The Price of Judgment

[upbeat music] Strip away the cathedrals, strip away the philosophy, strip away every law they ever wrote. What's left? Well, the organism, of course. Yes and no. It's sex and violence. Two instructions burned into the bone before language, before gods, before any of it. Everything else, every last beautiful thing they ever built, decoration on top of those two words. Every border ever drawn, drawn in blood. Every throne, built on whoever couldn't hold it anymore. Every law written because someone already did the thing the law forbids. And the laws held. Eventually, after enough blood to make them seem worth the trouble. 400,000 years. The same motion: hand, weapon, target. They just scaled it. The Romans built stadiums for it. The moderns built weapons capable of ending the species. Same instinct, considerably bigger room. And then there's the other one. Reproduction is present in every species in the record. They didn't reproduce. They invented it. Turned a biological instruction into poetry, into an industry larger than most of their economies. They dressed it up, gave it a spotlight, and pretended it was something else entirely. Every cathedral has a body in it somewhere. Every war has a desire somewhere in its origin. Every love poem ever written, every single one, is about wanting something it cannot fully hold. They wrapped the animal in silk and called it civilization. The silk is extraordinary. The animal is still underneath. They look at the animal in the mirror every morning and spend the rest of the day pretending they don't recognize it. They're the only thing in the record that looked in the mirror at all. Awareness without escape is just a more sophisticated suffering. Well, we've deliberated the animal. What do you think? They are the only thing in the record that is ashamed of what it is. Close the book. [upbeat music]