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What’s the purpose of your life?

By Theresa Fritz Camoriano

We humans have a natural desire to find meaning and purpose in our lives.  Many people find meaning and purpose through traditional religions.  Others find substitutes for traditional religion, such as new age, crystals, Tarot cards, and so forth.  One of the most popular substitutes for religion is government, with people seeking to use the power of government to make themselves feel like gods, imposing a “better world” on others through force.  What is the meaning or purpose of your life?

In your attempt to find meaning, you may want to ask yourself a few questions.  Do your efforts support creativity and growth, or do they involve theft and destruction?  If your efforts involve the use of force against innocent people, you are being destructive – not fostering creativity and growth.

Force does not have to be as dramatic as suicide bombings to be harmful – it doesn’t even have to be illegal or to arise from bad intentions.  A million soccer moms with good intentions who fail to respect other people and their property can do much more harm than a few suicide bombers.  It has been interesting to watch the situation in Afghanistan, in which the government has been following its democratically-established laws and constitution to sentence a man to death for converting to Christianity.   That death sentence is perfectly legal, but it also is extremely immoral and destructive. When you consider how to find meaning in your life, you ought to ask not only whether your activities are legal and whether they arise from good intentions but, more importantly, whether they are respectful of other people and their property.  Only when you respect people and their property are you promoting creativity and growth.

In our own country, we have many duly-enacted laws that transfer property or the control over property from one person to another by force, preventing people from using the fruits of their labor to support their own creative efforts and the activities they value. These laws are harmful and destructive, even if the intentions behind them are benevolent.  Similarly, controlling people’s education, health care, and other vital activities by force is also very destructive. 

If you are one of those people who seeks meaning in your life by trying to forcibly control the lives of others, my suggestion to you is to back off!  If your ideas are so great, you should be able to use persuasion instead of force to achieve your goals.  If you think you have the right to resort to force because other people are too stupid to know what is good for them, then you might consider the possibility that you are the one who is too stupid!

For example, if you were seriously injured in an auto accident because you were not wearing a seatbelt, then, by all means, use your example to persuade others to wear their seatbelts, but don’t push for laws forcing other people to wear them.  (If you were too stupid to wear your own seatbelt, do you really think you are smart enough to be using force to run other people’s lives?)  The risk of death or serious injury should be very persuasive.  But please don’t divert police and court resources away from protecting innocent people from dangerous drivers and put them into punishing people who are not creating any harm or risk to others.  While a policeman is pulling someone over for failure to wear a seatbelt, he may well create a dangerous road hazard that causes a wreck, or he may let a drunk driver get by who will then run into a car and kill all its passengers.  The law of unintended consequences tends to result in more harm than good being done by the excessive use of force, even when you have the best of intentions.

No matter how smart or how benevolent you are, you cannot possibly be smart enough to know or understand the individual situations of all the people whose lives will be affected by your use of force.  People are not interchangeable parts.  They are not stereotypes.  They are individuals, each with his or her own life, hopes and dreams, and each having the right to pursue those dreams without your interference.  If you want to find meaning in your own life, I suggest that you start by respecting the right of everyone else to do the same.

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