Principles and Magnitude

1 or 1,000,000

It occurred to me today that I am pretty thankful to be living in the modern age, with a contemporary view of many social phenomenons. I was watching the music video for that song "Same Love" by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis. Contrasting the romance and dedication in that story was a conversation earlier in the day on http://myliberals.com/ about BDSM culture and freaky orgies. I suppose for every loving and dutiful couple gay or straight there is a bunch of deviants or chronically bored people. Not that I'm opposed to a couple spicing things up with blindfolds or something, but I draw the line well before the crazy stuff like gimp suits and peeing on each other.

Looking back through time we can see that homosexuality has been treated differently by different cultures at different times. One thing that's true is that homosexuals were often ostracized or killed. In fact, there are many places in the world today where being openly gay can end in imprisonment or death. Given the sheer amount of time and prevalence of this violence its easy to imagine the number of people that have been killed as a result. Human death is rarely encountered in huge numbers, so the actual scope of this can be hard to visualize. With morbid curiosity we can envision monuments dedicated to the expression of this reality - great heaps of corpses made of stone that rival the Mayan temples. Perhaps the only silver lining of the Holocaust is the fact that photographic technology allowed us fully digest industrialized murder.

The number of people killed in the name of social purity is truly immense. It would be staggering if it weren't spread out worldwide, over decades and centuries. Estimates put the number in tens of millions. For a country like Canada with only roughly 35,000,000 people, it could easily be the entire population. Diehard animal rights activists would probably compare these numbers to industrial meat production. We tend to dispassionately murder hundreds of millions of animals to serve our appetites. Theoretically then, we can assert that the people who orchestrate these killings are the farmers and butchers of men. No one would actively support a leader who openly intended to kill them all from the outset, so it stands to reason that these individuals must have served some greater purpose. Society must have looked at these men and women and understood that their actions benefited the whole in the long run.

Necessary evil

One thing I tend to find is true in the world is the fact that big or small moments can be profound. Whether its a quiet epiphany or a major spectacle there is a heaviness that sets in at points in our lives. The core of every thought and action can be traced back to principle. It is our principles that provide the base for who we are and how we handle our experiences. Magnitude becomes irrelevant if you take a principled stand on an issue, which prompts the age old debate between consequential thinking and principled thinking. A person who stays true to principle in the face of overwhelming consequences might be labelled a fanatic, whereas a person who picks on a case by case basis might be regarded as scrupulous.

Using the above ideas, we can explore how principled actions turn 1 into 1,000,000. If your principle is that human life is more important than animal life and that it's appropriate to kill and eat an animal it's pretty easy to kill a million animals. At that point all you really need to do is reason that you're feeding a few million people in the process. The industrialization of death requires a degree of hardness typically associated with career killers like hunters and butchers. We make the same value judgment when it comes to our soldiers and national armies, entrusting a minority of people to kill other human beings for our defense. The difference between a single enemy soldier or criminal being killed and a million of them being killed is just a few logical steps. By looking at the core principle of the action we can determine that there is little if any meaningful difference between the one and the million.

A lot can be said for the devastation of war. The collateral damage, the expense, the toll in human life. If we reverse engineer the scope of these engagements we can draw similarities to street fights. There have been wars that were short and brutal, wars that were long and grueling, and wars that have been mostly posturing. Each of these wars can be drawn back to a number of reasons that are consistent with national character. Whether its an ethnic cleansing, a war of expansion, or a bitter feud between rival states they all average out to the common motivations of the state. Even if you take a war like the invasion of Iraq where the public was misled, the core of that war can be drawn back to a profit obsessed capitalist economy which is consistent with American values. It is that same insatiable hunger that led politicians to wheel, deal, and lie to the public. The Iraq war was simply an issue of false advertising.

Killing is wrong, isn't it?

Killing in and of itself cannot be wrong as a matter of principle, because we are a type of animal that kills to survive. We kill plants and animals to eat them or harvest their body parts for other uses. Even sustainable practices like eating fruit can be regarded as comfortably ripping a limb off a creature just because you know it will grow back. Even the most primitive cultures understood that killing things unnecessarily was counterproductive to the greater task of survival. Ignorance might have led them to hunting styles or activities that were wasteful, or ritualistic practices with no supernatural value, but underneath that the concept remained. Human beings are distinct for their mindfulness of the world and abstracts.

We must accustom ourselves to the reality of eternal struggle, of limited time and resources. The modern people need to take their newfound wisdom and apply it to age-old principles. There are criminals and traitors in our midst that do not deserve to live at our expense. There are enemies in other countries plotting our demise, dreaming of destroying or subjugating us and erasing our values from the world. Vast monuments of human death and suffering have been erected throughout the ages, and it is our responsibility to pay them due respect. For every person that has been unjustly killed we cannot let the guilty continue to live. Every breath taken by murderers, rapists, and terrorists is an affront to justice. Every pulse they have, every moment they enjoy as their victims rot within the earth is a travesty. That the common man has been tricked into dragging an orgiastic throne of criminality across the dirt where their loved ones lay is blasphemous.

It is time we cut loose the weights that are holding us back as a society. We cannot be intimidated by the magnitude of our task. The principles of our laws are intact and can serve this purpose adequately. All our brighter future requires is that we open our eyes to the reality of survival. With truth as our ally we can dispel the feeble arguments and empty condemnation of those weak people who shy away from life's hardest tasks. Let them turn blind eyes to our work and live their lives in comfort and blissful ignorance. In the end, they will thank us for doing what they could not.

With glowing hearts we see thee rise,
the true north strong and free!