Necessity, Necessity, Necessity, Necessity

The human species: organized systems across collectivities. Bound by biology, history, physics, each a facet of necessity shaping all states a human life may take. What is experienced, and thus what we are, are instantiations of a larger structure, one that contains all possibilities of what it means to be human. Love, affliction, joy, and other manifestations: all emerge because the architecture of humanity permits it. What can exist within the structure will eventually appear somewhere within it. Nothing more, nothing less; all acts of humanity are bound under the realm of necessity.

Genocide: a result of necessity. Within our humanity exists the possibility to ideate, plan, and execute the sustained, systematic extermination of fellow man. From the Assyrian annihilations to Rome's destruction of Carthage, from the decimation of the Gauls to the leveling of Melos, the human animal has repeatedly realized the latent possibility of collective murder. At one moment a people existed; in the next, through coordinated will and machinery, their presence was erased. Atrocity, although morally abhorrent, is a possible state within the human form, and therefore, by necessity, manifested.

All that is possible exists in either a state of manifested activity or in a state of latent slumber: activity and potential. A man screams in grief over his wife losing the battle to cancer; on the very same day, another man collapses in anguish upon hearing his wife's new diagnosis. What could happen has happened; what can happen will happen. The full range of human states are not anomalies but expressions of the structure of human existence itself.

At the core of human being is a miracle, something beyond comprehension which physics can only theorize. Something necessarily had to exist to create the conditions for the universe to form. Within the possibilities of our universe was sentient life, and thus it happened. The degree which the human mind can feel, think, and reflect on its participation in existence is a miraculous phenomenon. To willingly harm an anomaly that feels such anguish, hope, and despair, that plans for futures and the fulfillment of dreams, is to defile a miracle. Necessity does not imply moral goodness.

Suffering and ecstatic joy coexist under the force of necessity.

Great suffering is bound to happen, yes. But within individuals remains the capacity of how to respond to the suffering they encounter. The laws of necessity requires suffering to exist, but at the interpersonal scale also exists the choice to aid a suffering man. Or, put more simply, the choice to aid a miracle. Through this, the choice to look away and reduce someone into less than a miracle, into just 'another homeless man', is more dehumanizing than death. Death is the movement from consciousness into non-existence; moral distance is the movement from miracle into reduced thing while still alive.

What happened in the past will happen in the future, and this is why it is foolish to be surprised when history replays itself. Different contexts, different lenses, but the same activities play out, no different than a play curated for the current moment.

Grace: the choice to move towards goodness in the face of a suffering man, or love without possession.

If necessity is the structure of the world, then grace is the only force that does not arise automatically from it. Grace is in the collapse inwards of the "I" and "Them", the pure attention to a man contorted by the shackles of affliction under necessity. Grace is the anti-distance, the recognition that the other is just as precarious, miraculous, and transcendentally impossible as oneself.

Grace is a miracle onto itself. It is much easier to look at a homeless man and say, "You created your own struggles", than it is to say, "You are suffering." The former is comfortable, requires little thought, and costs nothing. The latter is uncomfortable, requires immense thought, and costs everything. Grace is the resistance of interpersonal entropy.

Grace is the only act that interrupts necessity. Every instinct within the human animal is shaped by forces that precede it: fear, hunger, history, trauma, habit, self-protection. Like any system, instincts act solely in the interest of self-preservation. Grace only manifests into the world through voluntary attention, or the destruction of the comfortable self. Grace is the self-destruction upwards towards something that transcends even the laws of necessity.