The Purpose of Life
What is Life? When I use the word "Life," with a capital L, on this page, I refer to things distinguished from other matter by feeding, by using energy in growth, by eliminating waste materials, and by reproducing their own kind. Later, I'll also make use of the term "Higher Life" to set apart those living things that are able to do more than these basic functions.
What is purpose? It is thought or action taken in pursuit of a goal. Conscious beings have conscious purposes. What is not conscious might still have a purpose, however; for example, an animal might have an instinctive purpose to mate, even if it is not capable of visualizing the family that will result from the mating.
What is the purpose of Life? A religious person might tell you that Life's purpose is to glorify this or that god—the deity named as being suitable for veneration will depend on the religion to which he belongs.
I find these "purposes" unsatisfactory for one reason or another. The religious answer is evidently affiliated with the corporate interest of organized religions, and the dispute over which god is the real god leads thoughtful people to the opinion that there is no such thing as a metaphysical god (atheism) or to the opinion that Man can never gain any definitive knowledge about metaphysical gods (agnosticism).1
But beyond its obvious corporate self-serving aspect, the religious answer presumes that the purpose of life is a conscious purpose, which presumes in turn that there exists a (divine) mind capable of that consciousness. And that leads to the classical first-cause paradox to which the religious have never found a satisfactory answer.
The answer given by many atheists, including myself until about 1996, is that Life has no purpose; it merely exists. But for the past several years, I've come to believe that the atheist's no-purpose idea lacks an appreciation for the ways in which matter has been organizing itself during the past 20 billion years, and especially for the direction in which Life has been changing over the past four billion years. In failing to appreciate those changes, the atheist's answer is as ignorant as the religious one, though it might be less motivated by politics or by economic considerations.
A biologist might say that Life's purpose is to create more life; that is, continued existence is the reason for antecedent existence. The biologist's answer is obviously no answer at all. Or, to the extent that it is an answer, it is a disguised form of the atheist's answer. Otherwise, it is nonsense. For illustration, remember that a carpenter hammers nails in order to build a house; he does not hammer this nail now merely so that he can hammer that nail later.
I now believe that Life has a purpose, which is immanent in existence, expressed as natural law, and that the aim of this purpose is to produce a God through the organization of matter into ever-higher states of consciousness. That is, essentially, the Cosmotheist idea.
Let me try to lead up to a proof of this idea by a succession of questions and answers.
a. How is Life different from non-life? The answer might surprise some readers. There are no differences between living and non-living things that can be traced all the way to the fundamental laws of nature. Living things take materials and energy from their environment and use them in growth...but so do crystals and stars when they are forming. It is better to consider Life as a bundle of related behaviors, including reproduction, acquisition of material and energy resources, growth, the elimination of waste products, and sooner or later a cessation in function normally accompanied by physical disintegration (death). Even then, however, discriminating life from non-life can require a subjective use of judgment, the better to segregate things conventionally regarded as "alive" from things that conventionally are regarded as inanimate. Such discrimination probably has no fundamental physical basis, and our Universe might be better understood if the living condition were not considered to be a separate, compartmentalized category. Rather, relative and practical distinctions, all of which were more easily defined, could be used to describe the parts of existence. Nonetheless, the distinction of a class of living things is customary and, provided that we all agree upon what belongs to it, is often convenient. One of my friends joked that Life is the photo-chemical reaction that causes the surfaces of some planets to become covered by concrete and solar panels.
b. How has Life been changing since it began on Earth? Over the past three to four billion years, Life has shown a general trend toward increasing complexity, both in species of organisms and in the interrelation between them, and resourcefulness in dealing with the environment. In particular, the survival-related information contained in gene-coded form has steadily increased in quantity and has, for the most part, improved in quality.
c. How has Life been changing during the past 200 million years? The evolution of living organisms took an interesting course after the extinction of the great reptiles. Creatures who possessed a means of regulating their body temperature by the controlled expenditure of metabolic energy emerged as the dominant life-form, whereas previously they had lived a furtive lifestyle in fear of the raw power and ferocity of the dinosaurs.2
2 The basic pattern for this kind of development isn't unique to biology. It also occurs in the political world. A species of creature, or a imperialist state, often bets its very existence on a particular kind of strength, but the circumstances later change in such a way as to render that kind of strength useless, and eventually the luckless entity dies out.
d. How has Life been changing during the past few million years? Intelligence emerged as the decisive factor in the competition for survival, in contradistinction to raw strength. Power alone would not decide the victor, and the contestants were no longer stupid brutes responding blindly to immediate stimuli. They had larger brains, better memories, more adept at combat tactics, and, gradually, developed a facility for strategy.3
3 Strategy is the advance planning and preparation for a conflict, and it also involves choosing when, where and how the battles will be fought. Reaching for a weapon after a fight has started is a tactical move, but anticipating trouble in a general way and acquiring a weapon in advance is a strategic one. When a government turns against the people whom it should serve, it first outlaws the use of strategic defenses by the citizenry. It does this by restricting the private ownership of weapons. Later, the rogue government proceeds to outlawing tactical defense as well: anyone caught using violence, even in self-defense, is found guilty of breaking the laws and is punished with fines and imprisonment.
e. How has Life been changing during the past 200,000 years?4 A species of warm-blooded, tribal mammals reached a level of intelligence sufficient to the development of primitive culture. A new phase in biological competition was thus reached: the fitness and the relative advancement of culture became a factor in the survival of races and tribes, and in the relationship between the cultured groups and the non-cultured animal life.
4 More recently, I've come to believe that H. habilis was the common ancestral species to all of the modern races of humans. Habilis, I think, emerged from Africa about 1.5 million years ago and wandered throughout Eurasia, becoming several subspecies of Homo erectus, which in turn (and at various times) became sapiens in Europe (700,000 years ago), Asia (200,000 years ago) and Africa (beginning 30,000 years ago, and the transition is still underway; i.e., African erectus is not extinct). For my answer to those who believe that chromosome variation or mtDNA proves a recent emergence of sapiens from Africa, common ancestor to all modern human races, see the bottom of this page.
f. How has Life been changing during the past few thousand years? With the progression of culture came surplus production, which resulted in two subsequent developments of interest: leisure for the pursuit of religion, the arts and the sciences, if the surplus could be kept, and prizes of military conquest otherwise. Tribalism (later, nationalism) thus became both a stimulus for cultural development and a stimulus for martial development,5 since a nation capable of creating surplus must have some means of defending it from foreign and domestic pillage, or else it will lose the surplus (at the least) and thereby lose the means by which it might have brought forth cultural advances and contributed to the fulfilment of the purpose of life, which by now should be coming clear to the reader.
5 However, tribalism didn't originate from culture or from the surplus that cultural development made possible. Rather, tribalism goes all the way back to our pre-human primate ancestor species and is a behavioral feature that is deeply hardwired into our genes. Species that are cousin to humans, namely the apes, are also tribal, and they got their tribalism from the same place that we got ours. Humans are happier, and psychologically healthier, when they are in a tribal social setting. If conditions won't permit a tribal lifestyle, psychological disorders tend to increase (and so does the need for therapy). The health-giving feature of tribalism seems to be the persistence of the "family feeling" among coworkers, neighbors, schoolmates, and people on the street. Racial homogeneity is conducive to tribalism, whereas multicultural, racially diverse societies tend to shut it out. Hence, optimally, each country should have only one race in it. Not only does racial homogeneity conduce toward the "family feeling," it also makes hostile and subversive activities by racial aliens more difficult to carry out.
Alert readers might point out that not all species of living things have made this upward developmental journey together, and this is quite true. But one might look at Life—at least Earthly life—in a more integrated way. Earth's biosphere has been differentiating in a way analogous to the differentiation of embryonic cells, in which originally similar cells divide into several kinds, each kind of which assumes its proper position and role in the emerging baby: brain, eye, heart, stomach, limb, and so on.6 Life has developed a head in Man, and this head contains Life's brain and the best of its senses.
6 Roughly analogous, that is. There are obvious incongruities, such as the mean by which energy reaches the living elements, which in the case of gestation is by transfusion of the mother's blood, whereas in the case of evolution it consists of animals eating plants and each other. Incongruities of this kind are not relevant to the point that I'm making.
Both Life and non-living matter are components of the same existence, and, as I stated earlier, there is no difference between living and non-living things that can be traced to natural law. Life is the part of the Universe that knows, understands, appreciates, creates and organizes. Since Life is the only part of the Universe that can do those things, it is the part that should do them. They, then, are Life's purpose: to know, to understand, to appreciate, to create, to organize. While the Universe has life, it is not, broadly speaking, a dead thing. The non-living matter in the Universe corresponds to a man's fingernails, which are not alive in themselves.
Life does not always consistently pursue its purpose. It can become infected, cancerous, or otherwise perverted. Forms of Life that betray Life's purpose can appear. Perverse Life arises perhaps by chance, but it persists by its own design, and while it exists it poisons or consumes the healthy Life around it. One example of Perverse Life is a virus, whose success leads to the demise, first, of a higher form of life and, second, to its own extinction unless it can adapt to and infect an unending succession of hosts. Another form of Perverse Life is cancer. A cancer is a group of cells that have stopped functioning for the welfare of the organism of which they are a part, and have decided to "do their own thing," at the expense of that organism. Cancer is also fatal, both to itself and to the organism on which it is a parasite.
Millions of years ago, there were already forms of Perverse Life. They were kept under control, however, because no species had any sort of world-wrecking power at its disposal. The problem with the rise of intelligence on Earth was that it was not preceded by the development of a mechanism for ensuring that Perverse Life, in some intelligent incarnation, could never gain control of world-wrecking power. This, unfortunately, has happened. By Michiavellian cleverness on their own part, and by neglect on the part of the White race, the Jews have gained control of the world's most powerful political organizations and the ability to "guide" (i.e. corrupt) cultural development. The Jews operate like a cancer-causing virus. They induce the individual parts of their collective victim, such as its poor (Marxism) or its women (Feminism), to work against the welfare of their race. And when Perverse Life becomes so successful as this, then the mission of Life in the world is in danger of irretrievable failure. It is a pity that Earth has come so far, over so many billions of years, toward its proper destiny, only to be undone at this crucial hour.
If one wanted to be mystical about it, he might persuade himself that overcoming "the Jews"—or whatever equivalent might arise on some other planet—is a last test of worthiness given by the purpose immanent in existence to a species that has recognized that purpose. And that such a species is almost ready to take conscious possession over its own biological destiny is not a coincidence. To fail the test is to fail utterly: God will not arise from the world where the failure occurs. The universe will attempt to do in some other place, at some other time, in some other way, what humans failed to do, if Jewish power is not ultimately broken.
Even if Life's purpose cannot be found written in the stars, or spelled out on a Black Obelisk a lá 2001: A Space Odyssey, there are nonetheless better and worse alternatives for the choice of purpose, and some of these choices are better than choosing no purpose at all. Perhaps more to the point, even if an alleged purpose could be found in signals from space, or words in a Bible, the purpose advocated thereby would be only as good as its advocate was wise. And if you believe that a metaphysical and infallible God wrote your sacred scriptures and therein told you that the purpose of Life is to sing the deity's praises (and give your money to the Church), then may the two of us never occupy the same lifeboat. The special thing about Life is its capacity for knowing, understanding, appreciating, creating, and organizing; hence, the exercise of those capacities constitutes its higher mission. Necessary to that higher mission is its more basic mission of carrying its seed into the future and into new territories, which might be what the biologist meant.
If Life's purpose is to be rescued, then it is necessary for Higher Life to defeat Perverse Life. That is, the only possible road to success is through the domination of the World, or anyway a decent portion of it, by the White race. Necessary to that domination is the overthrow of the present Jewish domination. A peaceful change-of-power is not possible. You might as well be asking the virus making you sick to give up its work of infection voluntarily. Violence (in the form of antibodies) is required. Since the virus, in this case, is intelligent, it has anticipated the steps toward its own undoing. It has been further educated in those steps by a failed previous attempt by a White country to cure itself (Germany, 1925-1945). Uncontrolled Perverse Life always kills its host, which is always Higher Life. Either the man's immune system will kill the virus, or the virus will eventually kill the man. Either the White race will defeat the Jews, or the Jews will destroy the White race, and on the outcome depends the entire mission of Life on this planet. Three billion years of laborous advance will be crowned with victory, or it will be swept away in time's cold wind.