Final Judgment

In my eighty plus one years I have on several occasions

departed one residence for another without observing the polite custom of

goodbye.

Therefore, while I may still have a few years to live, subject to modern medicine

and modern technology, I wish to make a statement that is intended to say

goodbye in a manner that is both sincere and reasonably complete,

or final.

This is it. This is goodbye.

I do not say goodbye and good luck, because I do not believe the human enterprise

deserves good luck, or deserves to possess the planet Earth,

or even deserves a protected existence.

I am judgmental, yes, because I do not subscribe to the advice that one

should not be judgmental.

In fact, the advice given to not be judgmental is ridiculous.

To live and think is to be judgmental, to form judgments and be guided by them.

We are judgmental regarding what we eat and drink, what we wear and what we say.

We choose our friends and we avoid certain people whom we have judged

to be either dangerous or unworthy of our time.

To have a mind is to be judgmental.

Truth and beauty is all we know and all we need to know

has been said and judged to be accurate, and of course both truth and beauty

are the outcomes of human judgment.

Thus I judge you, as individual and as group and as civilization.

I judge myself, of necessity, in one and the same judgment because I cannot

renounce or refuse my membership in human society.

I was born a human and will die a human,

but I am not required by any law of the universe to be grateful or proud or ashamed.

It is by my choice and I believe good reason that my most consistent

goal in life has been to be realistic,

to see and understand things as they really are.

And here I write what I see and believe to be reality.

The truth is the same no matter whence it came.

Serious democracy requires serious equality.

The human species is unworthy, destructive, dangerous to life.

If I were the being that humans have defined as God,

I would have eliminated human civilization long ago.

I do not have infinite patience, and human behavior is both disastrous and evil.

Is there good in the world? Yes as we define it, there is good like flowers and puppies.

But the evil of human behavior is overwhelming, and we do not acknowledge

the lethal scope of human selfishness and violence unless and until we experience

it directly upon our bodies and hearts and minds.

I was born near the very end of 1943 and it is at that time that whoever or whatever

looks over the Earth should have trembled in fear and despair at the pattern

of human behavior that had been with us for more than a thousand years.

Humanity is, in reality, hopeless.

The destruction and violence that humans bring to the table is outside of

the boundaries of definition, beyond any concept of behavior that might be deemed

acceptable.

The discerning eye of one who is judgmental sees that humans invest more time and money

into the invention of weapons than into the creation of art or music.

My judgment of humanity rose into consciousness when I was ten years old.

That would be 1954, when my mother and her friend, also my friend,

took me on a trip to New York City and the Empire State Building, which at that time

was the tallest building in the world. A big deal.

I recall vividly looking down from the observation deck and being struck

immediately by the scope of what I saw and the meaning of what I did not see.

I did not see freedom.

I had observed ant hills and from the position of observation high above

the streets and dwellings of New York City no human being or human vehicle

appeared to be acting freely, doing what someone simply desired to do.

Instead every action I saw looked almost exactly the same as ants in motion on the

granular hills of their communities, each individual doing what was expected of it

in accordance with the plan and design of the group.

No one appeared to be making choices.

Everyone appeared to be performing a role assigned to them.

And further it was clear that this universal fulfillment of training and expectation

was necessary for what we call civilization to function.

Millions of individuals doing what others expected from them,

doing what each of them expected from themselves.

That observation of compliance and conformity has been with me all of my life.

This is what it means to be human.

Compliance is life; freedom is crime.

Those who choose to deceive, steal, take, kill, are criminals.

They put themselves first and all others are disregarded.

The free will that puts oneself first and foremost violates the common oath of membership

in human society.

When the rules are rejected, disregarded, violated, the violator leaves the rights

of membership and sets themselves apart as an enemy of both love and justice.

We do not join civilization with and oath of freedom, but with an oath of dedication

to all of the common benevolence in the expectations of normal daily routine.

By our commitment to employ cooperation as our guiding principle we join

human society, and the songs of freedom are a strange form of dysfunctional fantasy.

Civilization exists because you and I do what we are expected to do.

There is no freedom involved, unless we define freedom as commitment.

And with this I bid farewell.

The choice of commitment is freedom.

All of the choices we make, all of the turns in our life path,

are enclosed in the standards of human cooperation,

all enclosed in a common desire for human success and human happiness.

We all seek the greatest good for the greatest number through the pervasive

act of cooperation, not freedom.

In my freedom, at the very height of my freedom, I am doing what you want

as much as what I want or what everyone else wants.

The meaning of freedom is not the trait of an individual

but rather the guiding principle of the human species.

I cannot be free alone, and my personal freedom is exchanged

for the freedom of all.

By our collective choice to work together, we each experience

a sense of freedom, a sense that our compliance is voluntary,

that civilization is not forced upon us, but rather a blessing we each

have freely chosen and not under duress.

Therefore, human freedom is the fruit of compliance.

It is truly similar to the way that a tree produces fruit,

not because it chooses to do so, but because it conforms

to the science of the soil. It grows according to plan.

And thus, I say goodbye, according to a plan.

I am glad to have passed by here, but still terrified of humanity,

and amazed that the human species is tolerated by the

more powerful beings that occupy this same universe as we.

Perhaps someday I will understand.

Until then, if I might have any advice to offer as an elder to those who are younger,

please, be judgmental.