We are not asked whether we want to be born or when. We are born into an operating world system with all its assumptions, beliefs, and operations of that time. We love to look back and mesmerise about how life was in those days. What did we do? What do we do now? Then and now we start with a premise and see how it fits in the current operating system. Isn't this what we do in the Memoirs class?
Some premises are time dependent, such as: "It's been 10,000 miles ago that my car was serviced, so I better make an appointment". Others not so much, such as premises I want to focus on here.
Increasing the ability of human beings to live longer, healthy, fulfilling lives. Do you agree with that?
I want to leave this world a better place than when I entered it. A pretty general premise, but don't we all want that? What do I mean with better? For example:
Is animal testing for medical research good? Does that make the world a better place? Most people, including myself, would say YES.
- While we have no desire to make animals suffer, we prioritise the countless human lives that animal testing saves. WHY?
- ... because our primary moral goal in this context is some version of advancing human flourishing; for humans to live healthy lives.
There are scientists who evaluate animal testing as immoral even though they know it has been very beneficial to human life. WHY?
- ... because they believe a higher moral standard than saving the lives of human beings from disease is the moral goal and standard of animal equality. The basic idea of animal equality is that it is morally wrong to interfere with mother nature.
- Even though they know animal testing for medical research has methodologically proven to benefit human health, the lesson here is that they know they are pursuing anti-human policies.
- Animal welfare can mean pro-human concern with the welfare of animals, such as unnecessary cruelty, which I think every human being agrees with. In practice it can result in supporting the whole animal-equality agenda including opposition to animal testing for medical research. Animal welfare is used as a disguise making it look like a pro-human goal.
This explains many of the times in history, when human beings who should have known better, supported and enacted viciously anti-human policies, such as slavery, racism, religious dictatorship, communism, and Nazism. An example is racism which spreads the assumption that killing or subordinating non-preferred races is not anti-humanism because those other races have somehow scientifically proven to be inferior and therefor not truly human. Nazism in Nazi Germany supported the extermination of Jews, not because it was unaware that extermination would kill many people, but because its goal and standard was the opposite of human flourishing: the triumph of one group of people, Aryans, and the subjugation of Jews and other non-Aryan groups.
This is exactly what is going on today with our knowledge system's evaluation of anti-human energy elimination policies. regardless of what you believe about the impact of rising CO2 levels in the future. Today you must acknowledge that human beings are flourishing more than 200-300 years ago, or even longer. This is expressed more or less as follows:
"Fossil fuels have made the world a better place to live, including a place where we are far safer from climate, but tragically in the future, their negative side effects will be so adverse that it's worth depriving billions of people of fossil fuels' massive benefits."
That would be a coherent claim, but it is not what today's knowledge system, especially its designated experts, tells us. It treats today's world, including climate, as being in a horrible state due to fossil fuels, being gas, oil, coal, and nuclear power. Antonio Guterres, head of the UN, has told us: "our war on nature has left the planet broken, and the consequences of our recklessness are already apparent in human suffering, including towering economic losses."
Factually, the planet has been afflicted far less by human suffering than ever. We have experienced unprecedented economic gains over the years. Is human health better in the Western world than, say Kenia or Uganda? Is water safer to drink in most Western countries than in Ethiopia?
