Your Right to Life Is Contingent on Three Factors, None of Them Divine

Your average minnow, Photo: sipppingmayflies.com

by Mary W Maxwell, LLB

Do I have a right to life?  What are the grounds for making the Yes argument?

Let me ask you: Do you feel that a minnow has a right to life?

A moment ago, I google-searched “minnows are prey”. I instantly got a reply, expecting it to be from Wikipedia but no, the author is named “AI Overview”. Here it is:

“Minnows are prey for many larger animals, including fish, birds, reptiles, and mammals: Most larger fish eat minnows, including trout, pike, stripped bass, and walleyes. Many types of birds eat minnows.  Snakes and turtles eat minnows. Some mammals eat minnows. Minnows are a vital part of the aquatic food chain because they eat plants, insects, and other small aquatic organisms, and then become food for larger animals.”

Hmm. In some whole-world sense, the individual minnow — call him Joe Minnow — not only does not have a right to live his life irrespective of any “responsibilities,” he is almost responsible for yielding his life when it is needed!

Don’t worry, I am not going to extrapolate from that to claim that next week if I need your kidney, I have an automatic right to it. Indeed, I won’t be using ordinary moral criteria to talk about the human right to life. My goal is to show that we foolishly proclaim our right to life without looking at the facts of what that “right” is based on.

Back to minnows. They are not lusting for the afterlife — they do attempt to stay alive. AI Overview notes:

“To avoid predators, minnows use a variety of strategies, including Traveling in schools typically groups of 4–6 fish; Hiding in sediment, seagrass, or algae; [and] Moving quickly to avoid predators.” [Plus one another strategy that I will mention later.]

The Homo Sapiens Arrangement

Our favorite species, H sapiens, is surely a part of Nature. It is as predictable as any other mammal in regard to rules of morphology, physiology, reproduction, etc. Also, in social behavior it predictably parallels the animal species that are social — be they penguins, baboons, dolphins, or ants. Such social behaviors may include altruism, group bonding, and intergroup competition.

Oh my, I have just asked my new research assistant, Artificial Intelligence, for “social species.” It replied:

“A social species is a group of animals that are highly interactive with other members of their species and whose psychological well-being is dependent on social interactions. Sociality is a survival response to evolutionary pressures. For example, a mother wasp staying close to her larvae in the nest makes it less likely that parasites will eat the larvae.”

Those creature’s social behavior is innate, of course. The behavioral repertoire looks the same, generation after generation, even for millennia, requiring no culture to keep it going. (Some learning may be needed; the mother prods her kid to do this or that, but in some species a kid is ready at birth to do the whole job.)

What about humans? Is their social behavior innate? A friend of mine in Melbourne, who had recently birthed her first child, said to me “I would throw myself on the tram tracks to save him if I had to.” She expressed amazement at her new-found capacity for unselfishness, total unselfishness!

The Right to Life

Back to this article’s opening question: Do you have a right to life? As we saw, minnows do not particularly have a right to life. Of course they’ve never had the opportunity to think about it. They go with the flow. Still, they do have an underlying protection, the one I promised to mention. It’s sort of a chemical warfare thing. Quoting AI:

“When a minnow is injured or killed, it releases a chemical signal called Schreckstoff, which means “fear substance” in German. Other minnows in the area can detect the chemical and respond by changing their behavior to reduce the risk of predation.”

Let’s remember that word — shreks-toff. Or shrek-stoff. It bespeaks divine intervention. Well not really, but if the human species had such external help (members of our species giving off a death smell, alerting the group to run or hide), I bet we would ascribe it to God.

In the title of this article, I specifically “ruled out” that our oft-cited right to life is divine. But more than that, I do not think we have an actual right to life — therefore it is not divine or anything else. It does not exist.

Picture this, Joe Human is going to be attacked by a predator. Is he bound to stay alive based on some proclaimed “right to life”?

Surveying the whole society, here is how Joe could expect his right to life to materialize:

1. He could fight the predator. Likely, the party with the best weapon or skill will prevail.
2. He could live in a society where victims-to-be, such as Joe, can call upon others, such as by ringing an alarm, and these may defeat the predator.
3. He could live in a society where his right to life is protected by law. Thus, a potential predator may be quite reluctant to prey on him — at least lethally — out of fear of society’s punishment, including the death penalty.

Where does God come into that?  Perhaps God created the human species and every other species, using a sort of system, such as natural selection, whereby the whole of Nature would fit together — as it so beautifully does. But God did not promise to every human individual that he or she would be safe from predation.

Should We Give Up?

This article was partly prompted by what appears to me to be a growing resignation of my conspecifics to the fact that we’re all about to die. As in “Ho hum, well you know how it is, guys, there’s probably something up there in the 5G towers that will do the job….”

I’m guessing that this defeatist attitude is based on an unconscious awareness that we are outgunned. It is likely that the 5G towers were erected — rather hastily during the pandemic — without much explanation and public debate.

And, on August 8, 2023, we saw that in Hawaii there was a major kill-off of residents of Maui, without any legal reaction. It was a Ho-hummer like I have never seen before. The predators may have been grabbers of real estate. See Michelle Melendez’ book The Great Maui Land Grab.

(Also, please see my articles on this subject. I became a presidential candidate in the 2024 New Hampshire Republican primary, hoping to run a single-issue campaign on the matter of this genocidal hit on Hawaii, but no one “twigged” on the message. Also, to run against Trump was considered a sacrilege. What anti-patriotism that was!)

The Right to Life of the Other Group

Recapping Joe’s prospects as an individual fighting a predator, or any attacker, I said he could 1. use his own aggression, 2. rely on neighbors backing him up, or 3. put hope in the law. In the United States, in the late 20th century, all three methods were feasible. Today we tend to scoff at Number three — Law — because it isn’t enforced and has all but fallen off the list.  It could be brought back by new cultural effort. Of course.

Anyway, though, as a species we have an innate tendency to live in groups. Such groups may have to compete for resources. We do not have biological moral restraint here — there is no instinct to hold back on stealing that group’s stuff or killing them outright.

Hence, if we were to look at a Group’s “right to life,” instead of Joe Human’s right to life, there wouldn’t be a Number Three. A group can use its own aggression and also call for help from allies, but it has no hope (in my opinion) of getting the law to dissuade a group that plans a hit.

Back to the minnows again. The quote above was: “Minnows are a vital part of the aquatic food chain because they eat plants, insects, and other small aquatic organisms, and then become food for larger animals.” Personally, I do not see us having a role “within all of Nature” such that Nature would give us a motive to stop harming other groups. Do you?

Anyway, It’s Private Criminality, Isn’t It?

My guess is that the attackers in Maui, which may have been working from satellites, are American. Certainly you didn’t hear our national government yell “Eeks the Chinese have stuck our westernmost state.” But you also didn’t hear our national government threaten to punish the Americans who did it. This brings up the whole natter of our so-called government not working for us but being toadies or the globalists.

Suddenly the globalists appear to be running everything.  Right now, the WHO (World Health Organization, a part of the UN) boasts of its plan to become The Ultimate Boss! And since nations are not saying “WHO, kindly drop dead,” it can be assumed that nations lack the power

Nota bene: Our innate species behavior is not geared up for this!  Offhand, it looks as though only Number One on the above list of human protections against predation is currently extant. That is, you can use your own aggression. But Number Two is dead: you can’t ring a bell to call on your group since the leaders of your group are busy kowtowing to this new entity — the globalist club. As for Number Three, Nature never did give humans the means to hold back a foreign aggressor, at least not automatically.

Please don’t say “Bring it to Jesus.” Give Jesus a break. The only way we’re going to get out of the coming catastrophe is by using whatever human talents can come to the fore.

I’ll bet there are some. Please step forward with your portion. If you know how to make some type of Schreckstoff, let us know. You don’t have to be a MIT grad. You only have to be human.

Don’t be shy.  Above all, don’t be embarrassed by an accusation that you are unwarrantedly “nervous.” Nervousness could hardly be more warranted — the aggressors at the top say openly that we need to end up with half a billion people instead of today’s 9 billion.

Peeps, there’s trouble at the OK Corral. Get it?

Stop blathering on about your right to life. Wake up. Fix the situation.