To devalue human life while living a human life is the clearest form of insanity. Regardless of purpose or intent, the function of a thing can be clearly observed and analyzed. In this article, we present our model for observing and analyzing functional sanity and insanity.

We’ll start with a story and a bit of our own background that led us to developing this model. During the 20 years while we had an apparently undetectable and slowly worsening fungal lung infection that randomly wiped our memories every time we ingested protein and forced us to experience dreams and nightmares on par with reality, we experienced a phenomenon called ego death about 100,000 times, calculably. As we began to realize that our memories and personalities were inconsistent day to day, we began to have serious doubts about our own sanity. And so we developed, and redeveloped and redeveloped and redeveloped our own model for analyzing that sanity, or lack thereof. Today, now that the fungus has been discovered by a fluke and removed, we continue to utilize this model to aid in our recovery as well as to analyze the various people, policies, and philosophies in our environment.

It’s a value based model for functional sanity and it’s basically this:

I am alive, therefore I value life, therefore I value longevity, therefore I value health, therefore I value comfort, therefore I value dignity, therefore I value happiness. In other words, I am alive and so I want you to be happy. 

The common classical adage for determining insanity, “to repeat an action and expect a different result” cannot be reasonably applied to real life. This is because the universe is continually changing and no two actions could ever be identical since those actions take place in non-identical environments and at non-identical times. If you repeat the same action while the environment changes around you, the outcome of that action could very well be different. Even in a so-called controlled environment, changes occur as the subject ages and the observers think and feel. Keep in mind that the people around you are a part of that environment. And so if someone witnesses you repeating an action and decides to either help or hinder your actions, then the result will certainly be different. Perhaps those who repeat an action hold an expectation, consciously or otherwise, of social responsibility—something that has been woefully absent from many clinical studies throughout the history of medicine.

In fact, if we apply this concept to a community environment, it would be far less logical for the repeated action to always yield the same result. So, we reject that definition for insanity. Additionally, many diagnoses for personality and mental disorders are dependent upon the idea that capitalistic productivity is the basic goal of humanity. Humans survived for around 300,000 years before the various ages and revolutions that brought us to this point, and capitalistic productivity can be traced to be the cause of many of these disorders. We detect a contradiction. Instead, we will present a model focused on the functionality of continued life as a basis for analyzing the sanity of living beings.

Now, if a living being devalues monetary gain, there are many ways to demonstrate that devaluing, by giving money to others without concern for return or by volunteering their energy without compensation, diminishing their own money freely. In another case, if a living human devalues human life, the ways to demonstrate that value in earnest would be to end their own life or otherwise diminish their own life freely. But this typically doesn’t happen when someone claims that human life holds no value. Which means, if a living being devalues life, it is a form of dissociation between their own experience and how they perceive the experiences of others. In other words, they fail to recognize that others’ lives, pain, and suffering, are real. And so they experience no connection and no social responsibility to respect the lives of others. What does happen, however, is that a person will devalue the lives of others or of certain groups in order to gain a profit or some other benefit, as if they themself are not a part of those others’ species—an illusion of being nonhuman. Demonstratably, these illusioned persons often hold something in value above that life, such as money, power, religion, or resources, and will become obsessed with hoarding or justifying that thing while depriving their human neighbors of their needs and dignity as much as possible.

To devalue human life while living a human life is a paradoxical philosophy—a way of dealing with life by ending it instead of dealing with it. If the mindset of devaluing life were adopted by every living being, life would immediately cease to exist. Paradoxes collapse when applied to reality; they can only exist in imagination and concept. However, when that paradoxical imagination influences a living mind to make choices, we may observe the collapse of that life form and the eventual extinction of those who hold on to the paradox as it collapses.

One more point of important interest before the end. Travel is not only a healthy recommendation but it is essential for humanity to respect the dignity of the natural ecosystem of Earth. Nomadic, waterborne, airborne and perhaps spaceborne are the only viable types of society for humans on this planet. Permanent buildings, farming in place of ecological cultivating and permanent roads are all corrosive to human sanity and the viability of planet Earth. Every great civilization throughout history, as found in their ruins, has collapsed upon establishing stationary lifestyles. Absent evidence of the exact causes of their disappearance, this pattern is consistent while undisturbed hunter-gatherer societies, such as the San people, have outlasted all of them.