I've seen versions of this picture popping up around the internet lately, and it made me stop and think. It is not that I don't believe in right and wrong; I do. What I don't believe in are absolutes. Setting religion aside (the context in which right and wrong is often framed), the one thing that surprised me when I was studying psychology is how culturally and individually subjective right and wrong is. Our world can be so confusing that people naturally gravitate towards simplification, but the concept of right and wrong is simply too complex to be strictly dimorphic. The way we perceive the world is filtered through our society, but it is first shaped by our gender, our socioeconomic status, how safe and nurturing (or conversely, chaotic) our childhood was. Our perception of right and wrong is little more than a psychological adaptation to help us make sense of, and fit in to our environment.
When I was working with at-risk kids, trying to help them learn to make good choices, this became apparent really fast. I used to have to take one of my 9 year-old clients to get something to eat (on my own dime) before we could work on anything constructive, because a child who routinely goes to bed hungry doesn't care about making good decisions, and even less about listening to me tell him how to make the "right" choices. He cares that he's hungry, and will beg, steal, lie, and act out if he thinks it might fill his belly. My friend worked with the quietest, cute-as-a-button young woman who would, seemingly inexplicably, go home most nights and intentionally antagonize her mother until her mother would beat the hell out of her....because then she didn't have to spend the rest of the evening wondering what little thing was going to set her mother off that night, like it had every other night, for most of her whole life, and because if you're going to catch a beating anyway, you might as well get it over with. What my friend at first wrote off as the wrong choices of a 13 year old girl who was determined to be bratty and disrespectful to her mother was more accurately a young person exerting control over her life in the only way she knew how. She couldn't control whether or not her mother was going to hit her, but she could control when her mother was going to hit her. She had decided that knowing was better than not knowing, and she made the best decision for herself, in her reality, at that specific time.
It's not just at risk kids, though, because most of us have some sort of a hole in our well-being we're trying to fill. If we're lucky we get to fill it with the love of family and friends. Some people fill theirs with religion, or sex, or alcohol, or money, or hate, or whatever thing or combination of things works for them. And sometimes when they can't fill it themselves, they pass the burden of their hole onto their kids, or their spouse, or they simply fall into it and are gone. As awful as that sounds, what is amazing about our human experience and the world we all share is that everyone gets to decide what's right and wrong for themselves. The catch is, we have to live with the consequences of those decisions, but what is important here is we absolutely get to self-determine our own moral code, one that is not defined by our words, but by our actions. Because of this, people have legitimate disagreements about what's right all the time. Look no further than Republicans and Democrats (both frequently wrong, but equally convinced what they're doing is completely right) or Christians and Muslims (ditto) to illustrate my point. We don't agree across the board on what is right or wrong because right and wrong are not absolute concepts. And that's kind of a problem, because we like to act like they are. There are a lot of people running around judging what others do, vainly trying to hammer actions into preconceived, one-size-fits-all definitions of right or wrong, without ever having carried their burden, never having felt their pain, never having had to fill that hole. I've seen too much suffering, too many people who's only choice that matters is "whatever it takes for me to survive today", to say that right is right and it's black and white. We all cope in our own way. I'm under no illusion that my way is better than anyone else's. I've seen that sometimes what's right has little value to a person because it just can't get them what they need. Sometimes wrong is right (or, perhaps more accurately, most right) because a bad choice is the best choice to be had. And sometimes it doesn't even matter whether a person chooses right or wrong because they both disappear into the hole the same....
I don't want anyone to think I'm saying don't have morals or high standards. Absolutely, set the bar high, but for yourself, because the point is, right is right, and wrong is wrong, but only for you, and it doesn't really matter if everyone else is doing it, or no one else is doing it, because their circumstances and their reality are not your circumstances and your reality. If we all tried our best to remember that, we might be a little less judgmental of others, and maybe, just maybe, the world would be a little nicer place, and its people, a little more forgiving of the shortcomings of others.
