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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 and evil, no right or wrong—just how the mind functions once language gave it the ability to believe. And because the mind functions this way, 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 unless something intervenes.
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 provided guidance. The spirit is revealed through feelings, making it invisible to the eye. And because its feelings were the only guidance we had, we simply did what we felt like doing, and life worked well enough for humans to flourish. Why would we need guidance? What people did not recognize is that without feelings to satisfy, nothing we could do 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 home. In other words, without a spirit, we wouldn’t exist even if our living bodies did.
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 the sake of our species’ survival. Quenching one’s thirst seems normal, but we experience it only because, without our spirit possessing us with the desire to satisfy thirst, our species would not survive. We experience hunger only because, without it, our species would not survive. We experience attraction, aversion, fear, joy, love, 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 serve life.
The conscious mind assumes these signals are natural, but it is oblivious to the enormous biological machinery that produces them, and to 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 into the category of pursuing personal ambitions, not 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 point of view: it prevents us from experiencing life’s meaning. Social contracts are signed to realize personal ambitions, not to serve life. This is why civilized people are restless to the core: they have no access to contentment because they are no longer free to be true to their spirits in their relationships with the people 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 those feelings inspired behaviors that sustained the species. Throughout evolution, people simply did what seemed natural—doing what felt right and avoiding 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 are simply doing what seems reasonable and agreeable. Yet no matter how right, proper, and good the act may seem, by doing it we equated 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 to the point that humans could imagine the uncertainties of the unknowable future, men, quite naturally, wanted those uncertainties eliminated. To satisfy that feeling, the rational mind invented social contracting, through which men agreed to comply with moral laws in exchange for the right to own property—land, animals, slaves—and, through the contract of 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—there are no facts.
And the fact that eliminating future uncertainties—or believing we had—required us to stop functioning as agents of life was of no concern. We didn’t know we had ever served life. Even if we had known we had ceased serving life, 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 seeks the contentment that our innate wisdom rewards us with for satisfying our inborn feelings, and presto, life takes care of itself—not perfectly, but well enough to flourish, and that’s all that matters. Species survival, not perfection, is the human spirit’s goal. The process by which life takes care of itself is not magic, of course, but to our 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 institutionally subjugate themselves. The spirit still orchestrates the full spectrum of feelings by which spiritually free people serve life, and those feelings seek resolution as much as ever. But whenever an inborn feeling conflicts with a prescribed law, the wisdom evolution endowed us with is ignored as if it did not exist. No one can serve two masters, after all.
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, knowing something must be done without knowing the cause, we seek to solve the world’s problems, not realizing they are symptoms of social contracting rendering our efforts useless in terms of bringing real change. So, despite its spiritual 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 view 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 clearly uncertain, rest assured, 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 be preceded by 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. Virtually everything a cult does, a state also does. The most significant similarity is that states, like cults, dissociate us from our family members. In the state’s case, I mean social primate families—the kind Homo sapiens lived in before social contracting existed. By institutionalizing family relationships, states have rendered natural human families nonexistent. Consequently, there is no one to intervene.
I see myself as someone living in a cult, but who doesn’t want to. The only way out would be to form a natural human family to provide the material support I would need in the cult’s absence. But to do that, a few of us members would have to get honest with each other about how we really feel, the one thing a cult cannot allow. They would see me as not going along with the program and toss me out on my ear. Cult members seldom get tossed out because no one dares to be honest about how they really feel. Well, I am daring it.
Maybe it will encourage others, particularly women, to get honest with each other about how they really feel, at which point, if they are the right combo of females—which only their spirits will know—they might realize how much they need one another. At that point, they would become a sisterhood, bonded by spiritual trust—no house rules, verbally prescribed obligations, or separate monetary identities—the seed of all social primate families. They would do this—not to solve problems, theirs or the world’s, but because their relationships would become indispensable. They could not imagine what their lives would be like without each other. Or maybe I will 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, 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 compounds the suffering. We are trapped in a self‑sustaining loop energized by its own pain. This provides at least one explanation for why civil states fail. Once the promise of eliminating future uncertainties captures our imaginations—and with them, our hearts—there is no relief until the state—the authorizer of contracts—collapses.
The way out, assuming there is one, would require that spiritual homes reappear. As social primates, we gain access to the guidance of our souls only when we are emotionally and materially supported by a natural family. But, as previously noted, for a social primate family to reappear, we would have to be honest with ourselves and with each other about how we really feel, something we have found advisable to avoid since the first social contract 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 truly know: what it feels like to perform a successful and 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 that must be broken 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 come to realize that, for a social primate, success is not proving you can make it on your own. Quite the opposite. For a social primate, success is social acceptance, spiritual trust, interdependent living, and most important of all, being there for one another through thick and thin. Only within that framework can we celebrate life’s process, regardless of what 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 one another. 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 saw the same transformation unfolding in real time. They tried to warn us, using metaphors for reasons lost to history; thus, ones we may never know. 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 what has been said, a question naturally arises: Why have intelligent beings allowed themselves to be subjugated to moral law at the cost of their spiritual lives? It is the consequence of the human species acquiring language. For the first time on this planet, animate beings could imagine situations they had never experienced. At that point, what chance did experienced reality have against imagined reality? This gave the human mind not only the desire, but—through social contracting—the ability to circumvent experienced reality in the effort to realize imagined reality. At that moment, virtually everything about human existence went off course. Regardless of the tragedy that this represents, there is one saving grace. Without social contracting—the singular tool that enables individuals to invest in the 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. It’s not that how it happened is complicated. Nor is it because we haven’t been warned. The authors of Genesis, in the most revered book of all time, told us what happened in stories about the Tower of Babel and the Garden of Eden. To understand their message a few metaphors must be translated, but the message is there—stark and clear.
Once we understand what the authors of Genesis were trying to tell us, we will at least have identified the problem. At that point we can attend to the issue of what to do about social contracting rather than trying to manage its symptoms.
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 about 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.” That is how Genesis put it. But now we can see that the agent of life is who died, and that out of its death was born an agent of the state.
The problem was that the serpent also could not have known that the uncertainties of Nature cannot be eliminated by prescribed laws. You can try, but over time the unintended consequences of outlawing the wisdom of your souls will overwhelm whatever benefits the laws were meant to provide, and chaos intervenes—the very thing the laws were intended to prevent. Had the serpent known this, it would never have made the promise. It wasn’t evil, just well-intentioned—something that can be devastating when the would-be benefactor is misinformed. So Adam and Eve had virtually no choice but to eat the forbidden fruit, the stand‑in for a social contract—and eating it symbolized signing it.
Suddenly Adam and Eve possessed the knowledge of good and evil, just as the Bible says—good being compliance with moral law, evil being non‑compliance. Not knowing that the soul’s wisdom exists, thus presuming civil law to be the only reference for order, they took it as their sacred duty to judge every activity within the garden walls.
So, rather than continue participating in life’s process—a 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 about the mistakes being made as they happened, were trying to warn people about the consequences of trying to eliminate the uncertainties of the future. In that effort, we are unknowingly attempting to break one of the most fundamental laws of Nature: The distant future is unknowable, and therefore cannot be controlled. The point of the Book of Genesis isn’t that God cast anyone from a garden. The point is that the world no longer felt like a garden once people saw themselves as in control when, in fact, they were not. No species can survive long on this planet when its members presume they can control life. To survive, to support life, and be rewarded with contentment for our support, we must participate in the process.
In short, the authors of Genesis were trying to tell us how mankind replaced the wisdom of our souls with moral edicts, without our realizing anything of significance had happened. But for thousands of years we have been unable to recognize what was being said, 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. I suspect we have never seen it because no one wants to see it. Keep in mind, the rational mind exists to figure out how to satisfy feelings, not to know truth. To recognize that our species has devoted thousands of years to satisfying the illusion that we can control life, the illusion on which our present identities depend—is simply too great a burden for the psyche to bear. So our minds blind themselves to protect our bodies from the chemical imbalance we would suffer if we saw what had happened. The living organism is truly remarkable—in this instance capable of blinding itself when such blindness is necessary for its emotional health.
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 does know that in the day you eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”
But in a way, it does not matter what the authors intended. 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’s not that I haven’t thought about it. But, like all animate spirits, I believe mine is far more concerned about the well‑being of my species than my own. Whatever comfort I can take in that—and it is considerable—it will have to do.
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