The worth of souls

I've been thinking recently about the different ways that people value human life. From LDS President Dieter Uchtdorf on how God values human life:

Think of the purest, most all-consuming love you can imagine. Now multiply that love by an infinite amount—that is the measure of God’s love for you.

God does not look on the outward appearance. I believe that He doesn’t care one bit if we live in a castle or a cottage, if we are handsome or homely, if we are famous or forgotten. Though we are incomplete, God loves us completely. Though we are imperfect, He loves us perfectly. Though we may feel lost and without compass, God’s love encompasses us completely.

He loves us because He is filled with an infinite measure of holy, pure, and indescribable love. We are important to God not because of our résumé but because we are His children. He loves every one of us, even those who are flawed, rejected, awkward, sorrowful, or broken. God’s love is so great that He loves even the proud, the selfish, the arrogant, and the wicked.

What this means is that, regardless of our current state, there is hope for us. No matter our distress, no matter our sorrow, no matter our mistakes, our infinitely compassionate Heavenly Father desires that we draw near to Him so that He can draw near to us.



Apart from being a reminder of the impossibly high standard that many religious people are meant to hold themselves to when tasked with loving their fellow man as God loves them (and the great chasm from that expectation to their actual performance), I think this represents an interesting alternative to valuing human life than what has become the fad of late: prestigious job, fancy house, and attractive significant other being the baseline indicators for success, with additional money, celebrity, talent, or power being the true distinguishing characteristics to lift one above the masses of mediocrity. I have been in all sorts of cultures, from where Porsches are considered wannabe striver cars to where owning a bike is the envy of the village, but no matter where you are or what criteria you are using people always manage to find some way to think that they're better than other people.

I'm not suggesting that people stop judging others -- that's for them to reconcile with their own personal beliefs. I just think it's telling to see the different standards the people use to judge themselves and others. I thought the video below was an interesting perspective that happens to be very counter the majoritarian view -- so much so that I imagine many people assume she feels this way just because she does not rate high on attractiveness herself (sour games?). Her view: "I never want to get into this place where I feel like what I look like is more important than what I do . . . . Being beautiful is not an accomplishment." I especially liked the part where she compared humans to how other animals look: "It's absurd when you waste too much time on it, when you look at the perspective of being part of this kind of silly looking species on this planet in this solar system in this universe that is huge and contains life forms we haven't even encountered yet and that are completely foreign to us."


But what is the sociopathic angle to all of this? Maybe that sociopaths also sometimes get judged according to standards that they feel are arbitrary or silly? And if you can see some absurdity to the way that many people value human life, maybe you can better understand how sociopaths feel about adhering to seemingly silly and arbitrary things like social norms? Maybe to let the people know who write to me to tell me, "get your life together and establish a legitimate career" or opining that what I have done with my life is "wholly insignificant" that my value system for the worth of a life is probably a little different from there's? And that's ok. I'm glad some people love their middle class lifestyles because they stabilize society and pay into the welfare coffers for the rest of us bottom feeders. Or maybe I am setting up a pity play -- trying to trigger an emotional response in people who read this in order to promote more tolerance as part of a desperate ploy to prevent further legally sanctioned prejudicial treatment of sociopaths?

Or maybe I've just been thinking about this because it seems like our transition from consumer culture to information culture has made us all connoisseurs and critics of "content," including the people that populate our lives. But I'm not sure that most people enjoy being the subject of other people's scrutiny. Nor could you really say that everybody is fair game, if fair is something you believe in. Because I don't remember asking to be born, much less born the way I am and I can't imagine that most people do/did either. And yet there is such a temptation to become an amateur critic of the humans we encounter. But what a dim view of humanity to believe that there is any morally sound and unbiased basis for sorting people out according to value, ranking something so unknowable as the human soul according to such superficial criteria as "our 'riches' and our 'chances for learning.'" Because out of all of the wonders of this world, humans are the most amazing to me. I guess that's why I like the Mormon doctrine on this point: "Remember the worth of souls is great in the sight of God".

Self-medication

I've been thinking recently about things that have helped me without me intending or even realizing it. I'll give you an example of what I mean. I used to watch the television show House. He would always ask the person if there was anything about their life that changed. Sometimes the change was a healthier change, like stop drinking so much. But a frequent plot point of the show was that the patient had been unwittingly self-medicating an underlying condition, so when there was a lifestyle change (even to a seemingly more healthy habit), that triggered a flare up of the underlying condition.

There are a lot of things that, albeit indirectly, have helped me immensely in terms of maintaining decent mental health and behavior control:

• I'm a musician. I didn't choose to be a musician. Music did not initially appeal to me, nor did I have a natural talent for it. At one point I wanted to stop music studies to focus on other things that I was better at. My parents refused. I went through the motions for a couple more years until I finally achieved a level of fluency that allowed me to understand and later communicate musically, connecting with people in an unmediated way that I had never experienced in normal social interactions. I have since studied music seriously, which was probably the first hard thing I made myself do. I learned a lot then about my limitations and how to incentivize myself or trick myself into doing things I normally would not. I still play. The abstract logic of music is very good for my mental health and the social aspect of music makes me be nicer to people. Music, to me, is humanity's most redeeming feature and has made me interested in the stability of the human race because a destabilized society means no more music generation. 
• I have a low sugar diet. A lot of food makes me sick, so I mainly eat the same things over and over again, mostly protein and fiber. This also happens to be the most stable diet for mental health -- no sugar spikes, no twinkie-defense, no need.
• Being a woman. I've never really had my megalomaniac fantasies indulged that much because I'm a woman. Men do not consider women a viable threat and women often look down on other women. So even though I felt like I could do absolutely anything, I never had anyone echoing that sentiment, which has forced me to be a little more realistic than I otherwise may have been. Also experiencing hormal swings has taught me that I can feel things that aren't real (emotional hallucinations). And girls are sort of evil with each other, so I could get my kicks through emotional manipulation and not through other riskier behavior.
• Being Mormon. Yes, there is the moral code, but I think some of the more important things about growing up Mormon for me were the endless primary lessons trying to get us to understand our emotions, the emotions of other people (e.g. he hit me, which made me mad, so I hit him back, and now he's sad). and that we can control our emotions ("turn your frown upside down"). I got the sort of "this is a happy face, this other one is a frowny face" explicit emotional instruction that I feel is largely lacking in a lot of formal education nowadays, with our focus on mathematics and reading. And I had to learn to interact with all ages, races, and backgrounds of people.
• Writing in a journal. My religion encouraged it and my narcissism wanted to document the early life of a genius (actual entries in my childhood journal). The side benefit was that it forced me to contemplate who I was and to realize some of the consequences of my behavior.
• Being smart. There are an infinite number of ways this has affected my life, but for now let me just say that being perceived as being smart allowed me to get away with all sorts of things I otherwise would not have. Teachers gave me the benefit of the doubt, even when I was caught redhanded. I was given all of the social goodwill of a "good kid" simply because I scored so well on tests. 

There are other things that I feel lucky for -- a middle class upbringing with its de-emphasis on material goods, self-interested neglectful parents who largely left me alone, a superficial but straightforward culture which largely prized surface attributes and accomplishments that made it easy for me to mimic, and being a middle child who benefited from watching the failures of older siblings and was in a prime position to be a powerbroker, both between siblings and between parents and children.  

So when people ask me things like how do I maintain my life like I do, I don't know. The answer is complicated. I don't really expect people to learn a musical instrument or convert to Mormonism. But I don't know what else to say besides, it couldn't hurt?