The symmetry and humane fairness of the operating system is exquisite except for this brutal unfairness. All the poor people who have suffered because of ignorance or
psychopathy during the million years while the human machine worked up to realize its perfect mission. But maybe even this glaring, nightmarish unfairness gives us insight into the larger mechanism of exquisite perfection otherwise at work in every other sphere and phase of existence and life except this one. Let’s consider the “in for a penny, in for a pound” argument on the circle of the universe.
There are only two possible scenarios at this point for arguing that life and existence make a perfect offer, and how the path to realization is opened only by the simple choice to do no holistic harm. The possibilities are that the offer of existence is not perfect, or that it is perfect except for the awful suffering of billions savaged by ignorance and psychopathy whenever we damage ourselves and impede the machine. It is impossible to argue that the operating system is perfect if there is no afterlife of some kind where the awful crimes done to us by the psychopathic antagonist make no difference in the long run. Phase One existence is where we are now with tribalism and dog eat dog and kill or be killed thinking, and psychopathy ruining commerce and enterprise, statecraft, truth, humanism and everything else. Phase Two would be when we become civilized enough to see ourselves enough as one tribe that we do no holistic harm to one another that would disturb the genius machine. Look at all the cruelty in history resulting from our passage through Phase One. Without this afterlife of Phase Three there is no way to argue that the operating system and its offer of the best possible life is superrationally perfect.
I would argue that the few glimpses we have from people who have come back from a look at death support the argument that any suffering we do on this side is made up for on the other side, so that the inarguable unfairness and brutality of whatever happens here during Phase One is compensated for after death in a Phase Three. Otherwise a system that is inarguably perfect in every other respect is glaringly awful and unfair in this one element. This makes no sense because the model is not symmetrical. Symmetry exists everywhere else—how can it fall short only here?
In conclusion, we may feel reluctant to accept a functional, processual, experiential and existential center-point as the core of why we exist. Because that core feels ephemeral, it feels uncertain. But it is not. It is implacably fixed on our own highest humanity. Our universe is run by a maze of structural forces probably made out of consciousness—that is everywhere and nowhere at once, the substrate of everything and yet unlikely to ever fully know, feel or control. We can only “control” it by living and thinking correctly. Complexity science and other branches of science have already pointed out how all of reality is, as Heraclitus said, never placing our foot into the same river. As Zen says, all is impermanence. All, that is, except for the moral lesson behind everything and that reality sticks our face in. The great lesson that philosophers from Lao Tzu to Marx have missed is the positive role of materialism that both delights us and drives us into lessons on restraint that always end up at the tuning of the Genius MachineTM that loves and feeds on the mistakes, problems and errors of mortals. Every success rests on a mountain of mistakes. Which mistake can we remove from any pile that did not help find the solution? There seems to be a kind of semi-divine sweet spot for us in the biological determinism always at the top of thriving. If you want it, you must improve yourself, and earn it. God, Nature, Life, Existence, the Cosmos, the Universe, Creation or Godness made this functional, experiential “node” of bounded instability the core of the fortress of the universe, of entering into existence. One proof is that we are not able to even imagine an existence better than this one—and yet we still have dream on top— and anything less would spoil surprises and make learning and humane self-sacrifice mean less than everything. Another proof is that all tribes want to survive and improve their circumstances. In the end, genius is always the best way to do this. Another proof is that all cultures believe in the end that they have the best handle on how to help humankind. There is no explanation or method superior to this one that already makes our world go round.