Increasingly I realise we live in a world of moral grey areas. If you have time, The Good Place is a great show that explores some of the ideas of ethics.
Take Chidi, the man is literally a philosophy professor who studies ethics. How can a man like this ever do any wrong? And yet he ended up in hell because his indecisiveness tortured everyone around him XD. This is of course hilarious comedic exaggeration, but the point stands that well meaning people aren't always right.
Suppose you have a crazy dictator who changed the nations calendar, ran a network of secret spies, executed your neighbours publicly and is generally a bit unstable. It seems to be the most obvious answer in the world that this person is the baddy. This is when the goodies and the power of the people should overthrow said dictator right? I mean, this is supposed to bring about change and democracy, peace and prosperity. Well that is exactly what happened when Gaddafi was killed violently by a mob in the streets after tortured by witnessing the death of his family. For readers with a strong appetite, you can find the video online, recorded on the mobile phones of the people.
At the time of writing this, it is 2026 and Libya is the same, if not worse, compared to under Gaddafi's rule. The country is divided by warlords, civil wars plague the country. Oil wealth disappears into deep pockets and foreign meddling remains unchecked. What went wrong? The public execution of the previous dictator in the streets brutally was a prophecy of the time to come. What replaced him was not law and order, but brutal violence and chaos. The UN's air strikes on Gaddafi's forces did not help bring about a new era or prosperity and peace. The big bad guy was defeated, but the country could not fix itself.
It turns out, the world, and the people in it are complex!
If we reference the Humanity's List of Badass Quotes, there's an entry from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's landmark book The Gulag Archipelago: "the line that divides good and evil is within every man".
It turns out Gaddafi united the nation against him; once he was dead, so was the shared understanding between the revolutionaries. When push came to shove, everyone was looking out for their own interests, especially warlords and foreign powers interested in oil.
Take another example, are militaries and wars inherently bad? Hippies certainly think so and politically left leaning individuals are likely to think so, but what if I told you that a strong central national army is a key prerequisite to a prosperous, wealthy nation and democracy itself? This is not political propaganda or an ad for the military, I'm well aware of their flaws (hence the core thesis of grey areas). You don't have to look very far back into history to see that every major civilisation had a pivotal moment where the central government could organise and operate a powerful central army. I mean it makes a lot of sense right? If there is no central army, regional leaders would just have a mob of people that served them. If you have enough of these people serving their own interests and arm them with swords, spears or AKs, you get warlords that exists outside the law and control of the central government. You can't really tax them, or investigate corruption, or do anything to them really. We live in a physical world, and whoever has the bigger, more well funded army has the final say in how things should be run.
In Gaddafi's case, he ironically didn't set up a strong central army because he was afraid of a mutiny. It's not easy being a dictator, they've got a lot on their mind! After all, if you have everything, there's a lot to lose. So after his regime collapsed, the nation had a central government only in name, but the regional warlords that had organised and taken up arms against him immediately took control of all the major cities, set up checkpoints to collect tolls (illegally since the money certainly wasn't official government tax), and began operating under their own chain of command. Well, shit.
I suspect that grey areas will be a recurring topic in my blog. It is important to think about things and question things and I think understanding this is key to acting with more wisdom. Another entry to the HLBQ is from Roman poet Phaedrus, "Things are not always what they seem; the first appearance deceives many". Tribalism and a black and white view of the world is natural to us. We were programmed by nature to follow leaders and conform to our group. And yet, modern society is so complicated that we are forced to read between the lines and try to see the same thing from different angles.
Nuance is important, nuance is hard, let's all add a little nuance to our thinking.