The Questions

Humberto Gómez Sequeira-HuGóS 51

The questions, “What is life?”, “what is death?”, and “what is the purpose of the universe?” are the inevitable consequences of Homo sapiens’ experience through the process of evolution.

The wise humans became “naturally selected” philosophers by creating the tools that they needed to survive and transforming their selves into the objects of their emotions, thoughts, desires, existence, preoccupations, and sufferings.

Primitive humans responded to the questions by deifying themselves and erecting opulent monuments to the instincts that drove their egotistical, deluded existence as the preamble to their eternal life on the dead bodies of slaves.

Rational thinkers responded to the philosophically important questions—for the continued evolution of humanity as an agent of civilization—by opposing the deification of the ruling class and the institution of their cruel

52 The Purpose of Life

pragmatism as law and order. They dissolved the “divine breath” with reason, replaced obscurantism with science, and thus advanced our evolutionary vision toward altruism.

The avant-garde of our species had the evolutionary advantage of being radically aware of existence as a chemical event whose purity must be guarded against the ruling class’s propagandists who dump the toxic elements of ignorance, selfishness, religionism, nationalism, hate, and war as virtues into the streams of consciousness of life to corrupt it.

The answers to these questions, or lack thereof, determine the rise or fall of human society.