From
the pond they call life,
the
fame they make believe,
seven
billion lives ascend
asleep
in their own dreams,
with
the weight of life upon them,
trying
their best to make amends
forever
beyond their reach.
Conjecture:
The moral dilemma of when/if it is right to kill another only arises
in a society where the sheer weight of its population guarantees the
act of murder. Conversely, the smaller the population, the less
likely it is that murder will occur and hence the need for its moral
argument, as it would seem absurd to kill in an environment where
every individual is required to work with the group in order that the
group survives.
Where
the population is great, hegemony ensconced, resource capture and
distribution industrialised and an economy of self-created scarcity
in motion, then it will follow that the life of the individual, in
such a programmed mass, is of little consequence to the whole and
murder, whether by the state or an individual, will be more likely
for this fact.
People
will need to be convinced of the immorality (or morality when the
state is the perpetrator) of the act of murder and laws imposed to
control those who see through this ‘story’ and attempt it all the
same.
The
story given will omit any mention of population as a cause and
instead will divert the reader’s attention to powers outside of
their normal perception: a God, a form or an ideal. The reason for
this is that the makers of the law must never be threatened, or their
laws brought into question, by values arising from our direct
physical relation to the world/environment about us, experiences of
which are rudimentary and within the grasp of all.
When
such values are realised the structure of power/control crumbles and
is most likely to be replaced by another hegemony once a better
‘story’ is found, and so we witness the succession of
philosophies, religions and political ism’s.
Given
this set of circumstances we can use pragmatism in our daily lives to
work our way through, however, we are often simply responding to ever
new structures of power rather than ‘realising’ our actual
relationship to our environment: our actual ‘being-in-the-world’.
To put it another way: while we are busy fighting the spectacle and
creating our own stories, like the one I am telling you now, we
forget that we are animals preoccupied mostly with eating,
defecating, sleeping, procreating and dreaming, and it is here we
find the essence, eternally sought yet never to be found, hidden by
ourselves.
Simon Leake
