Wheel and deal

this is not a blank slate

There are no blank slates. All ‘things’, real and imagined, have their causes and conditions.

It is said that ‘nothing comes from nothing’ and this implies that ‘everything comes from something’. Where did your ‘me’ come from?

Ultimately everything comes from the big bang. This initiated cosmic evolution such that planet earth came into being. Then there was biological evolution such that living things came into being. Then there was cultural evolution such that self conscious, large scale politics and engineering came into being.

Then a sperm and egg got together and you were created. The starting point was a single cell containing genes that had causes and conditions stretching back to ancestral times. The first cell divided many times to create a foetus that after nine months was expelled from the womb into a particular cultural and social environment. For seventy years ‘you’ then wheel, deal and maybe reproduce. Then ‘you’ die and your physical body rots and its chemicals return to the churn that is the vital force. If you were fit in an evolutionary sense you will have left more copies of your genes than other people in your group.

KEY SENTENCE: “For seventy years ‘you’ then wheel, deal and maybe reproduce.”

A life time of wheeling and dealing – are the details worth dying for?