THE FUTURE ABSOLUTE

 

A transcendental civilization won't punish offenders against it, but will endeavour to correct them.  The bourgeois/proletarian civilization of the contemporary West is certainly interested in correcting offenders, especially in its more progressive manifestations, that is to say, in countries whose relativity is inherently more extreme, like Sweden and Germany.  But it hasn't outlawed or transcended punishment, nor can we expect it to do so, since wherever the pagan root is still intact, no matter how extreme the relativity, punishment will necessarily survive, and often in its most absolute guise - as involving the death penalty.

      A transcendental civilization, to repeat myself, won't uphold punishment, and consequently there will be no death penalty.  Neither will there be life-imprisonment sentences, nor long-term prison sentences which virtually amount to the same thing.  Indeed, there won't be any imprisonment at all, because no prisons.  Instead there will be correction centres, whether psychiatric or otherwise, and an offender's detention in such centres will last for as long as it takes to correct him, and no longer!  Should he prove recalcitrant or well-nigh impossible to correct, then detention may have to be indefinite - that being the exception to the general rule.

      There are some crimes, however, that are less a product of mental derangement or misguided belief than of cold-blooded calculation, and murder and rape may be among them.  It occasionally happens that a murder is committed in consequence of tragic circumstances, whether developing over a period of time or resulting from a sudden flare-up of tension or, indeed, quite by accident, without the assailant's intending to kill anyone.  In a transcendental civilization, assuming murder was occasionally still committed, careful consideration would have to be given to the circumstances of the murder, so that the exact nature of the act was accounted for and the disposition or character of the murderer simultaneously taken into account, the better to determine whether extenuating circumstances should be upheld.  For, taken together, all these factors would determine whether the accused required one type of correction or another or, indeed, whether in fact he required any correction at all, it being necessary merely to detain him until a reasonable verdict could be reached.

      Of course, I don't wish to imply that certain kinds of murder should go without censure.  Detention could mean anything from 1-5 years, depending on the criminal circumstances.  One thing I am certain of, however, is that no-one, whatever the circumstances surrounding the act, would be sentenced to life-imprisonment in a transcendental civilization.  I would like to envisage five years as being the maximum term of detention, with the possibility of a longer period should such an act, or something similar, be committed by the same person again, following release.  Most people should certainly be released from detention within a few months or, at worst, years of their confinement.  Possibly no-one would think of committing murder in a society where all men were treated equally and no-one had any reason to be envious of anyone else - everyone living on approximately the same post-atomic plane.  We may suppose that, as society evolves towards a post-human epoch from a transcendental base, all or most forms of contemporary crime will disappear.  Its causes, including alcohol addiction, drug abuse, sexual rivalry, poverty, racial inequality, poor housing, inadequate education, envy, greed, etc., will have been eradicated.  When there are no longer barbarians in existence because the society or, rather, civilization in question is absolute rather than relative, there will be little or no barbarous behaviour.  A civilized proletariat would have no cause or excuse to indulge in crime.  The wonder of it is that, in a society where the majority are still effectively barbarous, there isn't more crime than already exists.  Certainly this may be said of most Western societies!

      If punishment would be incompatible with a transcendental civilization, could the same be said of euthanasia - the painless putting to death of the incurably ill, insane, or seriously injured?  In a relativistic society there are various arguments on this matter, a fact which accords with its relativity.  In an absolutist society, however, there could be no doubt whatsoever as to the validity of euthanasia for certain specific cases.  And the motivation, the chief moral justification, for sanctioning it would be to put an end to pain which, while tolerated and even admired by some people in a relativistic society, would amount to a kind of sacrilege in one exclusively orientated towards the post-Human Millennium ... in a post-atomic integrity.  While the diabolic pagan root is intact, while, in other words, deference is paid to the proton-proton reactions of stellar/solar energy through some theological abstraction (the Father, the Creator, etc.), stoicism of one degree or another will be upheld by the more traditional or conservative elements in relativistic civilization.  Once this root has been transcended, however, no argument for the endurance of pain could be justified, and consequently euthanasia would be officially endorsed for application to all extreme cases of incurable pain.  The very sight of pain in a transcendental civilization would be an offence against the spirit, a reminder of the centuries-old tyranny of the soul against which proletarian humanity had rebelled before becoming civilized.  Certainly there is no spiritual profit to be gleaned from constant and deep suffering!  A Christian who revels in pain will be brought closer to the crucified Christ, His transcendent salvation, however, receding into the psychological distance.  Such dualism will find no sanction in the future!  He who stems from the Father will have been superseded by he who points man towards the Holy Spirit - the man destined to fulfil the role of a Second Coming.  Such a man can have no truck with pain!

      There are, of course, other things with which a civilization founded on the teachings of this man would have no truck, including the maintenance of standing armies and the perpetration of war.  It is doubtful that symphony orchestras or other acoustic ensembles would be maintained, and we may surmise that all types of acoustic music would cease to be appreciated - the same, I dare say, applying to all types of naturalistic art, or art employing canvas and oils, not to mention all types of narrative literature, from novels and plays to poems and short stories, especially in relation to books, whether hardback or softback.  A transcendental civilization wouldn't uphold any form of traditionalism or conservationism, like a relativistic one, but would be exclusively concerned with what was relevant to itself.  And that could only mean what was absolutely on the post-dualistic level.  Whatever pertained to tradition, no matter how important it was once considered to be, would have been destroyed and/or consigned to the rubbish heap of open-society history.  To a civilized proletarian the past would be something to ignore, so concerned would he be with living in the present in the interests, needless to say, of subsequent evolutionary progress.  He would not be concerned with a cultural heritage - no more, for that matter, than were his barbarous predecessors who, when they weren't militantly Marxist-Leninist in an overly state-socialist context, existed as cultural outsiders within relativistic civilization - the bourgeois/proletarian civilization of the contemporary capitalist/socialist West.