If There’s Life And Death, There Are Objective Standards

The existence of absolute standards threatens a great deal of modern power, and so has long been ridiculed and excluded from consideration.

Reality, however, cannot be changed, and the fact is that we all act for life and against death. So does every other living thing on this planet. That makes life and death absolute and objective standards. 

Actions trump words, they trump ridicule, and they very definitely trump academic theories.The absolute standard of life as good is upheld, in actual practice, by every person who takes medicine or by anyone who avoids danger. Oceans of rhetoric can’t negate this. We and every other creature on this planet act to stay alive and to flee death.

Those with a need to wipe away the possibility of an absolute standard betray themselves every time they take an antibiotic or buy organic produce.

And so this also stands:

That which sustains and extends life is good or right.

That which hinders or ends life is bad or wrong.

Why All The Opposition?

Our need to extend and improve life has driven more or less every medical, technological and agricultural improvement of human history. Why, then, would anyone want to exclude it?

The first answer is that they simply don’t see it. They’ve come to see a constructed reality as the whole playing field of life, and are struggling to find status within it. 

A second answer is the more important one:

Life, if held to and pursued, will negate the power structures of this world, and fairly quickly.

Life spawns chosen, decentralized and organic organization. The people and organizations that oppose that model require us to be constrained: they require automatic compliance and couldn’t survive any other way.

The lords of the constructed reality, then, cannot allow life to break out of its constraints. They fear the recognition of an objective standard because it would wipe away their intellectual sand castles and make auto-compliance nearly impossible.

Life-spawned organization is everywhere, of course: It’s the way healthy families organize themselves. It’s how small businesses organize themselves. It’s the way little leagues and book clubs and tutoring clubs and a hundred similar groups organize themselves. This is the model of chosen grouping, and it injects life, decency and progress into the world.

The lords of the constructed reality require enforced grouping. They forbid, by any number of means, alternatives to themselves.

That fact should condemn them right off, except that most people have been confused and conditioned otherwise… they’ve been taught (by the constructed reality) that the construct is the only reality, and that advocates for anything else are maniacs. 

The constructed reality, then, must destroy opponents, beginning with God, because He would be the ultimate objective standard. It must also trivialize life, which also threatens to undo them. 

And So…

And so, if life is a good value, we should act to extend and enhance it. We do that by using life-friendly tools like chosen grouping, voluntary trade, honest money, unhindered innovation and the virtues that accompany these things.

We also do that by stepping away from the constructed reality – the virtual world of manufactured images, narratives and fears.

Fear, as I’ve noted often but probably not often enough, is a brain hack: It’s kryptonite to the human mind. Fear chains people within the construct: where they’re informed, endlessly, that they must believe what they’re told, because everyone else does.

Life in the construct, then, becomes all virtual, all vicarious and all externally-derived. It is the antithesis of the model of Jesus, Jung and more or less every other independent thinker. 

The alternative to the construct is to build a chosen society, centered on the golden rule. This model is known to work for us, being, again, the model of the healthy family, the productive small business and so on. Our way is the better way: the way that takes life as an absolute standard.

Because it is.

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Paul Rosenberg

freemansperspective.com