Mankind
From Free Talk Live
Contents |
What is a human being?
A human being is an animal life-form that exists (or, at least, thinks that it exists) on planet Earth (or, at least, that's what it calls its natural habitat at its present stage of development).
Like other similar living organisms, human beings are made of many individual cells, each autonomous, which cooperate together for mutual benefit, specialize, organize into organs, and form a body that is capable of taking care of all its cells in a more sophisticated way.
This is comparable to individual human beings, each fully autonomous and capable of independent function, cooperating for their individual benefit, specializing, organizing into clans and corporations, and together forming the human civilization that allows its member parts to function in a more complicated way.
Where do human beings come come from?
Typically their mothers, but the beginning of that chain is unclear. There are countless different and contradicting creation theories being speculated about over the past thousands of years, as far back as written history can take us. Newer, more scientifically verifiable theories suggest that at least some of the journey of modern man came about as the result of natural evolution, with millions of generations of only the best variations within a species of Hominidae monkeys surviving. (Micro-evolutionary changes have also been observed in viruses, single-celled organisms, plants, and other animals whose lifespans are short enough to observe for enough generations.)
What is human civilization?
The exact nature of this specialization and cooperation has been debated throughout human history, and the process has changed considerably throughout. At certain points the need for centralized authority led to the most effective function of a primitive society, and a subspecies of human beings came to be the hereditarily-designated braincells. More sophisticated societies, however, discovered that the capacity of individual persons to act in their own self-interest is very powerful and very dynamic, and a centralized monopoly of authority only slows it down. This resulted in the most successful societies giving their members more and more freedom to act independently. Libertarians cought on to this idea, and wish to rationally extrapolate it further.
Benefits of modern civilization, compared to a family living alone in the wilderness, include greater on-demand access to information, access to more diversified manufactured tools and specialized services, as well as greater diversity, stability, and quality of food and water supply. This has been shown to decrease infant mortality from over 50% to under 1%, and raise the life expectancy of surviving children from around 35 years to well over 80.
Drawbacks of modern civilization include the necessity of adapting oneself to a more sophisticated economy that doesn't value the fundamental abilities of human labor as much as simpler societies do, as well as the possibility of suffering setbacks based on greater entanglements with other people.
Human beings in relation to everything else
Since the human writing this text knows of no other life-form or verifiably-existing entity capable of reading or understanding it (or doing anything about it), let us conspire freely about our human exceptionality - the rest of the knowable universe is our playground!
All matter, including all life that falls into all the species that we've conquered, can be owned by human beings (either individually or collectively) as property, and conserved or used for the benefit of its owners, at least until it becomes economically beneficial to recognize the natural rights of an other species that isn't conquered by us. In addition to things animal, vegetable, and mineral, human beings can be masters of abstract notions like territory rights (land, sea, air, or space), intellectual property, market rights, and various other types of agreements.
Human beings in relation to other human beings
Throughout much of its uncivilized past, humanity was fragmented into a multitude of simple cultures. Those tribes lived communally, decided things amongst themselves based on their own simple dynamics, and had little or no respect for the rights of those outside their immediate culture. As the result, little difference was seen between acquiring goods from natural resources or acquiring them through violent conquest of property of other human cultures.
With the unification of regions into common religions and/or empires, a broad legal and political system could be established. This unification took place gradually, with multiple systems competing with each-other over millennia. Human beings triumphed under certain systems, while others were left on the dust heap of history. While the systems that stood the test of time and reached peak popularity are not perfect, there are many lessons that can be learned from them. It is based on those lessons of history that the idea of natural human rights came into being.
There still are those who'd disagree on which ideas are best, but libertarians believe that a social system based on individualism and capitalism is ideal. Human relationships can be good or bad, fair or unfair, based on several tiers of cooperative harmony, and that the government must not make itself responsible for all of them, just the very fundamental ones. Libertarians further believe that this fundamental tier deals with (and only with) the individual's right to his own Self, as well as the fruits of his past, and the potential of his future.
Those three natural rights are absolutely essential, and societies that failed to provide those have always devolved into chaos and weakness. Their specific symptoms were:
- Murder (also torture, war, etc) - breaches the Right to Life.
- Slavery (also rape, serfdom, etc) - breaches the Right to Liberty.
- Theft (or large-scale conquest) - breaches the Right to Property.
Given those rights, human beings can work to create things that are beneficial to them, trade those things, accumulate wealth, and use that wealth to provide for themselves and their families. It is an economic fact, however, that some people are able to creates billions of times more wealth than others, and pass that wealth to their descendants. While the richest could thus afford millions of servants if they wanted to, the poorest would have no resources at all, not even the land to farm or hunt on or river to fish on. While all libertarians agree that it's not the government's place to engage in regulated theft for the benefit of those people, not all libertarians are willing to donate resources voluntarily.
Thus, even a libertarian society, if ineffective, can experience a number of symptoms of decline into socialism. When there exists the inability of individuals within a capitalist society to fulfill the need for sufficient and affordable food, a famine occurs. An epidemic occurs when individuals can't fulfill their need for medicine, homelessness in absence of shelter, and crime in absence of law enforcement.
