The Fool and the Great Equalizer

Death is a serious issue -- but only if you value life as the precious possession that it is.

Ask yourself, "How precious is my life?"

For some, it is so precious that they spend many thousands of dollars on Insurance, Doctors, prescription drugs, and on many other objects categorized as "Health Care".


For others, life is so precious to them that they thoughtfully exercise, eat "healthy" diets, avoid bad habits like smoking, excessive drinking, and risky behaviors like base jumping or sky diving.

Some don't care about their life and simply go along with their passions - whether it be motorcycle racing, junk food, all-night drinking benders, or unprotected sex with as many willing participants as possible. Life is full of risks and they know that they're going to die anyway, so why not enjoy it to the fullest?

Why not indeed?

Last week, the world's oldest woman, Mrs. Edna Parker of Indiana, died in a nursing home at the ripe old age of 115 years - making room for another person to assume the title of the "world's oldest woman" -- who will likely die soon too.

-- Pause for thought --

Some would say that she lived a long, fulfilling, and satisfying life. Some might comment that she rusted out and that's not for them - they would rather burn out. Still others insist (in their currently healthy state) that they will not experience death at all (Ted Nugent comes to mind) against all that we have experienced and seen - what a puzzling attitude considering that all of us are made of the same thing, "flesh", and flesh always dies.

One thing is clear no matter who you are or what you think about life and death -- life "in the flesh" is intimately tied to this "world", this "plane of existence", and it will end. Mark it down - YOU WILL DIE. Period.

-- Pause for thought --

As a man who has spent my entire 32+ year career in the Data Processing industry, I have often thought about how similar our minds and thoughts are to software - the programs and data that run on computers. (Representing the "state" of the machine.)

Think about it - our bodies represent the hardware upon which the device called our brain is "fed" nutrients and oxygen-rich blood, along with sensory information, allowing our "thoughts" to proceed in an orderly and systematic way through time. The "state" of our being changing moment by moment with the inputs from sensory organs (eyes, ears, etc. everywhere that a nerve cell connects to and passes signals back "up" the line) as well as the "feedback" from internal processes such as our short and long term memories, as well as programs that we rely on so much in order to accomplish this "thing" that we call "living" - those programs are known as "habits".

I wrote a program 22 years ago on an IBM PC AT computer that is so useful that I still use it today to manage my diary. It was "born" running on a relatively primitive 80286 processor with 64 kilobytes of memory and a hard disk of 20 megabytes running on a primitive operating system called "MS-DOS".

Today, I run the same program on a Hewlett-Packard multimedia PC with a dual-core AMD Athlon processor, 2 gigabytes of memory, and more than a TERABYTE of hard disk space!

It was a very simple task for me to copy the program from one computer to another ... and another ... and another ... and another for 22 subsequent years. Good software is like that - if it works and it works well, why not keep using it?

Then, the thought occurred to me -- IF our minds are simply "software" running on the "hardware" that we know of as "flesh", then isn't it at least remotely conceivable that it too can be literally "copied" to newer, better hardware?

The Bible speaks of people dying in the flesh and then being raised into "glorified bodies" that are "incorruptible" - that is, they don't age, die, and rot like "flesh" does.

Is it so inconceivable that the creator of our minds and bodies, our "software and hardware" if you will, cannot create new "glorified and incorruptible" bodies -- and then simply copy or transfer the software to the new machines?

-- Pause for thought --

I return now to the original question I asked in this posting, "How precious is my life?"

Is it precious enough to even devote a tiny bit of effort into investigating whether or not this "Bible" is on to something?

Some people have a conscience that is so "seared" that even giving a moment's thought to the idea of the Bible being true would cause them to run away holding their metaphorical ears shut against the possibility -- yelling such things such as, "right-wing fundamentalist garbage!!!!!!" as they run from the idea.

Such is not the behavior of someone who is "open minded".

"What does all of this have to do with Mr. Romney Wordsworth?", you might ask. Well, it has a lot to do with him, for you see, he considered his Bible to be his only possession to have greater value than his own life (in the flesh) and that he looked forward to a better life in a glorified body -- something that his God, the God of the Bible, had promised to him in no uncertain terms. (See I Corinthians 15 for but one example.)

Was he a fool for believing such a thing? Believing in it so much so that he was willing to allow "The State" to kill him rather than recant such an idea?

Critics

No story is without its share of critics - and rightly so, for no product created from the mind of man should exist with the label of "quality" if it does not first sustain the barage of contrary opinion.

There are and will continue to exist rational arguments against the lessons that "The Obsolete Man" teaches and those arguments need to be treated with the utmost of care, consideration, and respect while they are weighed and measured against the standards of truth that we deem to be absolute - logic and the scientific method - with its absolute requirement of "observation" intact.

A giant of Mathematical Reasoning, Blaise Pascal (see the illustration) wrote in his trestise, "Pensees" that,

When we wish to correct with advantage, and to show another that he errs, we must notice from what side he views the matter, for on that side it is usually true, and admit that truth to him, but reveal to him the side on which it is false. He is satisfied with that, for he sees that he was not mistaken, and that he only failed to see all sides. Now, no one is offended at not seeing everything; but one does not like to be mistaken, and that perhaps arises from the fact that man naturally cannot see everything, and that naturally he cannot err in the side he looks at, since the perceptions of our senses are always true.

No man or woman is the repository of all knowledge and all experience, so we should consider, with great humility, the contrary opinions of others as we weigh the evidences presented herein.

With that, consider the opinion of the writer who wrote THIS about "The Obsolete Man"...

"The Obsolete Man" was an odd episode...and an odd choice for the final broadcast of "The Twilight Zone"'s most dynamic season, especially given the story's austerity and notwithstanding that both of the focal characters perish. It is hard to envision such a futuristic society as The State, as well as its litigation for the breezy extermination of undesirables and unproductives. The courtroom, or more appropriately, the 'judgement room' was an impressive set, but the presentation as a whole is difficult to take seriously.

I think that the difficulty that some experience in taking such a thing seriously can only be understood by considering that in their experience, such a thing has never been witnessed.

There exists the temptation for all of us to believe that in all times and in all places, things are the same everywhere. Such a belief is not borne out by history as I will shortly demonstrate.

Although I am not one (Thank God!) who has experienced first-hand the lamentable life of one under the yoke of a totalitarian dictatorship (Alexander Solshenitzin comes to mind) I have made the effort to read the works of those who have, and to watch contemporary videos of the times and places in which they were "living" in in order to form an opinion that I think is more experienced than that of the critics of "The Obsolete Man".

I have, for example, watched actual video of a man standing trial before a Nazi Judge while World War II raged around them. In this trial, the man was accused of speaking against the state when he said what the SS and the Brownshirts were doing to Jews was "murder" - his exact word.

Upon hearing this, you can hear the blood-curdling cry of the Judge as he yells out, "M-U-R-D-E-R?" intoning a sickeningly sarcastic expression that condemns the man currently on trial.

Anyone, and I mean anyone who had the misfortune of seeing the tyranny of this so-called "Court of Justice" would come away with the feeling that nothing in Mr. Serling's short story was "difficult to take seriously".

We see the same problem throughout society as one who has been raised in an environment wholly different than others whom they are passing judgement on. There are people in this world, for but one example, who are busy living their lives, planting food crops, delivering mail, and so forth while they carry fully-automatic weapons about with them.

While inconvenient and certainly strange looking to those of us who live in the pampered West, they are doing what for them is a wise thing owing to the fact that they live where criminal snipers and bomb-bearing suicidal maniacs are not a rare thing to be found. In such places, to be armed is to have a better chance of survival than to not be armed.

It is easy for those of us who live as I say in "the pampered West" to find such a thing to be difficult to take seriously, and even to pass a self-righteous judgement on them for such behavior - a judgement without cooresponding consequences in our peaceful corner of the world - but for them, this is a daily reality and they have the human right to do what is necessary to survive.

About Romney

"Romney Wordsworth" is a fictional character created by the master of creative suspense, Mr. Rod Serling. The word "genius" describes the writer and the story with equal force. Superbly portrayed by veteran actor Burgess Meredeth, Mr. Wordsworth was a humble Librarian living out his last two days in a society that judges him to be "Obsolete". And like so many other sympathetic characters born into a time and place where tyranny of the worst sort reigns, this charge carries a death penalty with it. If he is judged to be Obsolete, the almighty State must execute him within 48 hours (prepare for sarcasm) -- but graciously allows him to choose the time and the manner in which he will be executed.

In the annals of great writing and screenplay for short stories acted out before us on television, I think that this one episode of the venerable "Twilight Zone" series is the most profound episode on many levels, ergo my tribute to the show with an entire blog dedicated to exploring the depths of these "levels".

There is so much that can be written about this story, that I don't feel like even a blog such as this one can elucidate all the ideas or enumerate all the words to describe it. Like classic literature, "The Obsolete Man" is chock-full of lessons to be learned to advance mankind from the depths of brute to the heights of literati. Anyone who seeks to know the true human condition must first believe that there is such a thing - and then motivated by that faith to seek the truth of that condition.

All human beings alike share the qualities of their maker and what they are made of - we are like God who expressed his creative will in designing sentient beings and limiting our range of capability so as to develop character - and we are like "the dust of the earth" in that we are severely limited and humbled by the reality of our limitations.

The humility of Romney Wordsworth and the nobility of his final days are the subject of this blog in hopes that the reader will consider the depths of these abstract and esoteric issues to the betterment of us all.