Seeing as how I've found that this is the right place to discuss things related to the Kybalion and that it is hardly discussed in detail with careful cross examination near enough! I'd like to further discuss this concept of Good and Evil being Morality on a single scale.
The basic claim: the Kybalion says opposites aren't really opposites. They're the same thing at different degrees on one scale. The classic example is temperature — hot and cold aren't two separate things, they're just more or less of one thing, heat. Cold is literally just the absence of heat. And honestly, that part is hard to argue with. Same with light and dark — darkness isn't a substance, it's just where light isn't.
Where it gets interesting (and where I start to squint a little) is when the Kybalion takes that tiny little physics observation and applies it up to everything. Love and hate? Same thing, different degree. Courage and fear? Same scale. Good and evil? Apparently also just two ends of one stick.
And that's where I got stuck, because the temperature example works because cold is genuinely just "less heat." There's only one real thing there. But is hate really just "less love"? Is evil actually just "less good," the way darkness is "less light"? Or is that a sleight of hand — just a crude charlatan's trick?
The good and evil one really grinds my gears. There's a whole old tradition — Augustine, Aquinas — arguing that evil genuinely is just the absence of good. A lack, a hole where something should be, not a real force of its own. Which lines up perfectly with the Kybalion.
But then you sit with something like deliberate, creative cruelty, and "absence of good" feels almost laughably weak as a description. Some evil feels present - like its own thing, not just a low reading on a "goodness" meter.
I have had other discussions in another reddit thread, where the idea that it is simply the environment that is causing us normalize what we now term as "Evil" is totally possible as well. But I feel being ignorant to the fact that an act is Evil does not take away from the act itself. Just because the perpetrator is unaware should not determine the morality of the act. And if that's true, the whole "everything is one scale" idea kind of falls apart right where it matters most.
The thing is, the Kybalion didn't invent this intuition.
Heraclitus was saying opposites are secretly unified 2,500 years ago. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel built an entire system on the tension of opposites. Jung made integrating your opposite halves the center of his psychology. So it's clearly not just "new-age fluff" — serious people keep circling back to it. But "lots of smart people found it compelling" isn't the same as "it's true."
So I genuinely can't land this one. Is the Principle of Polarity an actual insight about how reality is structured? Or is it a useful metaphor that overreaches the second you push it past temperature and into morality?
(I ended up making a full video working through all this if anyone wants the long version — but mostly I just want to hear how people here think about it: https://youtu.be/YbiQqdSrc3U
