As we evolved as a species, it was important for our survival as hunter/gatherers to have a healthy and well-populated klan. Meanwhile, it was also important for our survival to be able to nonchalantly slaughter the members of rival klans competing for food and other resources. This might explain the very selective nature of the sanctity that we place on human life.
If a close friend or a family member dies it is viewed as an epic tragedy, but if a US military drone shoots a Hellfire missile at an Afghan wedding party, it barely registers a foot note in our news media.
If an emotionally disturbed gunman senselessly shoots innocent people in the US, he is condemned as sick and deranged. Meanwhile, if a sick and deranged President tells bald faced lies about “weapons of mass destruction”, resulting in the deaths of hundred thousands of Iraqis he is given a second term.
Countless people are very deeply opposed to abortion because they view it as murdering babies. I don’t know when human life begins and I certainly don’t want to support murdering babies, but I think it’s a little half-baked to be deeply concerned about abortion while not lifting a finger to address the 35,000 breathing children who die of preventable, poverty-related causes every day.
The sanctity of human life will be more and more called into question as modern, industrialized civilization continues to unravel and the world’s bloated 7.8 billion population starts to die-off in earnest. The Darwin Awards, now seen as a comical way to poke fun at people who die from doing stupid things, may become more and more seen as a practical way to thin our herd of those lesser deserving to live, or more to the point, lesser deserving to consume precious resources.
For example, the young men who like to base-jump off of bridges and other high locations often have to elude the police whose job it is to prevent the practice because it’s dangerous. Instead of being prevented, perhaps in the future dangerous stunts could be encouraged. The police could recommend other, lower bridges as a more fitting challenge to the dare devil’s courage.
There’s currently discussion of eliminating the nuisance of the horns of the trains passing through Eugene, but the railroad says that in order to eliminate the horns, all the railroad crossings would have to be upgraded to have their lights, bells and boom barriers brought to some improved standard. But seen in the context of the coming population die-off, perhaps the trains should simply stop sounding their horns and if a few people die, we might view it as an arguably positive thinning of the heard. We can simply hope that their death was quick and painless and that they weren’t able to produce offspring beforehand.
When a gun enthusiast leaves a loaded gun where his toddler accesses it and shoots him, there again, it could be viewed as a good thing – especially if the lesser intelligent gun owner would have otherwise produced more offspring.
We all accept that Adolf Hitler really was bad. But in addition to carrying out the holocaust he also gave eugenics a bad name. The genetic legacy of our species is something that society should take seriously. (And this needn’t have ANYTHING to do with race!) Traditionally, it was the smarter people who survived to produce offspring. Now, with no predators and social welfare guaranteed for much of the world’s population, it is simply those who pump out the most babies who are defining our species’ genetic legacy and they are not necessarily the smartest among us. In other words, the lesser intelligent are producing more offspring than the more intelligent. This is very bad news for our species. Just a few generations of lesser intelligent people out-breeding the more intelligent, will have an appreciable effect on our species’ overall intelligence and our ability to maintain a viable civilization. As the human population dies back over the coming decades, it would be better if the less intelligent, less kind and less fit among us were the ones to do the dying.
Regretfully, the most visible, high profile gun owners don’t consistently seem to be the most intelligent, kind or thoughtful among us. Maybe that’s an argument for a new trend toward intellectual, sensitive, new-age gun ownership.