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Against Human Exceptionalism The Matter-of-fact
Reading of the Druid Minim ‘It’s not about me’ 1. The Human Self-Delusion Humans,
specifically infantile humans, have an old habit: they imagine themselves at
the centre. They call themselves the “crown of creation,” “the chosen
species,” “the image of God.” Civilisations are built on this conceit.
Libraries of (human invented) theology, philosophy, and even science whisper
the same self-flattering refrain: it is about us. But the
logic of emergence exposes this as delusion. The human species is not
destiny, not divine election, not a cosmic masterpiece. It is one platform
among millions, a temporary probe in drive, as lottery, to increased
complexity. 2. The Lottery’s Indifference Look at
the facts: ·
Nature has issued about seven million species
tickets on Earth. Humans hold just one, indeed 8 billions differentials of one. ·
Each platform spawns
countless expendable life quanta — bacteria by the trillions, insects by the
quadrillions, humans by the billions. Each quantum self
tests, self-discards discards, is forgotten. ·
Ninety-nine percent of species that ever lived
are extinct. They were once as “special” as we now claim to be. The
lottery is ruthless, indifferent, mindless. It keeps no favourites. The
extinction of humanity would matter no more to the Universal Procedure that
generates the Cosmos than the vanishing of trilobites, ammonites, or the
dodo. 3. The (infantile) Fraud of
Divine Chosen-ness Religious
doctrines of chosen-ness — that God picked one tribe, one book, one saviour,
one species — collapse under procedural scrutiny. A truly universal procedure
that transmutes random events into self-logic structures cannot show
preference; it runs its experiments blindly and automatically, ad infinitum.
The Hebrew prophets, the Christian evangelists, the Qur’anic revelation —
each is the voice of a species flattering itself. Even the
modern secular equivalent — the fantasy of human progress toward utopia or
transhuman immortality — is just the old delusion in new clothes. It is still
the cry: it’s about us. 4. The Harsh (adult) Truth The harsh
truth is this: ·
Humans are not ends, but short-lived probes. ·
Civilisation is not destiny, but experiment. ·
Consciousness is not crown, but expendable
interface. To think
otherwise is to mistake a lottery ticket for the lottery itself. 5. So now you know? So the druid’s minim rings out
like a hammer blow: “It’s not about me.” Not about
you, not about our species, not about our gods or our histories. We are not
the story — we are footnotes, experiments, expendable probes. The
cosmos will not remember us. The stars will not weep when we are gone. The
procedure will keep iterating, probing elsewhere, through other forms. 6. Freedom Paradoxically,
this cynic view carries a strange liberation, indeed moksha. If it is not
about us, then we are relieved of the burden of cosmic centrality. We can
drop the desperate fantasy of immortality, chosen-ness,
or eternal purpose. What remains is our moment of realness — finite, bounded,
but absolutely ours. For the
leaf, the neuron, the human, this is all there is. |