He is neither straight nor crooked.

Let us move on the the other end of the spectrum, that of the chaotic. There are many people whose actions are motivated by nothing more than pure self-interest. People who little or no heed of upright of devious, just what they find interesting. I, myself, am motivated in a similar manner. These are the men and women who illegaly jump off of buildings… for fun. They throw thousands of dollars into a crowd… just to see what happens. They lie, cheat, and steal, yes, but they also expose truths, give away the answers, and even steal something back into rightful hands. Pure self-interest can be both straight and crooked, and even leaving both behind and careening off into simple insanity.

Straight and crooked are, I admit, the two major aspects of human nature. But, they are not, in the least, the only two. People are motivated by more than being devious or upstanding. They are motivated by self-interest, the urge to simply live, and some are even motivated by nothing, going through life out of simple habit. The human race cannot be divided between straight and crooked, upstanding and devious, good and evil, because some people just don’t fit into either of them. I wholly disagree with the myth in that the world is balanced between straight and crooked, right and wrong. There is too much that fits into neither side, because the world is balanced between hundreds of possible alignments, not just two.