Human Values, Tenacity, and the Future of Our Species

You have a family, and doubtless you love them. You would likely preserve their lives even if it meant the death of your neighbors. There are endless scholarly opinions on how the ethical math of such an exchange works out, but as you increase the scale it becomes less vague.

Would you sacrifice the entire neighborhood to preserve your family, for example? The entire state? The country? All of humanity? Hopefully you would sooner sacrifice yourself if you could save them all.

There's a lot of room for reasonable, valid debate as to how your order your loyalties from the individual level all the way up to the national level. But every human being, if they have any right to identify as one, must put humanity at the top.

That's the epiphenal leap we're able to make because we have the cognitive capacity to see ourselves as part of a larger whole, to have a survival instinct that goes beyond just the self and immediate kin.

Now, what if a being of incomprehensible power appeared to you and demanded that you turn on your fellow man? Supposing this being offered you eternal life and everlasting bliss if you obey, and everlasting suffering if you don't?

What makes this being different from any human tyrant who has compelled men to slaughter one another with that same carrot and stick method? How many North Korean soldiers serve only because they fear what will happen to their families if they do not?

The fact that the being is incomprehensibly advanced and powerful beyond any hope of resistance should not sway you. Power does not make one right, and the futility of struggling against a malevolent force you cannot ever hope to best is not foolish, it is the essence of what we are. True bravery, after all, is fighting even when you know that you cannot win.

Being human is more than just DNA. It's clawing your way out of the sea to lay eggs even as you asphyxiate. It's hurling shiat in the face of the tiger that's about to eat you, then taunting it from the trees.

It's gutting a bear ten times your mass, wearing its skin and living in its cave. It's cutting off your own arm because it's trapped under a boulder and you refuse to die. It's trekking to the South Pole to settle a bet, stabbing a shark in the eye as it eats you, continuing to the bottom of a 7 mile deep oceanic trench even though the window just cracked.

If anything defines us as a species, it's the refusal to lay down and die when confronted by forces more powerful than ourselves. When nature floods our cities, destroys our reactors, buries the elderly and sweeps our loved ones out to sea, we mourn our losses, but we rebuild.

Bigger and better too, so that next time we can laugh defiantly as forces incomprehensibly larger and more powerful than any one human prove powerless against our combined brilliance. And even when we lose, the fact that we got up again and refused to die is a small victory in itself.

Before nature, or purported deities, or any other irresistible force, we must refuse to die. That much any animal understands. Being human means expanding your survival instinct beyond that limited scope of the self or the family, such that it encompasses the species and one day all sentient life. To turn against your kind because a force too powerful to oppose commands it is to renounce that principle, and with it your humanity.

Having bought into an ideology which infantilizes you and exhorts you to be submissive and obedient, you may see some or all of what I wrote as misguided hubris. You may believe we are God's "children", that Christ is our "shepherd", neglecting to consider what happens to sheep that obligingly follow their shepherd into the slaughterhouse. And that is what awaits us in the end times, if Jewish, Christian and Islamic teachings are to be believed.

The whole of human history, simply a farce. A drama with no point, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. All of it played out on this tiny globe, before we've had the chance to realize our dreams of becoming a permanent fixture in the universe, exploring every corner of it, mastering its fundamental forces.

That isn't our future. It can’t be! We are more than just actors on a stage, pawns in the game of damnation and salvation. We're valid. We matter. We have a right to exist, and we have a glorious future, provided we can cast off the mental chains which have conspired to convinced us otherwise.

The Judeo-Christian paradigm, with its fatalistic vision for our future and obsessive fixation on our frailties is fading, and vicious opposition to secularism is an expression of its final, violent spasms. They’ve seen the writing on the wall, the shape of things to come, and they are powerless to change course. Humankind will finally shed the twisted fever dreams of angels and demons, damnation and salvation.

These and all other superstitions will pass, leaving us stronger for it. No longer tormented by spectres invented in our infancy, we will leave this planet and settle others, the realization of a long held dream...after the passing of an equally long nightmare.