When Did It Become A Crime To Cherish Life?

Paul Rosenberg

This question comes from the 1978 Superman film, as Jor-El, Superman's father, bows to “the council" and accepts the unnecessary deaths of himself, his wife and many others, rather than disobeying. It's not a great scene but it's a telling one; even its clumsiness is informative.

And so we have an essential question, well stated, in illustrative circumstances. It's also a question whose answer is rather surprising. So, let's get on with it.

We've Always Cherished Life... Within Limits

We humans have always cherished life: our own lives, those of our families and other people we love, even the human race in general. Good things all. But always, so far as we can see, the cherishing of life has been limited; has been restricted.

Regardless of our level of commitment to the evolution narrative, there can be no doubt that we carry the same essential chemistry as primates and that our most primitive traits are those we share with primates like chimps and baboons. This is a rich area of study but we'll have to bypass it here and simply point out that cherishing life, in our earliest days, was limited by the approval or disapproval of our local troop or tribe. Usually this involved loyalty to our tribe, perhaps some love within it, but no love and definitely no loyalty to other tribes.

Of course the best humans have always broken through such limits. The noblest of people extended the cherishing of life, even though they often paid a price for it. And it is to precisely such unknown people that we owe most of human progress.

The limits imposed by the early tribes were enforced by dominant individuals: by rulers. And those enforcements served the dominants and their positions, mostly relating to the cohesion of the individuals under their ruler-ship. Insiders could be cherished, outsiders not very much. Loyalty or treason was the binary choice they offered.

This, however, is only the surface of the issue; the cherishing of life goes far deeper than blessing the people we know and love.

Life is absolutely fundamental, not only to us but apparently to the universe itself. (If that strikes you as grandiose and baseless, please stay with me for just a few more lines.)

Life is the only counter-entropic force we can see in this universe. Mere matter is plainly entropic: it all wears down, shedding utility as it goes. Life, however, is that which organizes the physical world counter to entropy: plants producing fruits and grains, bees producing honey and so on. We can debate the limits of this counter-entropy (even though we have insufficient perspective for doing so), but the statement itself can hardly be challenged.

And this life, this counter-entropy, finds its greatest means of expression in the human consciousness. Humans are able to create at will; are able to counter entropy at will. Nothing else we've seen can do that.

To then restrain and suppress life and doubly to suppress the human consciousness, is a sin against the universe itself. We may express this concept any number of ways but it stands and will continue to stand.

So, life is apparently the fundamental good. That's a heavy concept to assimilate but we need to work on it all the same.

The Obvious Choice

Given all the above, it's strikingly obvious that this Life, however it operates, is the thing we should be using to solve our problems. What better could we find? It works magnificently and it's resident within us.

Bear in mind, please, that our fancy terms (like counter-entropy) are not at all necessary for grasping the concept that life works wonders and that the human consciousness allows life to operate far more fully than anything else. And we find precisely these ideas in some of our oldest writings.

This was an easy enough concept even in ancient times. The belief that humans inherently suck requires far more enculturation than we modern, urban types assume. (Enculturation being its strongest in modern, urban settings.)

So, it is sensible to look to individual humans as problem-solving units. In fact a good deal of human life does revolve around individuals as problem-solving units. That's the model of the healthy family, of the small business and of more or less all voluntary human activities. In these areas life is cherished, is valued.

Where this cherishing of life is restricted is within the hierarchical and the involuntary.

Such structures cannot provide the creative magic that life does; all real breakthroughs still come from individuals, as Einstein noted:

Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.

That said, hierarchies can assimilate the findings of those individuals, seizing them and pretending to own them. This is something that I lived through, coming to call the process “elite capture." What I refer to by that term is a new development — produced by life operating through individuals and blessing the world — being progressively limited and restrained, until it is owned by the hierarchy and its benefits are attributed to the hierarchy.

Those of us who lived through the early years of electronic communications (bulletin board systems, fiber optics, the early Internet, strong encryption, digital cash, etc.) watched this happen and wept along the way.

The best way I know to envision this is to imagine a containment structure being erected over and around an organic life-form (I envision this living thing as a sort of dome or half sphere). The first beams and struts are more insulting than damaging but they keep coming until the organism is sealed within. All entrance and egress is regimented and life within the structure is choked.

If the regiments are smart or limited, they allow the organism to remain alive, albeit at a low level. Mostly, however, they're not smart and they end up killing the organism. Afterward, they blame the organism for being essentially flawed in some way.

The threat posed by life — that something could be seen as more essential than the hierarchy — is thus eliminated and for a single reason: It was in the way of a “higher purpose."

And so this is the essential limitation of cherishing life: Dominance hierarchies will permit you to cherish life, until it gets in the way of what they decree to be a higher purpose. After that point, cherishing life is a crime and will be punished. And so we should state this very directly:

The obvious conclusion that life should be left to create has been overridden by the abstract concept of the higher purpose.

A Short History Of Higher Purposes

The higher purpose began in the troop or tribe: the tribe itself was the higher purpose and must be preserved, no matter who or how many would die. The actual higher purpose, at least among human tribes, was a primitive lust for status and dominance on the part of those who were feeding off the tribe's efforts.

From the primate troop to the human tribe to the nation state, those at the tops of hierarchies must take away the production of the productive and dominate those producers. Among primates this is done with naked violence. Among humans this can be done either with violence, with extensions of violence or with confusion and inertia.

Violence is simple enough and began among humans as simple theft — as thuggery.

Extensions of violence involve terror. Humans, unlike apes, have powerful imaginations. And so early rulers learned that they could project power a lot further — gaining far more dominance and wealth — by having a terrifying reputation. People who imagined the horrors of disobedience would comply far more easily than those who did not. We had thugs with legends (Nimrod the great hunter) and thugs with horror stories (flaying rebels alive, walling them up in columns and so on).

Confusion proved to be far better for an aggressive ruler. By various combinations of stories and priesthoods, people were convinced that they were personally worthless, that they needed the help of gods to survive and that they needed to please those gods by offering them their production: animals, grain and so on.

The gods gave them a class of sacrifice collectors to help, of course.

This arrangement held fairly well for quite some time and only began to modernize in the time of Plato, at about 400 BC. Plato, of course, monopolized the teachings and legend of Socrates. We have almost nothing from Socrates from any other source.

The philosophers who lived before Socrates focused on the structure of nature. After Socrates, they focused on politics. This post-Socratic, Platonic philosophy assumes that control of “the people" — the controlling of humans en masse — is a primary necessity and holds that necessity above examination.

The earlier, “beg the help of the gods" process is generally referred to as sympathetic magic and as noted, it became very widespread. Plato's philosophy promised more or less the same thing; the difference was that it replaced the mythical gods with a mythical society. And this ideal model of Plato's, as he spent a great deal of time explaining, was a pure and perfect organization of human beings— a magic state guided by a superior class of rulers.

And so Plato replaced the gods with a perfected society, offering the same something for nothing deal. If you held the right political opinions, you'd get the same benefits you used to seek from the gods. That's the “secret sauce" of politics and it's deeply fraudulent. We are able to earn what we need and those perfect societies aren't real.

And so Plato's magic society — and there have been any number of forms — became the new higher purpose, and remains so to this day.

Bear in mind also that the higher purpose is merely an abstract concept; it is not a concrete, physical thing. And without this reign of abstracts above concretes, the great atrocities we know would not have happened and certainly not the extent that they did.

Huge atrocities require that normal people don't see the victims directly: that they rather see a higher purpose that must be sanctified and protected. They must accept that the higher cause is more important than the real people who are suffering and dying.

Neither Stalin, nor Mao, nor Hitler, nor any of the others could have killed one tenth as many people without a higher cause to cloud and confuse the minds of normal humans.

I know this can be a difficult line of thought but in the end we come to see the wisdom of Tolstoy and Jesus:

The truth is that the State is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens... Henceforth, I shall never serve any government anywhere.

That which is highly esteemed among men is abomination in the eyes of God.

Back To Superman

As we opened, I noted that the scene we referenced was clumsy. That's true precisely because the line about cherishing life being a crime was too explicit. Obviously many good lives were about to be lost and the writers had to come up with some way for Superman to be the only survivor of an advanced race. In order to do that, the best they could come up with was an order of “the council," which as modern people believe, embodied the higher purpose of “the great law which made civilization possible."

In other words, the scene was clumsy because it was ludicrous, having nothing to hold to but superstition. It grasped for a massively over-glorified abstract — an abstract in the process of being wiped away — and attempted to justify the idolatry of holding that above actual persons... above actual life.

The cherishing of life is indeed a crime in the modern world, whenever it gets in the way of a rulership complex. That crime, of course, is called treason. Treason is punishable, fittingly enough, by death.

Loving one's enemies simply will not do.