Human Life

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Transcript:

HUMAN LIFE

"Keep Right with Ralph K. Ginorio"

Human life is special because we are the only as yet known self-aware beings in the universe. While on this world arguments can be made that certain whales, dolphins, chimpanzees, bonobos, elephants, octopi, ravens, hive insects, and even now a few computers possess some form of non-human intelligence, only we Homo Sapiens Sapiens are known to be fully sentient.

By the principles that governs economics, scarcity confers value. One of gold’s qualities, along with beauty, that makes it precious is that it is encountered infrequently. Uncommon items and services always command a great price in proportion to their rarity.

In all the known universe, we have not encountered signs of life, let alone intelligent life. Could it be possible that, in all of creation, only we are awake to our own existence?!

Perhaps, though I think this unlikely. The sheer scope of our own galactic spiral arm, let alone that of our Milky Way galaxy, its orbiting Magellanic Clouds, the rest of our local galactic cluster, and the near-infinite number of galactic superclusters makes this terribly unlikely.

So, while I personally believe that we are not alone, I acknowledge that in this moment our civilization has no proof of this. As far as we can prove, our species may be the only thinking, remembering, and planning race of beings.

That makes us precious, because we may be unique.

Even if we eventually encounter nonhuman minds, they are likely to be so different from us that our uniqueness will persist. Set against alien mentalities, the particularities of our distinct human perspectives will still likely be unparalleled.

We have actually already encountered this phenomena. Within the past six centuries, as our European and Judeo-Christian Western Civilization encountered the locally evolved cultures and civilizations that existed beyond Europe, unbridgeable gulfs of assumption sundered the Earth’s scattered iterations of human society.

Consider how fundamentally different were the habits, manners, beliefs, and institutions of Muromachi Japan from those of the Iroquois Confederacy; how the Khmer differed from the Incas. Even within regions, mutually exclusive cultural predispositions proliferated, as with the Mughals and the Ming, the Mongols and the Arabs, the Tahitians and the Aborigines.

We human beings ARE alien to one another. It is our un-reflected-upon cultural values that determine the meaning of everything we encounter. As such, there is a value in preserving the stories, languages, and folkways of cultures that are in the process of being erased by contact with the wider world. Consider how thoroughly human cultures might melt in the presence of an interstellar civilization thousands of years more advanced than the Earth’s apex culture.

Unique human cultures and subcultures should be preserved because of their unique understandings of life, the universe, and everything. Without their insights, our shared understanding would be incomplete.

However, we are increasingly beset by the sheer numbers of our fellow man. Human population has exploded since World War II, when the United States led the West in openly sharing modern medical and agricultural technologies with the undeveloped world. American and allied Universities have disseminated advanced knowledge as our government and businesses have shared sophisticated products.

One result is that societies who never developed industrial and post-industrial resources now have them. These modern blessings are killing the Third World.

For example, it took Europe centuries of slow growth, plus the first century of industrial development, to alter the size of the average family. The quantity of children was reduced as the chance for survival for each child increased. In the modern epoch, the West stabilized at a rate of slow population growth in accord with our society’s growing wealth and expectations.

On the other hand, many cultures around the world equate male value with the number of boys that a man fathers. More boys equates to higher status and to greater respect. Over the past eighty years, there has been no significant reduction in these pre-industrial birth rates to conform to changed circumstances.

We are seeing the world’s human population doubling itself in increasingly short intervals. Unchecked, this will finally outrun our technological advances in food production and medicine. If nothing changes, we face the apocalyptic overpopulation crisis predicted by Thomas Malthus centuries ago.

As uncommon as humanity is in our universe, individual human beings are uncomfortably common. Just as rarity confers value, overabundance undermines it.

Today, our would-be social engineers see this population crisis as the greatest threat facing our world. Their climate crisis language all adds up to their conviction that the uncontrolled proliferation of human life must be stopped.

This is why Western elites like Claus Schwab’s World Economic Forum advocate policies that must inevitably destroy human rights and freedom. If the West devolves into a new technocratic feudalism, the overpopulating human herd could be culled.

Without liberty, enterprise withers. Without recognized inalienable God-given rights, the individual becomes subsumed into the mass. By restricting our food supply, our access to medicine, and the quality of our education, everyday people in the West will be reduced to the status of Serfs.

A distinct West will dissolve into a new global dependency, where technocrats will rule over us without restriction. They will call all of this necessary for the sustainability of humanity; for the good of the planet.

This all derives from pride, intensified to the point of hubris. These elites have sloughed off all humility, all reference to the lodestone of the transcendent values of the Judeo-Christian West.

As they deny the existence of God, they can play at being gods. Without hope of heaven or fear of hell, there are no limits to the extent they will go in service to their ambitions. Without genuine connections by love and family to the rest of humanity, these elites increasingly see themselves as a natural aristocracy; as a people apart with a manifest destiny to rule.

This disconnection from our shared humanity is coupled by their lack of humility before the imponderable mysteries...