The Importance of Self as Delusion
Life has many lessons to teach but the most painful lessons have to do with coming to grips with our delusion of self importance in an evolutionary process that has been around for billions of years. Everything in our own sense of reality dictates we surely must be important, and that there is a God who will save us from the land mines of life, if we just follow inherited or marriage adopted religious scripture of some sort. After all, if we are not important enough to be granted exceptions from the laws which govern this evolutionary process, what is the sense of even existing?
Part of the problem is our inability to grasp the enormousness of our universe, or comprehend how it could have ever begun. After all, how can something come from nothing? Clearly something did, and whatever “essence’ or “Gift giver’ is responsible for it all is eternally mysterious to us. This gift giver is given the name of God and the nature of God we often end up creating ourselves, in our own image, coupled with a hope that we can become special, and personally involved with this human created image of God.
The math helps put all of this in perspective. There are over 7 billion humans on the earth today. Population has doubled in my own life time. We are stressing our planet via our activities to the hilt right now. What happens if it doubles again? Is our species exempt from the consequences of species overpopulation? To think that seems a tad unrealistic. And responsible reproduction is not even a hot political debate. After all, who is going to tell any of us just how many offspring we can have? Over our dead body. But then again, it is not our dead body but a lot of future dead bodies at stake here. There are over eight million different species here on earth today and scientists estimate that there are 5 million more yet to be identified. Right now, today, humans are behind another huge mass extinction rate in evolutionary history. In the past, climate changes created mass extinction rates, today it is our own species behind this newest extinction rate. We are on a rampant tear to push out millions of species to make more room for more of us, undaunted that the natural resources to sustain this human over population growth are not there. The blind leading the blind.
We hope, at best, to approach 100 years in longevity. What kind of time period is that to an earth which has been around for billions of years? What is earth anyway in the big picture of things? The sun, relatively close to us as a planet is not close in human terms. Roughly, if we could travel 100 miles/hr all day long it would take us 100 years to reach the sun. And this distance is a minuscule distance compared to most distances in our known solar system. Frankly, past a certain unimaginably large distance, we have no idea what is out there. We can’t comprehend any ending any more than we can comprehend any beginning.
All of the above, without piling on even more unimaginable stats, kind of relegates our own importance to the total picture as a disappointingly infinitesimal nothingburger. So why don’t we just shoot ourselves, get it over with, and avoid all the stresses which come with life? The answer is easy enough—there is the potential for some happiness, some pleasant excitement, some achievements, some contentment, some laughter, some appreciation, some love of others, some new knowledge and so on. That is all any of us has—some potential.
While all of us are unique and different, none of us can achieve much on our own. We depend on others, or we fail, in which case our potential never gets realized. How much help is needed varies just like everything else around us. Diversity is a cornerstone of the evolutionary process and essential for evolutionary progress. A Terrell Owens may achieve a lot purely on his own, but that is not the norm, the typical, the reality for most of us. We need help from others, endless help, albeit different kinds of help at different stages in our lives. And yet, despite all the help from others, we are all in this life alone together.
At any rate, the above, to the extent we can really relate to it all, kind of puts a realistic perspective on our own importance. Of course this is annoying—we try all our lives to be important, only in moments of reality, to be face to face with our own unimportance. Our own world does not operate in any meaningful way with the other 7 plus billion people on our earth. Our time concept is meaningless compared to the billions of years the earth has been in existence, and we actually have no solid reason to believe our own species will be the end product, or even survive in future Time. Time seems to be a constant, that is TIME stays, we Go. That, of course, is really annoying. Not that others will go, but that we will too. It is so much easier to assume others will die than to assume such a permanent thing could happen to us. And if it does, we are going to Heaven, which of course, none of us can begin remotely to describe, let alone claim we have such a ticket to go there. Interestingly, all religions always have an escape clause to get us into this ‘Heaven’, even if we often disregard the scriptures which we claim guide our lives.
We not only often create a God as some kind of comfort food for our individuality, but we pretend that our offspring are somehow very close intimate copies of ourselves, some sort of significant bonding of identities. There are varying degrees of success in creating such close identities, but realistically, the match between offspring and parent is practically as diverse in reality as our closeness to nearby neighbors or distant neighbors. We all know that adding an atom here, a molecule there, etc will often create a totally new compound hardly resembling at all the components added to get the new compound. Genetics is rather similar, a gene here, a gene there, and just like that something quite different from the original parents is created. I reckon it all depends on what we consider important. If two white people marry then yes, the offspring are most likely to be white too. But what is unique about that? There are millions of other people in existence with white skin too. Essentially, it is not physical traits, but personalities which enable two people to form close bonds. Ok, not always. The prom queen is not likely to marry an ugly guy which really only proves how irrational sex is as a determinate of anything. Only fools try to get too rational about sexual proclivities. If we have a foot fetish, our only choice is to deal with it as best we can. Sex is entertainment, and requires, most of the time, two people. If both can’t enjoy the same entertainment, the sexual relationship will not be successful. Sex is always the circus element in our lives and we are the clowns. If someone is physically attractive they can legally have sex as much as they want with, in essence, as many people as they like BUT, if someone is ugly, and no one particularly is willing to have sex with them, then they are to abstain from sex and if someone will have sex with them for money, both are then eligible to arrest. A tad illogical.
Offspring, most of the time, go their own way. This is natural. Humans have managed to make it far more complicated. We actually create a priority/value system called ‘Family values’. Essentially this means that we and our offspring are more ‘important’ than others. We often confuse obligations to real ethics. Parents, human or otherwise, have an obligation to raise their young until the young can exist on their own. That is obligation, and it comes inborn genetically, or in the case of humans, it is an understood learned obligation. It has absolutely nothing to do with anyone’s ethical importance. It is the Golden Rule which, via reason, establishes the equal importance of everyone to everyone else. To the extent the Golden Rule reigns as the basis for human ethics, the earth is a pleasant enough environment with contentment maximized for the entire species. Because of diversity, the amount of help needed for individuals to reach their potential in life varies, but when help is available, and that needed help, required from the more fortunate, is forthcoming from that source, then the most people can achieve some contentment.
Yet things are today going in a different direction. ‘Family values’, of various ilk, is gaining ground, and more and more people are circling the wagons around genetic cabals, or religious cabals, or economic cabals, or racial cabals, or cultural cabals, or whatever other cabals, instead of the most fortunate focusing their help on the less fortunate. We have become almost cannibalistic in nature, denying children in poor families less health care than those children in affluent families, devising educational funding systems in which the kids of affluence get better schools and teachers than those in poor families. We start wars in which everyone is not required to sacrifice for the effort, but we use mercenary ‘volunteer armies’, which is essentially a safe guard to ensure the more fortunate are not required to put their lives at stake. In fact they don’t even have to put their money at stake since we tend to fight wars on borrowed money. Why did we kill 2 million Vietnamese? There is no good answer but we did. What good has been achieved by killing millions of Iraqis and Afghanistans? We invade, we kill, then tire of the killing, declare victory and leave. But what have we left behind? Simply countries that are more seeped in violence than when we invaded. Violence begets violence, always has, and yet we pretend otherwise. Around half of our citizens feel we have only failed because we have not done enough killing across the globe. Who knows, maybe this mentality will be the factor which solves the human overpopulation problem. We certainly are making a decent run with this approach to human overpopulation.
If we could find some way to deal with our own self serving sense of importance, accept the reality that we are on borrowed time, and understand the fundamental responsibility of the more fortunate to help the less fortunate as the basis for ethics, then the earth and all the species on it, would have a more peaceful, contented existence. Quality of life not only counts, but is the primary goal of every species. We can be collectively very significant, what we cannot be is individually significant. If Lincoln had not freed the slaves, someone else at some point would have, if the Wright Brothers had not invented the airplane, someone else would have, if women had not achieved the right to vote when they did, they would have achieved it at some other point. Evolution moves on, and moves in a direction which is independent of any particular person’s contribution.
So there we have it in a nutshell: it is the evolutionary process which is important, not any individuals of the process. Individuals can affect the Timing, but not the direction of evolution. Remember, Time stays, individuals go. There is no sanctity of life for individuals of any species, just a sanctity of life for the evolutionary process. Life continues and every living cell comes from another living cell and always has from the beginning of time. Life just keeps passing from one form to another, endlessly, over time, using the same basic building blocks, just rearranging them in billions of ways to create diversity and improvement. It is never good vs evil or God vs the Devil but the useful vs the useless. What is new with the human species is an inherent ethical nature which makes it possible for even the useless to achieve some degree of personal contentment——a sort of dog eat dog as a kinder, more civilized version. Thus with our species, we get the survival of the fittest (in the broadest sense of the term) along with mercy for the less fit. At least the potential is there but ethics is still in the developing stage.
