Good, Bad, or Both? By: Ashley Lasko

We have begun to read William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies in class recently. We haven’t read far into the book, but it's clear the book tells the story of boys crashed on an island, highlighting how they react to the environment and to each other in this scenario. Despite only reading to the sixth chapter (about halfway through the book but still nowhere near the climax), it’s clear William Golding wrote the book with the idea humans are inherently evil. His participation during WWII inspired this idea.

Similarly, Thomas Hobbes, a philosopher studied alongside John Locke, shared Hobbes's view of humans. He described human’s lives as “nasty, short, and brutish”. In contrast, John Locke believed humans were basically good and capable of controlling themselves. Both philosophers as well as Golding clump together humanity, arguing at whether they are good or bad group.

I’m not a philosopher who studied and mulled over the human race for the majority of my life, nor have I lived enough years to be considered an adult. Nevertheless, I’d like to add my ideas to this immortal debate. Humans are large and diverse group of people. There are around 7.5 billion of us on the planet, with many different cultures and languages to define us. With the numbers and diversity that surround us, why do we still try to group humans together?

There are awful people in the world. There are those who will hurt people. However there is also a group of compassionate people in the world. There are people who will devote themselves to the wellbeing of others. Just as there are those who will choose to take lives away, there are those who will chose to donate and bring lives back. However, the fact is that people, both good and evil, exist. Like I’ve said before, it's not easy to say that one group embodies the majority of humanity with the other group intermingled with it, not to mention those who do not fit into one group or another.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m nothing close to being considered an expert on this subject. However, I believe mentioning one group without the other fails to recognize the different aspects of humanity. By saying humans are inherently one thing or the other, the diversity of the human race as a whole is ignored. There certainly humans that fit perfectly into Golding's ideas; humans that will work for themselves and create evil where they go mirror a message from The Lord of The Flies. There are certainly humans that follow Locke’s principles as well, working for the good of everyone. We can argue that the human race is good or bad, but the undeniable diversity makes it impossible to truly say we are all one way or another.