Here We Have Earth - allegory about how morality insulates us from the harm we inflict on others
Actually written SEPTEMBER 24, 2016 -
[Cue: Robyn Hitchcock - Welcome to Earth]
The next ancient civilization on our galactic tour is Earth. You’ll notice it just now on your experience horizon. It will be the pale blue dot encroaching on your left.
The civilization of Earth is most interesting to us because its language-using inhabitants bear a striking behavioral similarity to our own species, as we were 7 million yakons ago.
Language-using earthlings, called “humans”, suffer a natural environment hostile to their happiness, just as we ourselves once did. As such, the lot of them constantly seek ways to relieve their suffering. Items in their environment that relieve suffering are called “resources”. Policies for distributing and maximizing the effectiveness of resources are called “economics”.
The most fundamental resource is the bodily strength of the individual, since through it, all other resources are acquired. And, since the relief of any individual’s suffering overwhelmingly requires cooperation from others, the bodily strength of others are also essential resources for each individual. Likewise, those with the strongest bodies can use their superior strength resource to inflict more suffering on the weaker-bodied ones as a means to coerce them to surrender their body-strength resource to the strong. And since the mere threat of inflicting such suffering can gain surrendered cooperation from many weaker humans, this policy is a very efficient use of the body-strength resource for the strongest.
This economic policy is called “slavery”. Slavery gets complex as other forms of strength become viable, such as intellectual acumen, wherein the intellectually strong discover how to make constraints and weapons for more efficient infliction of suffering. Slavery only diminishes when, and to the degree that, free trade is seen as more efficient, as it often is for producing highly derivative and intellectually complex resources. Free trade and slavery often co-exist, intersect and support one another in complex ways.
Oddly, humans also have an often significant compassion for one another, which puts them in a tragic bind of sorts, as relieving their own suffering largely requires them to inflict more suffering on others. To resolve this bind, humans have evolved a means of psychologically detaching themselves from those they need to hurt as they relieve their own suffering. The detachment is facilitated by a belief in a state of affairs that was meant to be, and that over-rules anyone’s feelings or desires or happiness or suffering. This belief is called “morality”.
Each human, or group of humans, always produces a version of morality that supports the way they relieve their own suffering, while condemning the other humans they must harm to do so. Using their variant of morality, relief-seeking humans dismiss the suffering of their condemned as “meant to be” so that the relief-seekers can inflict suffering on the condemned without remorse. The tragic bind is still there, of course. They just don’t notice it anymore.
All of this is, of course, strikingly similar to the way we ourselves used to be all those 7 million yakons ago.
And moving on to sector F, we see another interesting ancient civilization that has no physical bodies at all…
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