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Before we understood gravity, it ordered the solar system. Before we understood the human spirit, it ordered life. Neither needed to be understood. |
Creating Moral Law: The Original Sin
Chet Shupe
For thousands of years, humans have lived under the weight of moral law. We were so enticed by its promise of protection and control—even of our own destiny—that we accepted it without considering the consequences. Why would we be drawn to the promise of future control when common sense tells us the future is unknowable and therefore uncontrollable?
The answer lies in how the mind works. The mind uses reason to resolve feelings, not to establish truth. Otherwise, belief systems—religious or ideological—would not exist. Indeed, we call them beliefs because feelings justify them, not experience—the futures they promise cannot be experienced. A mind that sees compliance with a belief system, religious or ideological, as essential to its well‑being will cling to it and judge others by it, even though it is only a belief—a proposition for which there is no verifiable evidence. We think we want to know the truth, but the desire to feel safe outweighs it—which makes sense. No good or evil, no right or wrong—just how the mind functions once language lets it believe. And because the mind takes comfort in beliefs, social contracting—built on the belief that, by accumulating wealth and basing relationships on legal arrangements, people can control their future to meaningful ends—will continue indefinitely, or until we better understand how the mind works.
If you sometimes wonder why this world makes no sense, now you have the answer. Before social contracting, humans relied on the wisdom of the human soul, revealed through feelings, for guidance, not the promise of beliefs. This wasn’t because they were smarter or better informed. Before social contracting, our innate wisdom, which is revealed through feelings arising from the human spirit, provided the only guidance available.
How did mankind come to prefer legal systems over the human spirit for guidance? First, we didn’t reject the human spirit. We didn’t know it existed or that it guided us. The spirit’s guidance is revealed through feelings, making it invisible to the eye. Because feelings were our only guidance, we simply did what we felt like doing, and life worked, not perfectly, but well enough for humans to flourish. Why would we have thought we needed guidance?
People did not recognize that without feelings to satisfy, there is nothing we could do that would feel good; therefore, there would be no reason to do anything. Physically, we might be the same as we are now, even breathing, but without a spirit—the desire to do what feels right or not do what feels wrong—there would be no one at home. In other words, without a spirit, we wouldn’t exist, even if our bodies were alive.
Quenching thirst feels natural to the conscious mind—and it is—but not in the way the conscious mind imagines. Thirst expresses genetically accumulated wisdom, delivered through feelings, that enables us to enjoy drinking water for our species’ survival. Thirst seems normal, but we experience it only because our spirit instills the desire to satisfy it; without that desire, our species would not survive. Hunger feels natural because without our need to satisfy it our species would not survive. We experience attraction, aversion, fear, joy, love, anger, and grief for the same reason. These feelings are not random; they are instructions. They are the spirit’s way of guiding the organism toward behaviors that sustain life.
The conscious mind assumes these signals are natural, but it ignores the enormous biological machinery that produces them and the fact that each feeling rests on wisdom accumulated over millions of years. The objective of all this machinery is singular—species survival. And the reward for satisfying innate feelings—the output of this machinery—is contentment. That feeling, and only that feeling, tells the organism it has done its job. It can rest. Indeed, being true to our innate feelings is our organism’s only source of contentment. Any effort made for reasons other than satisfying our inborn feelings falls under pursuing personal ambitions rather than serving life. All such efforts lead to emotional dead ends because whatever meaning we derive from them ends the moment the ambition is realized.
We have now arrived at the foundational issue with social contracting from the human spirit’s perspective: it prevents us from experiencing life’s meaning. People sign social contracts to realize personal ambitions, not to serve life. This is why civilized people are restless at their core: they lack contentment because they are no longer free to be true to their spirits in their relationships with those around them—the only way a social primate can serve life.
Before social contracting, people did not need to know where feelings came from or that feelings inspired behaviors that sustained the species. Throughout evolution, people simply did what seemed natural—what felt right and avoided what felt wrong. Social contracting introduced a new choice: do good and avoid evil. The distinction may seem slight, but it is profound. When we follow what feels right—the wisdom of the human soul—we act as agents of life. When we follow what is deemed good—the laws authorizing social contracts—we act as agents of the state. Through social contracting, our allegiance—our soul’s most sacred gift—shifts, without our realizing it, from serving life to serving the state.
Whether signing a contract or helping establish a legal system that authorizes social contracting, we do what seems reasonable and agreeable. Yet no matter how right, proper, and good the act may seem, doing so equates our well-being with that of the state rather than with the life of our species—and we have felt unmoored from life ever since.
How did social contracting arise in the first place? When language developed enough for humans to imagine the uncertainties of an unknowable future, men, quite naturally, sought to eliminate them. To satisfy that desire, the rational mind invented social contracting, under which men agreed to follow moral laws in exchange for the right to own property—land, animals, slaves—and, through marriage, women.
As for relieving our concerns about the unknowable future, social contracting worked well, not because it eliminated future uncertainties, but because the mind found comfort in believing it would. Regarding future concerns, the languaged mind takes comfort in beliefs, not facts, for there are no facts about the distant future. Because language lets humans imagine the unknown, humans have always taken comfort in beliefs to close the holes our imaginations create in our conceptual universe. But those beliefs never interfered with our innate wisdom, and thus our sense of contentment, until our predecessors began taking comfort in the belief that, through rights of ownership, we could realize personal or collective ambitions by fixing the future to desired ends. That was the origin of the concept of good and evil, which the masses, quite naturally, took comfort in. In doing so, we rendered the spirit’s directives, the feelings that had previously guided us in serving life, virtually useless. At that moment, our intellectual intelligence became disembodied, almost as disembodied as AI: neither has a reference for reality it can experience. From then on, mankind raced forward, chasing a future we could entertain in our imaginations but not feel directly.
And the fact that eliminating future uncertainties—or believing we had—required us to stop functioning as agents of life didn’t concern us. We didn’t know we had ever served life. Even if we had known, it wouldn’t have mattered. Evolution never informed us that our role is to serve life. It simply provided us with inborn feelings and expected us to satisfy them by doing what feels right.
Serving life is not a rational process, though reason plays an essential role. The rational mind figures out how to resolve feelings. If it succeeds—you can’t satisfy thirst without water to drink—we experience the contentment our innate wisdom rewards us with for serving life, and presto, life takes care of itself—again not perfectly, but well enough to flourish, and that’s all that matters.
The human spirit’s goal is species survival, not perfection. If a species’ survival required perfection, animate life would not exist. The process by which life takes care of itself is not magic, of course, but to our conscious minds it might as well be, because we have no clue about the complexity of the processes involved or their goal.
The most remarkable and distressing thing about social contracting is how tightly and instantly it freezes the human spirit. It is not a matter of individuals choosing whether to be true to the feelings evolution endowed them with or to the laws of the state. States grant people the right to own land, yet they claim absolute sovereignty over every livable parcel of land on this planet. To have a place to live, people have no choice but to submit to institutional subjugation. The spirit still orchestrates the full spectrum of feelings by which spiritually free people serve life, and those feelings still seek resolution as much as ever. But whenever an inborn feeling conflicts with a prescribed law, we ignore the wisdom evolution endowed us with, as if it didn’t exist. After all, no one can serve two masters. And there is a price for not being free to resolve our inborn feelings—emotional pain that, if prevalent enough, results in emotional illness.
With our spirits frozen out, we exist in a chronic state of discontent so universal it feels natural. Because we see our tribulations as inherent to existence itself—“oh, that’s just life,” we say—we have no reason to do anything about it other than medicate or seek therapy when our lives become unbearable. But as worldwide crises close in on us, we realize we must do something. So we seek to solve the world’s problems, not realizing they are symptoms of social contracting. This renders our efforts useless for bringing real change. So, despite its emotional and material cost, a cost that deprives us of experiencing life’s meaning and threatens to denature the planet, the practice of social contracting remains secure, at least for now.
In light of these observations, one might wonder whether this is a terminal condition or whether there is a way out. Only providence has the answer to questions like that. Though the way out is uncertain, rest assured that if I didn’t believe regaining our spiritual freedom was possible, I would not trouble you good folk or myself with any of this. If the escape hatch opens, it will come as a considerable shock. I experienced that shock years ago, or I would never have reached the perspective that lets me make these observations. The shock came from a sudden loss of the identity I had been living under—the state‑constructed self that had replaced my spirit early in my life. Having been through that shock makes it difficult, at times, for me to say what I believe needs to be said for the escape hatch to open.
Living in compliance with moral law is like living in a massive cult. The only real difference between a state and a cult is their size. A state does virtually everything a cult does. The most significant similarity is that states, like cults, dissociate us from our family members. By family, I mean social primate families—the kind Homo sapiens lived in before social contracting was invented. By institutionalizing family relationships, states have rendered natural human families nonexistent. Consequently, there is no one to intervene.
I see myself as living in a cult, and I do not want to. The only way out would be to form a natural human family to provide the material support the cult now provides. But to do that, a number of members would have to be honest with each other about how we really feel, the one thing a cult cannot allow. The true believers would see me as not going along with the program and toss me out on my ear. Cult members are seldom tossed out because no one dares to be honest about how they really feel. Well, I am daring it.
Perhaps my need to speak out will encourage others—especially women—to speak openly with one another about how they truly feel. If the right women find themselves together, which only their spirits can discern, they may realize how much they need one another. This might result in sisterhood, the foundation of every Homo sapien family. Their relationships would be grounded in spiritual trust—without house rules, promises, prescribed obligations, or separate monetary identities. They would bond not to solve their problems or the world’s, but because, having found a place where they could let down their pretenses, their relationships became indispensable, and life without one another unimaginable. Or perhaps I will simply be tossed out on my ear.
Without access to interdependent family relationships—through which our distant forebears took pleasure in supporting one another emotionally and materially—we suffer. That is what our religion, education, progress, planning, technology, money, travel, politics, mass media, and accumulated wealth are about: attempts to find contentment in a world where there is none. The greater the suffering, the more we seek comfort in the promise of the law, which only compounds it. We are trapped in a self‑sustsaining loop fueled by its own pain. This offers at least one explanation for why civil states fail. Once the promise of eliminating future uncertainties captures our imaginations and, with them, our hearts, no relief comes until the state—the authorizer of contracts—collapses, after which the cycle begins anew.
The way out, if one exists, would require spiritual homes to reappear. As social primates, we can access our soul’s guidance only when a natural family supports us emotionally and materially. But, as noted earlier, for a social primate family to reappear, we would have to be honest with ourselves and each other about how we really feel, something we have found advisable to avoid since the first social contracts appeared. Instead of presenting ourselves as self‑assured masters of our fates while we discuss philosophy, politics, and how to save the world, we need to gather and talk about what we are experiencing: what it feels like to perform a successful, happy life without a real home. Only spiritual honesty can break down the pretensions required to be perceived as successful in a social contracting world—pretensions we must shed if we are ever going to recognize and share our inborn needs and vulnerabilities, the prerequisite for a spiritual home.
I don’t know how it might happen, or whether it will, but people must somehow realize that, for a social primate, success is not proving you can make it on your own. Quite the opposite. Having to make it on your own would be failure—indeed, it would be emotional death. For a social primate, success is social acceptance, spiritual trust, interdependent relationships, and, most importantly, being there for one another through thick and thin. Only within that framework can we celebrate life’s process, whatever being there for one another might entail.
That is why spiritual honesty is so crucial. Only when we openly acknowledge our burdens and recognize the griefs carried by the ‘successful’ around us will we realize how much we need others, and, just as importantly, how much they need us. Without that recognition, nothing real can happen—certainly not spiritual homes.
Everything I have said so far describes the biological and emotional consequences of social contracting. But none of them are new. The authors of Genesis inherited stories handed down through generations from a much earlier time, stories that may have preserved the experience of people who witnessed this transformation as it unfolded some five thousand years ago. By the time those stories were written down, their message had been preserved in metaphors whose origins are lost to history. What follows is their account of how civilization began, and why it carried within it the seeds of spiritual death. Their message is simple, stark, and, once the metaphors are translated, entirely consistent with what has just been explained.
If the reader accepts this argument, a question naturally follows: Why have intelligent beings submitted to moral law to the detriment of their spiritual lives? The answer lies in humanity’s acquisition of language. For the first time on Earth, living beings could imagine circumstances they had never experienced. Once that became possible, what chance did experienced reality have against an idealized alternative? In the world they imagined, for example, armed conflict was unnecessary because all issues that might lead to it were resolved by gentlemanly agreement.
To realize a world without armed conflict, with legally arranged family relationships, and countless other features no human had ever experienced, the human mind not only possessed the desire but—through social contracting—also the ability to circumvent experienced reality in the effort to realize an idealized one. Despite the tragedy this represents, there is one saving grace. Without social contracting—the singular tool that lets individuals invest in an imagined future—our imaginations can’t take our species off course. In my mind, that is what the authors of Genesis were trying to tell us in their story about mankind’s fall from grace.
What happened was not complicated, nor did it occur without warning. In the Tower of Babel and Garden of Eden stories, the authors of Genesis—in one of history’s most revered books—described what happened. Their interpretation requires us to translate a few metaphors, but the message is there, stark and clear. The story’s survival, even in obscured form, suggests many people recognized the danger as the events first unfolded.
Once we understand what the authors of Genesis were trying to tell us, we will at least have identified the problem. The problem is not civilization; it’s social contracting, a practice that made civilization unavoidable. Once we understand the problem, then we can focus, for the first time in recent history, on what to do about it rather than continue trying to manage its symptoms. I say recent history because I believe many ancient cultures did back away from social contracting before civilization really took hold.
Consider the Tower of Babel: humanity’s attempt to elevate itself above the uncertainties of the natural world. Such efforts are destined to fail because they rest on the illusion that we can bend the forces of Nature that created us to our own purposes—in effect, that we have dominion over our creator. Their effort to build the tower failed not because people began speaking different languages, but because what they tried to communicate rested on conflicting illusions. We see the same pattern today when people with different political views—different beliefs about how to control Nature, including human nature—try to understand one another. Whether the other person is a family member, neighbor, lifetime friend, or would‑be comrade, what they say can seem madly unimaginable to us. But the issue isn’t that we are speaking in different tongues; we are speaking in different illusions.
As for the story of Adam and Eve and our kind’s fall from grace, the serpent represents the state. It promised what every state promises: a world of peace, justice, and abundance, provided Adam and Eve obeyed a few simple laws. It was a promise they could hardly refuse, especially since they had no way of knowing it could not be fulfilled—or that obedience to the law would cause their spiritual death. “For in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” (Genesis 2:18) That is how Genesis put it. But now we can see that an agent of life died, and from its death an agent of the state was born.
The problem was that the serpent could not have known that prescribed laws cannot eliminate nature’s uncertainties. Such laws may offer temporary benefits, but over time, the unintended consequences of suppressing the soul’s wisdom will overwhelm those benefits, resulting in chaos—the very outcome the laws were meant to prevent. The serpent’s problem was not evil but good intentions. Good intentions can be devastating when the would‑be benefactor is misinformed. Adam and Eve therefore had little choice but to eat the forbidden fruit, which represents a social contract; eating it symbolized signing the contract.
Suddenly, Adam and Eve possessed the knowledge of good and evil, as the Bible says—good as compliance with moral law, evil as noncompliance. Unaware that the soul’s wisdom exists, they assumed moral law was the only standard for order and took it as their sacred duty to judge every activity within the garden walls in the name of the very power they believed had created the universe.
So, rather than continue participating in life’s process that had been unfolding on this planet for hundreds of millions of years—they saw themselves as responsible for controlling reality itself, including, through the law, repressing the feelings by which their souls were trying to inform them how to celebrate life by participating in it.
None of this literally happened, of course. The authors of Genesis, writing as these mistakes were taking hold, sought to warn people about the consequences of trying to eliminate future uncertainties. In trying to eliminate them, we unwittingly defy one of nature’s most fundamental laws: the distant future is unknowable and therefore beyond our control. The point of Genesis is not that God expelled anyone from Eden, but that the world stopped feeling like a garden once people believed they were in control. No species can survive for long if its members assume they can control life. To survive, sustain life, and experience the contentment that comes with it, we must participate in life’s process.
Given the lack of evidence for intelligent life throughout the universe, scientists have begun asking a question the authors of Genesis answered long ago: Why are civilized cultures predisposed to fail? The answer lies in why civilizations exist at all: to grant people the right to own property. But to maintain that right, everyone must comply with the state’s laws, forcing us to serve two masters. By our intellectual intelligence, the adaptive part of our brains, we belong to the state—a relationship we must honor to have a place to live. But by our emotional intelligence, we belong to our species—a relationship we must honor to have peace of mind. Because having a place to live is always more urgent than peace of mind, we exist as subjects of the state, as if emotional intelligence didn’t exist, or worse, as if it were the source of sin.
Yet the soul’s wisdom never vanished; it has only been overpowered by the fear of not having a place to live—a place that, in a legally formalized world, is defined by contract, but in a spiritually honest world would be defined by where we feel we belong, which is wherever we feel our lives are making a difference.
From this perspective, our species might already be extinct if states didn’t regularly collapse under the weight of their abject dysfunction. I see social contracting as the ‘Great Filter’—the term scientists use for a universal barrier that prevents intelligent life from surviving long enough to spread across the galaxy. Yet the absence of evidence for life elsewhere does not necessarily mean that all intelligent life fails to survive social contracting. In some cases, something may have reminded them where they belonged, and they went home—to the place Nature prepared for them.
In short, the authors of Genesis were trying to tell us how mankind replaced the wisdom of our souls with moral edits without our realizing it. Yet for thousands of years we have been unable to recognize what they were saying, despite its simplicity. Surely a few metaphors are not blocking our view—not for a species that figured out how to get to the moon and back.
We cannot see Genesis’s message because the most primal need of any animate being is a place to live. Under social contracting, the king—the authority who grants access to the land—controls that need. Whether the king is a mortal ruler, a heavenly deity, or the international monetary system that now functions as the gateway for eight billion people’s access to life’s most fundamental resource—the land—our material survival depends on aligning ourselves with whatever holds that power. And given the circumstances social contracting puts us in, our emotional survival depends on loving the King—leaving us blind to the fact that the king, like the emperor in the fable, has no clothes.
Our inability to grasp the consequences of social contracting is not a failure of intellect but a result of the emotional priorities that once served us well when we were spiritually free, but now have us loving our prison.
Regarding our prison, nothing in this argument suggests that a state can be overthrown by armed conflict for the sake of our species’ well-being. Any use of force against a state would be another attempt to play God, an effort to control life rather than participate in it, and that is the state’s illusion, not the human soul’s. This does not mean armed conflict is unnatural to spiritually free life. Defending territory on which survival depends is an expression of the soul; fighting to impose a conceived social order is not. The latter merely shows that we remain caught in the same illusion as those we oppose. Worse, it would reinforce the belief that the free human spirit is inherently untrustworthy, despite evidence of its trustworthiness provided by our species’ very existence, and strengthen the foundation on which empires are built.
Our only real power is to free our spirits so they can lead us to informal family relationships, bonded by mutual trust rather than prescribed or legal arrangements. Once natural bonds form, spiritual freedom is at the mercy of the powers that be. That has not worked out well in the past, as we all know. But we now understand more about what life is about, which is taking care of itself, and times are changing.
How do I know my interpretation is correct? One might ask. I don’t. Since innate wisdom guides life exclusively through feelings, my mind—like all minds—tends to resolve feelings rather than concern itself with facts. I am inclined to believe my interpretation because the stories, as I interpret them, satisfy my feelings about what happened. And the authors left a convincing clue that the forbidden fruit represents a contract: “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:5)
But in a way, what the authors intended doesn’t matter. I am not communicating their beliefs; I am trying to communicate mine. The story is so widely known and so clearly conveys the message I want to convey that I would consider myself a fool not to use it.
Why all the metaphors? Why a serpent instead of a state, and the forbidden fruit instead of a contract? Perhaps the authors feared persecution if they spoke too plainly. They may have been trying to get their message past censors. Or, as the story gained popularity, the state may have commissioned scribes to obscure the truth. Whatever the reason, I stand by my interpretation. If it conveys my views, that is enough.
And finally, what was the original sin? The authors of Genesis never said. To express my view, I will tell you how I believe the human spirit would answer if it could reveal the wisdom of our souls in words. But first, remember: our souls are far more concerned about the well‑being of our species than about any individual, including ourselves. Otherwise, our species would not exist. With that in mind, here is what I believe the human spirit would say:
The original sin was not the failure to obey moral law. It was committed, albeit innocently, in creating moral law.
One last thing. If the authors of Genesis did not speak plainly for fear of persecution, what gives me the courage to say these things now? It is not that I am fearless. It is simply that, like all animate spirits, I believe mine is far more concerned with the well‑being of our species than with my own. Whatever comfort I can take in that—and it is considerable—it will have to do.
Only when emotionally and materially
supported by a spiritual home are we free
to live by the wisdom of our souls
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We eventually discovered the invisible force that orders the planets. Perhaps it is time we discovered the invisible force that once ordered us. |
