by Sven Nilsen, 2023
This is an essay about where we came from and where we are heading as an intelligent species.
The Roman Empire did not actually collapse. People who were living in the Roman Empire started to think differently about themselves and this changed how knowledge was transferred from one generation to the next. Over time, some pieces of knowledge was lost and also the collective memory of once belonging to an empire. Thus, ancient ruins appeared to people as mysteries, places of haunted ghosts, until scientific investigations led to the rediscovery of the Roman Empirean identity. However, like the ship of Taursus, people no longer thought about themselves in that way, since every piece of the ship had been replaced by another. Still, is there any aspect of the Roman Empire that exists today, preserved in essence but transformed in form?
The primary reason that people do not identify themselves today with the Roman Empire, is because the foundation of the Roman Empire was built on slavery. To have slavery functioning on such huge scale, it required slave markets. When people were sold as slaves, they got a prize on their life. The highest bidder during the auction got the right to purchase the slave and a transaction took place afterwards. Only a limited amount of time was set aside to sell each slave, due to the large volume of people that this system needed to process in order to make the empire tick. Even though one got to know the prize of one’s life that day, it did not benefit the person which prize was associated. Instead, the transaction benefitted somebody else. Also, the prize might vary, depending on whether there was sunny or raining outside, determining the mood of participants. Perhaps some of the rich did not even bother to come, but made slaves purchase other slaves for them.
Once upon a time, there was a lamb. It was following its mother around who showed it where to grass. As the lamb grew older, it started to notice how the farmer observed the flock. This was curious, the lamb thought, that the farmer was interested in sheep. What was the farmer actually looking for? Why did the dog come and chase them around and into areas surrounded by fences? One day, an idea hit the lamb like a lightning strike. Oh, it is the wool! Now, things started to make sense. The lamb could start to reason about the entire picture. It did not like that somebody examined and used it for their gain. Did not anything of what the lamb felt inside matter to the farmer? Like, its relationship to its mother? Should it escape? What about the dangers of leaving the flock? The lamb realised that escaping would not solve anything and even it was aware of being property, it could not just go. Not all areas were surrounded by fences, so escape was physically possible. The problem was that it would not leave the flock. Could everybody escape at the same time? After some time, the lamb understood that despite the desire to be free, it had no choice in the matter. It had to stay in the flock to survive, with its life depending on the farmer’s view of the world. Once this was decided, a scary thought appeared: I need to be careful! What if the wool on my back is lost? Will my life depend on it?
As the Roman Empire crumbled into dust and left people confused, the slaves had escaped yet still found themselves bound to feudalism. The trauma of the slave market did not entirely go away:
“One day, I will benefit of the true prize of my life! When I die, I will enter Heaven’s gate, and St. Peter will judge my worth with perfection! This time, for once, I will benefit of my own value!”
As time progressed, people transferred this idea into capitalism. The system where everything has a prize, except human life. It is a mirror projection of the slave market, where every property of the world is attempted to be packaged into a product and sold separately, as if people were having roles instead of their lives. The systems corrupts and sell pieces of your soul, bit by bit.
“You are a manager! You are a sales person! You work in advertisement! One day, people will see my true worth to society!”
That did not happen. One day instead, scientists invented a new machine. This machine could do everything. “Oh no!” people thought. “What has happened? When will everybody see my true worth to society if the machine does my own work? Who am I? Am I not a manager?” Thus, the carrot, which was dangling in front of the donkey, seemed to be loosing its tempting flavour and smell a bit, day by day, as the doom of unemployment came lurking on the horizon of the future.
The farmer is dead. The farm burned down in a lightening strike. All sheep are roaming around in the hills, confused, worried about the wool on their back. The sheep organize and work together to make a better future for themselves. Do they have sufficient scientific methods to determine the value of their wool? How can they use such measurements to make better decisions for the future?
A little girl asks her mother: “Mom, if I go to Heaven and figure out this is not the right place for me. Can I go back?” Her mother wrote this down in her diary and kept thinking about this. When you actually sit down and reflect upon the imaginary ideas we have about Heaven and Hell, how do we know from these ideas and how they are perceived, that Heaven is a safe place and Hell is an unsafe place? Is it the white clouds behind the gate of Heaven? A sign of purity? Is it the decorations at the gate signifying wealth? Why does not the gate of Heaven, look like the gate of… Bilbo Baggin’s house?
With the technology to achieve anything, mankind soon realized that the problem was not to enter Heaven through careful analysis. Actually, it was more like paying 1$ or giving hive five to St. Peter. The idea that your wool at the back was the primary concern in life, fell away. Like the Roman Empire crumbling, a transformation of how people thought about themselves.
It was just this problem: Heaven was hard to find.
We could enter it easily, once we have found it. Also, we could exit any time we wanted. Heaven was not a place safely guarded and kept people inside as sheep, but a landscape changing with the seasons. Heaven became no longer, because its distinction from Hell became more and more vague. The future became a labyrinth of dead ends, traps and experimentation with various solutions.
How can you make the world better if you are in Heaven? Have you perceived the world that way? Did you pay for the Sun today? Have you given birth to Earth? How can anything you do increase your value for society in this world? Is there a way to be further maximally satisfied in a state of endless joy? Can you go from super-happy to super-super-duper-happy? What if we assign every photon in the universe a value? Perhaps this can be a way to make even better decisions?
At some level, it gets silly and you start thinking about this approach as a pain in the ass.
An alternative: Should we ask the question “What is the meaning of life?” from the perspective of being able to enter Heaven very cheaply? The problem is to know which way to go! Perhaps not all people want to go in the same direction? We can not force people to go to Heaven or Hell, can we? Do we need to be there in person to tell people where to go? Did we ask people what they want?
Oh, I have an idea: Try many different approaches and put up road signs for future generations:
<<< Heaven this way --------- Hell this way >>>
High five!