I've been very interested in the idea of good and evil, and the line between love and hate. There's a TED Talk by Philip Zimbardo (which is absolutely mind-blowing, but pretty disturbing simultaneously) that is about this concept of "The Lucifer Effect". He talks about Lucifer meaning "light" and how Lucifer was God's favorite angel. Then, he discusses Lucifer's fall from grace. Zimbardo, who was the head researcher and the superintendent of the Stanford Prison Experiment, talks about how the same exact situations can produce good OR evil in us--how the same situations produce heroes OR villains. If we are conscious of this, though, we are more empowered to walk away the lover, the hero. Another thing that moves me about his talk is the third thing that you can walk away as--guilty of the sin of passivity. These are those of us who don't do anything at all, and just let the evil go on since we neither participate in it nor fight it. That's one of my greatest fears, actually--that I will be guilty one day of participating in evil because I don't recognize it around me. This quote by Marilyn Monroe reminds me that I'm very much capable of that and have to constantly be aware.
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