Religious/Political/Commercial/Judicial Power

Religious/Political/Commercial/Judicial Power

Thomas Mann predicted that the history of the world, having been seen in a religious power prior to the mid-20th century, would come to be understood politically as the power of nations.

In our time the destiny of man presents its meanings in political terms. And, recently, an odd form of political religiosity has infected the Judicial.

Yeats wrote a poem in response to that:
How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics,

Yet here's a traveled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there's a politician
That has both read and thought,

And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war's alarms,
But Oh that I were young again
And held her in my arms.

As politics matured, events of the last half of the century reflected the power of the individual. The world is now best seen in commercial terms. That commerce more directly reflects the human condition, from an evolutionary philosophical vantage point, is not surprising. The message of the universe is: survive!

Survival is not individual survival, but genetic survival the survival of the genome, the chromosomes. To assure that survival, animals do the dance of mating; we perform its complicated steps. The female, in all species, determines the final conjunction of the participant genes. The male must demonstrate to the female those characteristics which are of greatest value to species survival and, when he does this successfully, he is chosen. The rarest component of this equation is the egg. Sperm are lowly: with each ejaculation, a man will produce upwards of fourty to fifty million sperm. The production of sperm continues for the lifetime of the male. Sperm are common as the sand and therefore they are cheap, almost valueless.

A woman will have a maximum of 400 eggs in her reproductive lifetime, a lifetime which is very narrow, especially today, as women bear children later in life. In universal terms, a woman's eggs are the sui generis of humanity; they are the rarest and most valuable element of humanity. Thus, woman is the rarest and most valuable element of the species. The human egg is the most valuable single entity in the world.

It should not be surprising to us that the mating process, the search for the egg, is the driving force behind everything we witness. When assessed in this way, behavior which we might interpret as functional, mundane, commercial intercourse, can now be explained for what it is: rutting. Whether men urge themselves to participate in direct rutting activities such as sports, games and such or whether we climb the financial ladders of success or the ladders of intellectual success, the results are of the same kind. The higher one goes, the more value he has. The value relates to success in being chosen by a woman so that his sperm might be used by the egg she carries.

Furthermore, behavior which some might interpret as historically rule-bound, such as demanding that Muslim women be encased in Burkas, can also be explained for what it is: protection of actual or potential mates from other males. Consider, too, the Catholic church and the inferior position women hold; consider the interference with personal freedom.

While this seems complicated and indirect, there is also more direct mating behavior: the egg is quickly fertilized, the new human emerges. This is what we see in situations unfettered by society: teenage pregnancies, early marriages, the lusty stuff. The dance goes on alone, even when a pregnancy is thwarted. Here one must understand the intrinsic drive as separate from the result. The behavior is the same whether or not a spermicidal, sperm thwarting or fertility fouling mechanism is employed. There is no apparent social difference between dating/mating on or off the pill or with or without intact vasa deferentia.
And yet the curious behavior of the judiciary, especially the present-day high court, appears to reflect some kind of fear that freedom to terminate pregnancies might interfere with the current realm of power, which appears to be in the hands of the woman who owns the egg and its potentials. The implications are egregious: women are the property--the slaves--of the men who make the rules. Seen in this light, the intrinsic prejudice the supreme court displays against termination of pregnancy implies a fear of loss of control.

What I am saying is that the stuff that makes-up playing the game of life the mating game continues even in the absence of a prize at the finish. The prize, today, is not essential to the game though it is still essential to the universe, to the species. The peculiarities of this process suggest that there is an inverse relationship between the likelihood of one having offspring and one's intelligence or one's experience. This also suggests that the characteristic of cleverness, at one time a highly valuable attribute, a characteristic likely to be chosen by the woman, might be endangered. Babies, today, are more likely to be born with lower intelligence; they reflect the qualities of those who are generating offspring.

Jack Leissring
June 23, 2023