Part of the problem is that our conceptualization of good and bad are culturally conditioned. As members of a group, people need a collective sense of what is right and wrong, but good and bad are not some cosmic duel between the forces of righteousness and evil. They are the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The 1/0 of life. What is good for the fox, is bad for the chicken and there is no middle ground, other than the energy that was the chicken becomes a fleeting burst of energy for the fox.

The larger societal problem this simplification creates is that all the higher order social perogitives, such as honesty, love, respect, responsibility, trust, etc, as well as the negatives, are complex interactions of this basic attraction/repulsion, so that when conflicts arise, rather than each side being able to assume the other might hold to the higher order evolved standards and potentially using such obstacles as opportunities to further evolve, it becomes a race to the bottom, of us versus them.

The fact is that reality constantly builds and evolves upward and outward, until the stucture becomes unstable and collapses back in. Resets.

While we are not going to ever transcend this basic fact of nature, possibly the better we understand it, the better we can work within it, creating durable and healthy societies, with durable and healthy individuals. Nodes and networks. Trees and forests.