User:John Bessa/Organismic Fate

This writing attempts to direct other writing of mine, articles on web magazines, that looks at the contradiction of human killing from a historical, pacifistic--even religious, yet realistic and evolutionary perspective. Killing is inhumane, yet humanity kills. The simple explanation for this dichotomy must be that there are two different kinds of people who have inside their heads different neurological constructs.

=Organismic purpose=

The purpose of an organism is to live. It's, or his, life is spent collecting and developing materials as resources for continuing, improving, and assuring future life. The difficulty begins when some other organism wants to end its life, it its organismic purpose which is life. Or an other organism may attempt to impact its ability to live effectively by denying access to resources. That organism may want to defend itself, and for the human organism, therein lies much, if not nearly all, of the struggle in life, has become conflict. We know, especially in our time, that this struggle is unnecessary; we have the ability, or technology, to maintain all life, both wild and domestic, but we work at cross purposes with life. We work stupidly and inefficiently, where ingenuity effectively only enhances destruction.

=Behind the title=

I was looking through an old shed and found a milk crate full of old jars. Since the shed roof had recently collapsed, the some of the bottles were full of water, and others had been mouse nests. The bottles with water had drowned mice in them. I realized that the bottles had been a good nesting area for the mice until the roof failed, and filled the jars, making traps from which many of them could not escape.

When I first started my writing on Empathy, I had happened on a mouse while cleaning my own shed; she was nursing a pinkey, and also had another baby nearby. I documented her strategy to save her babies in Spiritual Darwinism, and that material is being used by a professor in the Northwest. I realized that mice have a lot of what Darwin called "natural affection" but tend to leap before they look, getting into situations that can kill them. I cannot count how many mice I have rescued from jam jars, oil bottles, and pails in my cabin, and some have not been so lucky.

Recently, my adopted cat caught a mouse in my third floor apartment that is in the rural city of Torrington, Connecticut. (He has stopped killing, or even hurting, animals at our request, but still loves to catch them. I rescued the mouse and held it, and it calmed down.  I brought it down stairs and let it go on my arm; it crawled into my hair on the back of my neck (it was long then), and stayed there for a half an hour.  Then it scurried off.  Mice, I think, are tremendously affectionate, and hence a great evolutionary value, and are able to succeed as a species, despite their being a major food species for prey, and also despite their tendency to leap before looking.

The crate of jars in the abandoned shed served to create an successful family environment for mice, but it also served to kill many of them. Clearly, mice live by numbers, through their emotional ability to raise families, and not by cunning or physical strength. It seems sad that such empathic animals suffer so much death, that their fate is to breed in large numbers only to live short lives. Their clearly develops very quickly, and so do their family skills.

This applies congruently to humanity in one respect, but diverges in another...

=God's Handwriting=

DNA is God's handwriting, and the goal of DNA along many different evolutionary lines is empathy: love. God is love. There are mistakes in the writing, and in a sense, God's work is a "work in progress." In nature, higher organisms typically live and grow in family or community units, and when the DNA of love fails for a higher organism, that organism cannot function in a generous way that makes him a contributing member of his group. God's handwriting has a mistake in it, for whatever reasons, and that organism, typically attempts to gain the resources necessary for live in non-beneficial ways--what we can think of as taking from others, but not giving.

There is a contradiction, or perhaps even an irony, in this view of God's handwriting as DNA, and evolution as God's creation. Higher organisms--us primates being the highest--are normally all highly empathic, the highest among us having the most sophisticated empathy. Normally we, typical of higher organisms, care for the less fortunate, and they return emotional gratitude that completes a circle of caring. This includes caring for organisms that have mistakes in their DNA, and in typically in nature those with mistakes tend to live short lives. The contradiction appears when the broken DNA is the DNA that creates the empathic neurons. In humans, we know that this broken DNA can not only deprive the highest empathic facilities, but the defect can reach very far into the history of DNA. Humans, apparently externally normal, may be so genetically damaged as to lack even the most rudimentary DNA structures dating back to the beginning of God's work. Humans may literally have only the communication abilities of, say, reptiles or snakes, yet may be able to function intellectually well enough to carry out a functional role in society, that is to say, have a job.

The result of this contradiction is that humans dysfunctional in this way, victims of God's mistakes in His handwriting of DNA, completely lack what we think of as humanity and can conceivably act in nearly purely inhumane ways, usually typically to gain the resources necessary to have a pleasing life. The image that comes to my mind is the sadist in prison, the person who, for pay, works for the totalitarian to inflict pain. Extending this contradiction, is that much of humanity attempts to define the torturers actions in terms of society, environmental experiences. These philosophic humans, typically psychologists, attempt to apply what they think of as empathy towards humans whose DNA is so mis-written that mis-define empathy, they use the term in every way except the way God means it, to create an avenue of escape for these types of very broken people. This is where God's contradiction become human irony. Organisms who nature would condemn to a short life, in a perhaps cruel organismic fate, actually become the most powerful in human society, as they are able through the protection of society's men of philosophy to kill in great numbers, and in-so-doing, create vast accumulations of resources called Capital.