The War Within - Between Good and Evil - Bheemeswara Challa (psychology books to read TXT) 📗

at bay. We can design babies and delay, possibly even defy death.
The line between life and death is getting blurred, throwing into question longstanding
assumptions about what makes a sentient being alive, and we hear
terms unthinkable a few years before such as being a ‘little less dead’. Such a
prodigious ability has led to a seminal turn of events at the deepest depths of
human consciousness. As a result, the way issues and choices related to life and
death are processed, assessed, analyzed, valued, and judged has radically mutated
in the human mind. It has given rise to a key question: for anyone who chooses
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not to die, is more life necessarily better? Is existence a sufficient reason for
continued existence? And what could be the reasons or causes sufficient for man
wanting to continue to live infinitely? Most of all we need to bring ourselves to
face the wrenching question: Has the modern human way of living itself become,
on the whole, an irreversible, ‘unnecessary evil’ on earth? And if so, what is our
duty as a self-avowed moral being? Man always wants to know what else there is
on the menu. A principal reason why we want immortality is because mortality
is not a choice; had it been so we might even want to choose death. In fact, that
is what is happening: death, even if involuntary, is becoming an alternative to
life. If man attains ‘immortality’, all deaths for whatever reason, will become
‘premature’. All the turmoil and tragedies, slaughter and shootings, massacres
and madness, callousness and cruelty we witness and that cause us so much
distress and dismay, is but an outward manifestation of what someone called
‘mental diarrhea’. Another, possible fallout we must take serious note of is the
social impact of immortality or of an exponentially lengthened life span. Eternity
is expensive, and so is dying with dignity these days.
We do not notice it, but a major stabilizing and soothing factor in human
society is our belief that, sometime or the other, before us or after us, everyone
in the end bites the dust—president or philosopher or plumber, powerful or
powerless, rich or poor, celebrity or common folk, friend or foe, spouse or
stranger. That ‘reassurance’ is what lets us endure and wait. That knowledge keeps
a lid on resentment, indignation, anger and rage; we tell ourselves ‘so what; he
too will pass and meet the same fate; my misery is as impermanent as his success’.
If the underclass, oppressed, and exploited, even sections of the middle class
truly come to lose faith in death as the great leveler, then there is no knowing
what might befall; we have never had such a situation or experience before and
therefore even our imagination will fall short. Whether or not gods envy us our
mortality, mortality has a huge place in maintaining order and stability in human
society and in containing the darker drives inside us. We would do well to keep
this in mind while plowing in tons of money into research on immortality—at
the expense of other problems of greater priority, problems pertinent to what
Manuel Castells called ‘the fourth world’, which includes sub-populations that
are socially and technologically excluded from the global society. In the modern
world, individual decisions on how we, particularly the wealthy, use money,
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do matter, because an extremely wealthy man by the very way he lives, works
and plays and has fun, could impact on other lives, could help or hurt a lot of
other people. We must also not forget that the actual, at least for sometime,
beneficiaries of related research will again be the very plutocracy—the club of the
really rich—which runs the modern state. Life used to be seen as a gift. Now it
is being demanded as a right... Life is now no different from what we create on a
factory assembly line. Contemporary society creates fake wants, which integrate
individuals into the existing system of production and consumption via mass
media, advertising, and marketing. We live in twisted times when our collective
creativity focuses on creating and satiating wants more than fulfilling essential
needs of human existence. Pop star Robyn’s lyric “No, you’re not gonna get what
you need. But baby, I have what you want”,54 pretty well sums up what is wrong
with modern culture. A stage has come now to rethink what we ‘deserve to desire’
and whether we are ‘worthy of our wants’. A few can get whatever their worldly
wants are—cozy comforts, slick gadgets, exotic yachts, instant entertainment,
salacious titillation—but a huge chunk of humanity lives deprived of basic
human needs—clean air, potable water, safe food, stable shelter, sanitation. What
is worse is that many of us also think that our aim ought to be to empower the
‘have-nots’ to get the same luxuries; indeed that is what they want. We do not
think their very making is immoral, that it entails the misuse of non-renewable
resources which could be used to fulfill more ‘basic needs’.
Our thirst for wealth is such that we don’t care how we get it. We condone
evil so much we don’t care if we are the casualty. And yet, life has become so
meaningless and frightening even for those whose ‘basic needs’ are more than
met, that ‘right to life’ is now beginning to be viewed as inherent in the ‘right
to die’, and death is being seen not as the end of life but end of pain. It is being
argued that just as people have the right to live with dignity, they also have the
right to die with dignity. The huge gap between ‘right to die’ and ‘right to kill’
is also narrowing, and many are beginning to see killing as a remedy, another
available option. We already implicitly exercise this ‘right’ through abortion.
Abortion takes place when parents or partners decide that bringing into life
another human being does not suit their interests; instead, it creates another lifelong
inconvenience or problem and therefore they have the ‘right to kill’, or, as
it were, nip it in the bud. Many now want to extend that ‘right’ from the womb
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to the world, arguing that what is moral inside cannot be moral outside. This is
not a case for or against abortion; it is to highlight the fact that norms and values
around issues of life and death are seismically changing. Genetic engineering,
nanotechnology, robotics, computer technology and artificial intelligence might,
in the not-too-distant future, enable humans to create or redesign life and produce
offspring ‘suitable to our taste’… Recent scientific advances from genomics to
assisted reproduction have brought us to a stage when a tongue-in-cheek kind
of billboard advertisement like “before you drop your beans check your genes’
is not so flippant or out of context. And as a de facto ‘god’, we hope we will be
unshackled from God’s confining commandments and moral restraints. These
are meant for those scriptural humans, not for the synthetic humans, or even to
humans of the millennial milieu. Nothing happens in a cultural vacuum. And
that, in turn, will generate new moral issues and dilemmas such as: How do we
ensure equity in an era when intelligence can be decided by gene editing, and
wealthy parents can ‘customize’ their offspring?
Earlier the classic moral dilemma was whether it was ethically correct to
kill one to save several. Now the dilemma centers not around ‘saving lives’ but
how many other lives are worth wasting to kill a wanted man. Even at the personal
level, the imperative is shifting. Many feel no moral qualms to pass by a critically
wounded person to be on time to keep a date, and equally in using killing to make
a living or to get an exam postponed or to get something you need badly like an
iPhone. What is happening at a deeper level of our consciousness is that while
we still dread natural death, murder is a blockbuster source of entertainment.
Our fascination stems from a desire to experience crime vicariously. What is
happening at a deeper level of our consciousness is that while we still dread
natural death, killing is losing its stigma and odium. If not yet stylish, it is
becoming simply another lifestyle choice. The unimaginable becomes casual, the
hideous becomes tedious, and the unbearable becomes ordinary. It is a seismic
shift in our mindset, far reaching and utterly unnerving in its implications.
We live at a time when there is a broad consensus that, as human beings,
all of us have certain basic innate and inalienable rights. One such right is the
‘right to life’. As enshrined in Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, it means the right to life, liberty, and security of a person. There is a
subtle shift to extend the reach of that right to include life without pain. Ending
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pain has long been the dream of man and medicine. But it is only now that it
is being extended to death. For, what can be more painful than death? Assisted
death is now legally permitted in some parts of the world on the premise that
a humane society has an obligation to assist a human suffering from incurable
and intolerable pain. Even with no particular pain whatsoever, there are some
who still want to die. For them, this modern life—of coarseness, consumerism,
shallowness, cynicism, loneliness, despair, decadence, meaninglessness—is the
incurable disease, and death the only logical cure. Many have come to agree with
Mary Shelley’s words, “Let us leave ‘life’, that we may live” (The Last Man, 1826).
In the face of all this pain and misery, we call ourselves lords of creation and
masters of life and death. Some philosophers like Bernard Williams are arguing
that endless life would have nothing in it, that it would propel the immortal
forward into a future that would inevitably be beset with insufferable boredom.
When asked, “What do you do from morning to night?” Emil Cioran replies “I
endure myself ” (The Trouble with Being Born, 1973). The ‘disease’ we have to
cure is our corrupted consciousness, and the cure is cathartic cleansing. But then,
what is tolerable to some is intolerable to others, and some stretch it to include
the pain of living itself and suffering of any kind. One can ask: ‘Pain is personal;
why should I become a patient to end my pain and my life the way I wish it?’
And in the minds of some who want to end their lives for whatever reason, that
‘right’ entitles them to choose ‘assisted dying’ to solitary suicide. After all, they
argue, how we support the dying is central to who we are as human beings.
Some ‘pro-choice’ people see this as a logical extension of freewill and individual
autonomy over their bodies. It is a huge change from the scriptural injunction
that life is God-given and you had no choice in your birth, and therefore should
have no choice on how and when it has to end. It is medical technology that has
empowered man to combine two of our long-standing goals—life without pain
and death with dignity. And it is entirely consistent with our overall approach to
life: choosing the path of the pleasant, rather than choosing the path of the good.
What we should also note at this juncture is that even as science is
strenuously seeking the elixir of youth and eternal life, the rage and range of
violence in contemporary human life has made man more lethal than ever
before. Murder and fratricide have been around at least since Biblical times. Man
has always killed another man for a range of reasons like greed, gain, jealousy,
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malice, and profit. But never was the trigger as trivial and casual as it is now. The
revulsion and horror attached to killing is on the wane. Killing, under certain
conditions, not only in war but in civil life too, is getting the legal imprimatur.
A new human right is the ‘right to die’. Some are even saying that if death in
itself is not bad, how can killing be any different. There are many who, in the
words of Thomas Ligotti, “despise the conspiracy of Lies for Life almost as much
as they despise themselves for being a party to it” (The Conspiracy Against the
Human Race, 2011), and for them death is the only refuge. Taking one’s life is no
laughing matter; nor does it give sleepless nights. Killing is no longer a novelty;
every day, we are exposed to a media mélange of murders in graphic detail. There
is virtually no one and no cause or circumstance that is impervious to murder.
Anyone can now be a Cain (the first son of Adam and Eve), who disowned
his