No we’re not having a going out of business sale… Yet.
I keep seeing these posts that say
“black lives matter”
or
“police lives matter.”
Do they?
Do individual human lives matter, Really?
What does that even mean?
What is the intrinsic value of a human life?
Is it worth more than a tiny ant? Or a broccoli?
How does it compare to the value of a good pack mule?
Or a hot breakfast?
What is our standard for measuring this?
We usually measure value in dollars.
We could put a dollar amount on it:
According to wikipedia,
It costs $16,200 to raise a child in a “developing” nation.
It costs $157,410 to raise a poor child in America.
It costs $333,420 to raise a middle class child in America.
It costs $342,000 to raise a child in Great Britain.
And to raise a child in a tribal society, in an “undeveloped” country, costs $0.
Well, that doesn’t round out so well…
But it explains why we treat people in developing and undeveloped nations with disregard;
Fiscally speaking they’re not worth much.
We didn’t invest much, so the return is negligible, I guess.
How does this rank against other species?
According to agriview.com it costs $363.69 to raise a cow to adulthood.
But cows are useful, they make milk and meat and fertilizer.
Something has to offset the cost of the humans, what do they produce?
War…
Religion…
And advanced technology to spread…
War and religion.
You know, those things might be related somehow…
Moles have never shot tear gas at peaceful protesters.
Raccoons have not annexed my trash cans and sold my debt to the World Bank.
Broccoli has never attempted to cut off my genitals and throw them in a pot of boiling water.
And a deer has never taken a pot shot at me with a rifle on my way to work in the morning.
Remember those squirrel blitzkrieg raids from world war…One? Two?
Whoops.
Right.
Squirrels have never had a world war.
Nor have otters, chimpanzees, gnats, or Bison.
Prarie dogs have never conquered a country by force.
Ants don’t subjugate or oppress their women.
White mice do not discriminate against black mice.
Trout were not responsible for the firebombing of Japan. Or Europe. Or Vietnam.
Or any other firebombing of any place any where in world history, because trout are too busy.
Why is a human life automatically more valuable than any other kind of life?
Are we extra sacred for some reason I’m missing? Or is this just a bunch of species-racism?
Because the objective breakdown looks like…
Middle class Americans are worth more than poor Americans. Economically.
We’ve invested more in them, doesn’t that increase their value? Otherwise why bother?
Even dairy cattle represent a much larger investment than all the people in all the tribal societies.
Does that mean cows are more valuable than the rural Hindus who worship them?
If we look at this from the perspective of business and economics, it’s exactly the reverse. When you buy low and sell high, you make a profit. The less you spend on a good, or a laborer, the greater its value (or potential profit) is to you.
If you could buy 300 Chinese laborers for the price of one white suburban American, and get away with it, you would have no American employees.
You would move your whole business to Indonesia, where cheap labor is plentiful.
If you hadn’t already done this years ago, you’d be filing for bankruptcy right now.
News flash for my middle class white American friends: Economically you’re worth very little.
We’ve got a lot invested in you, and there’s no market for your ass.
This is the problem with assigning value to human life: It’s an entirely arbitrary scale of valuation. There is no way to assess the margin of error in calculation, and there’s no way to eliminate bias. We cannot prove or falsify our value, therefore it is unscientific and illogical to conclude we have any value at all.
This must be a religious argument, then.
Of course a human would think humans are the most valuable form of life, because that sort of self-serving logic leads to self preservation, and ensures proliferation. But in order for humans to have value or live at all, they must kill and eat other forms of life, which then become less valuable by comparison.
For the record, I’m not saying human lives have value, or that they have no value.
I’m saying human beings made up value and meaning, just like we made up the rules of tennis, we made up the language to describe it, we made up middle earth and Smaug the dragon. Smaug and tennis have an equivalent real world value to human life.
File under fiction.
The value of human life is a fairy tale we tell our children, so that the grim clutching fear of inevitable mortality does not carry them off to sleep each night. And as soon as we create that illusion, suddenly there’s a contrast between that life, and other lives. Maybe this life is more moral and pious than that one. Maybe this Christian gets to go to heaven, but that Muslim doesn’t. Or maybe vice versa.
Maybe lots of things.
Maybe it doesn’t matter,
Because it’s all human fiction,
And human opinion,
Written in human language,
So fuck all you zebras out there,
You’re not even worth counting, ya stripey bastards.
And, you made it to the end, congratulations on being a cynical, persistent human.
Since you’re still here,
What do YOU think,
Upright future topsoil?
Not yet worm lunch?
Doomed bipedal saline meat bag,
What is your opinion of your value?
Better spit it out quick.
You’ll be dead soon.