Why does Evil exist?

When children ask you why there is evil in the world, there are a lot of answers that you can give.  Some people will give religious answers, others will delve into psychology albeit in a simplified way that children can understand.  For me personally the answer that I would give is not one that is particularly encouraging.  The truth is Mankind was never taught to be evil, it is in our nature.  There is a depiction from Chinese Philosophy of two twins known as Yin and Yang, the former is black, and the latter is white, the two are twisted together to create the Taichi symbol, whilst they represent darkness and light respectively, they each contain a smaller circle that holds part of their opposing twin, this represents that in everything good there is always bad and in everything bad there is always good.

When asked why there is evil in the world I would simply say that there is evil because there is good.  If there was no evil there would be no good, they exist as a scale you can make any scale bigger or smaller you can cut it in half in an attempt to remove the bit you don't like but what you're left with becomes the new scale, the two ends become the new extremes.  You can only eliminate one end of the scale entirely by eliminating the whole thing.

When you look at the world, it's very easy to find darkness.  It's very easy to see everything that is wrong with it.  The negativity stands out, but the fact that mankind survives and lives on is because despite what you are led to believe, there is as much good in the world as there is bad.  It's easy to argue against this and say that there is much more bad than good and that there is no balance enforced by nature but I would argue this isn't true.  There is a balance and it is more solidified than we think.  There is no association between genders, male and female as to who is more likely to be good or bad, but we can take the divide between male and female as an example of something that you would think there would be no balance enforced by nature.  You would be wrong however.

There are around 7 billion people on Earth right now and incredibly, the distribution of male to female is approximately 1:1, this is despite the prevalence of patriarchal society, and some countries fixation on preferring male children, and all manner of human intervention in fertility and birth rates etc.  The human race is not alone, most species that reproduce via sexual intercourse result in the same population ratio of 1:1 in terms of binary genders - the idea of binary gender in and of itself is archaic but that's an issue that requires a much more lengthy explanation, the short explanation is that gender in humans isn't determined by XY pairing as it was once thought to be, it is determined by the SRX/SRY box genes which have hundreds of permutations which is just one reason why gender profiling is problematic but as I said that's a topic for another time.

You can take things which involve much wider scope for random variation like the Euromillions lottery balls and you will see the same conformity eventually arise.  The Euromillions is a lottery where 5 regular balls numbered 1 to 50 are drawn and 2 lucky star balls numbered 1 to 12 are drawn.  It was launched in 2004 and has remained largely unchanged since its inception.  There are other lotteries that have been around a lot longer but the consistency of the rules for this one make it a good example to use.  There is a website you can use called LottoNumbers which details the most overdue balls for the Euromillions lottery among others.  Balls generally reach between 20 and 120 days without being drawn.  You can also see the most common balls which details the balls that have appeared most often.  What you will observe if you pay attention to both of these pages over time is that the numbers that appear in each changes quite often.  There are no balls that remain in either page forever.  A standard distribution is eventually achieved and a standard deviation also emerges as to how long a ball can go whilst being the least or most common to appear.  In the end there is an even distribution that emerges.

Good and Evil we are raised to believe are the result of how we are raised, and come down to a case of nurture as opposed to nature - I don't believe this is true personally.  I don't believe you can ever achieve world peace and Utopia, and I don't believe that the world could ever descend into total war and a Dystopia, you can call me naive for thinking that but I maintain even if you managed to cause it, in the end it wouldn't last.  Whichever side you sought to eliminate will eventually emerge in time.  I know this to be true because it has already happened, as I have said Mankind was never taught to be evil, it is in our nature, but likewise Mankind was never taught to be good either, that too is in our nature.  Humanity is Yin and Yang, there is evil in the world because there are people in the world, and so long as there are people, there will be evil, but there is also good in the world, because there are people in the world, and so long as there are people, there will be good.  You just have to find it, and focus on it, and if you want the world to be a better place then you need to create more good in the world.