by Chet Shupe
humans as profoundly separate and superior to animals.
To anchor our lives in relationships is not possible, without surrendering our legal and monetary identities, and thus, our wealth and privilege. In other words, the identities we have always recognized as our selves—and to which we have devoted our lives—would have to die.
Just the thought of such a death experience is painful, even for a person who believes that, both a new birth into spiritual freedom, and the unconditional love inherent to success in that life, are waiting on the other side. However, should we ever find ourselves in circumstances where we were free to be true to our feelings of the moment, in our relationships with those around us, I believe we would see the passing of our legal self as our life’s greatest blessing.
The issue isn’t that we don’t know how to love unconditionally. That is as innate as our senses of hunger, anger, romance, or grief. All of these are feelings we can and do experience, but only in situations where they make sense. For instance, it doesn’t make sense to feel hungry if we have just had dinner, or to feel grief if we haven’t lost a loved one.
We seldom experience the unconditional love of interdependent relationships because legal systems, both, compel us to repress our feelings of the moment on behalf of future concerns, and they destroy interdependence by forcing us to compete with one another, in order to survive. Our need is to find a way, within this hostile territory, to re-establish organic human relationships in which we, and everyone around us, can thrive, by taking care of one another. As members of a social species, only within the context of relationships bonded by mutually-experienced needs are we free to be the spirits we are born to be. Only when free to be ourselves does unconditional love make sense. Love is not learned, nor intended, and love is never an act. Love is real—indeed, as real as hunger or grief. This is why love happens only in circumstances where to love, and to be loved unconditionally, make sense.
Finally, by surrendering our legal identities, which include our citizenship, we would be recognizing the laws of life as sacred, instead of the state. By not honoring the state’s laws as sacrosanct, we would be questioning the state’s sovereignty. To do so would incite fear and foreboding in the minds of the larger populace, whose sense of wellbeing and security depends entirely on legal truth being universally recognized as absolute. Indeed, Jesus’ refusal to acknowledge the state as sovereign, when brought before Pilot, is why the crowds wanted him crucified. It also explains why Roman citizens gathered in the Colosseum to celebrate the feeding of Christians to lions. These are just two examples of the extreme chastisements exclusively reserved by a citizenry for those whom they perceive as their worst enemies, i.e., heretics. Heretics are despised more than traitors. Traitors, at least, believe in law and order.
So there are plenty of reasons why life, as experienced by modern humans, lacks the order we see in the natural world, and why we seldom know the unconditional love with which our emotions would reward us, were we succeeding at being true to life.
Conceptual Transitions are Never Easy, Regardless of How Simple the Concept
But, things can change, even radically. In a time of artificial intelligence and robotics, we know so much more than people did at the time of Jesus. They didn’t even know about evolution. We now know, for instance, that for artificial intelligence to serve a purpose, it must be carefully programmed to serve that purpose, a process that usually involves a lot of trial and error. Why wouldn’t the same apply to biological intelligence—the combination of instincts, knowledge, and sensory system, that informs a living being? Nowadays, it surely isn’t that much of a stretch for us to recognize that the purpose of biological intelligence is to serve the life of its species, and also to recognize that it was programmed, by the processes of evolution, to serve that purpose.
Nevertheless—and despite the simplicity of the concept—it is no easier for people, today, to ac-cept that the brain has been programmed by evolution to serve a specific purpose, than it once was for people to accept that the earth was not the center of the universe. In fact, accepting that was so difficult that the guy who discovered it had to agree to house arrest, and to keep his mouth shut, for the sake of his very life.
Given that the brain has been programmed by evolution to inspire the behavior that optimizes its species’ chances for success, think how complex that program must be, and how much evolutionary trial and error has been required to refine it. Whenever we ignore our feelings of the moment, in deference to legal truth, we are discarding the output of that wonderful natural program, which is our most precious asset. It is the program that gifts us with our ability to love, and also to fulfill our reason for being. By disconnecting us from our purpose, legal truth is, in effect, a brain virus that has rendered the human brain useless to the species it evolved to serve. By seriously limiting our ability to love, the virus has also rendered our brains virtually useless to us in our search for happiness. And, since the “legal-truth” virus has infected all human brains, everyone’s behavior is similarly affected, which hides the virus. Even more disconcerting for the prognosis of life on earth, infected brains can organize societies en masse, making them appear superior to uninfected ones.
The legal-truth virus serves us well, if we want pyramids, temples, skyscrapers, instant worldwide communications, fancy cars, air travel, and rocket ships. These are all “gifts” of mass organization. On the other hand, if we want happiness, love, sustainability, and a future for our species—as well as for many others—only the uninfected brain can light the way.
As was true with both Galileo’s and Darwin’s discoveries, no conceptual transition that affects how we see our place in the overall scheme of things is easy. And, if our species is to survive, we are about to face the most painful one of all, which will start the moment it begins to dawn on us that our belief in the state is a symptom of our brains being infected with the legal-truth virus.
Another example of a conceptual transition is a child’s realization that Santa Claus doesn’t exist. Why do children continue to believe in Santa Claus, long after the evidence against him is over-whelming? Because their will to believe is far greater than their will to know the truth.
The evidence that states are not viable expressions of life is also overwhelming. But, having been raised as dependents of states, the only sense of wellbeing, purpose, security, and self we have ever known has been provided by the state. Our abject dependency on legal truth gives the state cult-like (if not God-like) power over us.
Incensed by Mindlessness
In my mind’s eye, I see a group of ducklings scurrying along to keep pace with a man whom they have been imprinted to see as their mother. But, it is we who are the ducklings, and the man is the state. Though we like to think otherwise, we have no more control over where the state is taking us than those ducklings do over where the man is leading them. In effect, the state is our parent—even more than our parents. Consequently, like the child, our will to believe in the “Santa Claus” who gifts us with “order”—and a whole lot of other stuff we think we need, but don’t—is far greater than our will to know the truth.
But children eventually do get over their belief in Santa Claus. As I see it, the hope for mankind is that we will eventually get over our belief in the state, as the pain of legal subjugation eventually becomes simply too great a burden to bear. In either instance, shock is involved. But, since our sense of self, and of wellbeing, are far more invested in the state’s sovereignty than a child’s is in Santa Claus, the shock we must endure is far greater. Having been through that conceptual transition, myself—emotional chasm, if you will—I know the shock of it well. I can personally testify that, no matter how difficult or painful it was to realize that nothing real was going on in my life, or in the world around me, the transition is survivable. And I had to survive it all alone. Having others to share in the transition would surely help.
It isn’t that I feel there’s much real is going on in my life
now. It’s just that my brain has adapted to that situation. Adaptability is part of our problem, because it makes the situation to which we adapt feel normal—even worse, necessary, as our legal subjugation does now.
Upon realizing it was his parents, not Santa Claus, who were bringing the presents, all along, a child will sometimes exclaim, “Now things make sense!” There are many senseless things burdening our existence that we will recognize as mindless, only after we get over believing in our “Santa Claus.” For instance, outlawing murder is one facet of legal truth that does pass the test of universality, as every state authorizes laws against killing. Yet, as dependents of one of those states, we are inspired to kill people in distant lands en masse—people just like us who have not directly offended us in any way—in order to protect our institutions of government—in effect, to protect our legal identities. If we are born to be agents of life, as surely as are all other living beings, these atrocities we commit when defending various notions of legal truth can hardly be viewed as other than mindless. Yet, to brains infected with the legal-truth virus, such behavior
