Bailey vs. Darko

Last Blog | Index | Next Blog


9 April 2013

I am oft vexed by the value of my own existence. The easiest way to demonstrate that the value lies in one's interaction with others is to try to assert the opposite, to justify one's existence without reference to a member of one's own species. Even the most adamant treehugger will eventually realize that they are just trying to protect the earth from humanity or else clean up the mess we've made. Concluding that value lies in human interaction, however mediated it may be by something else, one must decide whether an individual action is positive or negative. This is where things start to get messy.

In the Jimmy Stewart classic, It's a Wonderful Life, he played George Bailey, a man driven to suicide by the difficulties life had thrown at him and his own perceived failures. It is only a guardian angel showing him how many people would have been worse off by Bailey's nonexistence that finally convinces him that his life has value. Fast forward half a century to Donnie Darko. Here a boy on the cusp of manhood has a destructive influence on the albeit corrupt fabric of society. Eventually his actions lead to the death of his love and he uses his time traveler powers to send a jet engine back in time to kill himself. Both stories have an element of fantasy in allowing a false reality to play out so as to allow the protagonist to value his own existence. Are both tales correct, or is one perspective right and the other wrong?

The fundamental question appears not to be, have I acted more often for good or more often for ill, but instead whether the sum of individual good actions can consequently lead to evil. Rare is the human who mostly does things they believe to be bad. Also rare is the human who evaluates the goodness of an action much beyond how it affects themselves. Even in considering others human judgement is not always so good. The Hippocratic oath that doctors once took had them vow to do no harm to their patients, and then additionally had them vow not administer euthanasia, abortion or surgery. Anaesthetics and hygiene has made the last of these seem dated, but the first two are still hotly debated two and a half millennia after Hippocrates first assembled the oath. Gandhi somewhat generalized this to ahimsa paramo dharma, claiming the moral high ground for nonviolence but leaving open the possibility that we may be too stupid to move forward along that high ground. So any action where one initiates violence appears to be wrong, but the question still remains whether one should ever consider the greater good. What if I could kill Hilter's mother before he was born? Would that violent act be justified by the outcome of a world without Hitler? Or what if I just sterilized her? Or what if I didn't know exactly who she was so I sterilized a cohort of women who might give birth to Hitler? Would the harm I caused those other women be justified by the "greater good"? Is war to protect an oppressed minority justified? (e.g. The Civil War) Is pre-emptive war justified? (e.g. Iraq in 2003) Is rounding up and confining potential enemy collaborators justified? (e.g. Americans of Japanese descent during WWII) Is extermination of those potential enemy collaborators justified? (e.g. Auschwitz) It is a slippery slope when one agrees to do violence for the "greater good".

As a libertarian, I am frequently accused of being selfish. I embrace this accusation, but think of the Self in somewhat more of an onionlike fashion. The innermost layer of my Self are the memes which make up what Douglas Hofstadter would call the "strange loop" of my thought processes. Then there are the genes which make up my body. One of my life's goals is to pass those on to my offspring, but if Ray Kurzweil is right and the singularity occurs I will be able to shed them within my lifetime. Then there is my extended genome, commonly referred to as family. Because of our closeness they also carry a fair number of my memes as well. The next layer of my self is my extended memome. These are like-minded folks who also believe in things like hard work, honesty, mathematics, and the veracity of experiment in testing any theory. Beyond that is humanity, my species, and then further out into primates, mammals, animals, life and the universe my Self. If my action is good for my Self at every level of the onion then it is justified.

Sadly I am not smart enough to discern if George Bailey's or Donnie Darko's assessment of the value of existence is the right one. I cannot see all the levels of my Self at once in full clarity. What I do know is that attempting to avoid wrongdoing in an environment of limited knowledge can lead to complete inaction. Logically we must eat to live and harm some other form of life to eat, so ahimsa (nonviolence) requires santhara (suicide by fasting). Clearly this destroys both the memes and genes at the innermost core of my Self though, so this nihilism fails the test. I am left to apply the nonviolence principle to successive outward layers of my Self - as many as possible.



Last Blog | Index | Next Blog

Web wogsland.org


Last modified on 14 April 2013 by Bradley James Wogsland.
Copyright © 2013 Bradley James Wogsland. All rights reserved.