I read an interesting article here about abortion being practically illegal in Ireland, as it still is in many other places around the world.

And where it isn’t officially illegal it’s a social taboo. Like being gay.

Abortion is one of those highly emotional topics, which whips people into such a fervor that they start believing they have the right to tell others how to live their lives.

And behavioral prescriptions assume an external authority over our internal reality. A contradiction that is evidenced by our chaotic world.

Religions are great at doing this. They excel at telling people how to live their lives, even going so far as to make threats of eternal damnation if disobeyed. But it’s not just a religious thing because intellectuals and atheists make the same mistake.

In politics, all across the board, otherwise ordinary people hand out lifestyle prescriptions left, right and center. As if someone had given them the creator’s authority. And the entire concept of ‘government’ is based on this assumption.

All of it is completely misleading and creates a preschool-playground type atmosphere where childish quarrels require the constant attention of authority to avoid chaos.

You see, it’s not abortion that’s the issue here, nor is it homosexuality, religion, politics or Government. The issue here is the assumption that human beings are incapable of assuming responsibility while exercising freedom of choice.

The issue here is our lack of personal responsibility. That’s why the world is in such a mess. We are incapable of making responsible decisions.

Look at the world around you. The way things stand now, if government were to disappear tomorrow, chaos would indeed follow. But it hasn’t always been that way.

Human beings are meant to live freely. We were never meant to live governed. The world is in such a state precisely because we’re living in this artificial and unnatural environment of external authority, where we’re constantly being told what to do and how to live.

This authority cripples and disables our inherent ability to make those decisions for ourselves.

Not many people realise this, but we actually lived with freedom of choice for the largest part of our history. We’ve spent 95% of our time on Earth living in pre-historical, indigenous hunter-gatherer societies. Without governments.

We’ve been untrained in a relatively short period of time.

Anatomically and behaviourally modern humans have been living on Earth for between 160 000 and 200 000 years. And it’s only in the last 10 000 years or so that our societies have been organised as they are today: under the authority of government, whether religious or secular.

We’ve therefore only spent 5% of our time in this unnatural man-made environment. The other 95% was spent living balanced between personal freedom and personal responsibility.

And just as our bodies developed to eat foods that are natural, not chemically processed in factories, our hearts developed to live naturally, balanced between freedom and responsibility.

Natural law is very simple: Do no harm. This is part of our natural constitution. Do only unto others as you would have them do unto you. Any human being brought up in a natural and healthy environment will develop this understanding.

Even those brought up in the current artificial world still understand this and are frustrated by the contradiction of our artificial world. Why do you suppose the majority of teenagers are so rebellious? Is it just an oddity? Or is it more likely that teenagers come to realise that they’re growing up into a world that does not fit their true nature? Until, as adults, they’re either assimilated or sidelined.

Think about it. How long do we need to continue trying a failed experiment before we realise that it isn’t working?

Crimes have been punishable by laws for hundreds and thousands of years and no amount of refinement to those laws and punishments have made any of the oldest crimes disappear. Not over the course of 10 000 years.

And yet, 95% of indigenous pre-historical societies lived without the overwhelming rate of crime we have today. And without the need for punishment as we understand it.

It’s only in recent modern societies that governments, politicians and churches have become necessary to govern and punish people, and it all started happening along the same time that the authority of those same institutions were obscuring our natural ability to live ungoverned.

A lioness knows how to hunt. But take that lioness out of her natural environment and feed her daily and eventually she’ll start forgetting what hunting really is. Now raise her children and her children’s children in captivity and eventually hunting will be nothing more than a faint memory.

We once knew how to live ungoverned, balanced between freedom and responsibility.

But, for the sake of control by a power hungry elite, that ability was slowly but surely obscured.

Until today, where we live in a captive society that’s as close to hell as we’ll ever get, despite there being more laws and more sophisticated punishment than ever been before.

And that’s the failure of our modern behaviourally-prescriptive society that we don’t grasp.

No amount of laws and punishment will prevent a person from doing what they’ve already decided to do.

Texas, USA, is one of the few places in the western world where the death sentence is still in use. And yet, the murder rate there is amongst the highest in the world. If laws and punishment solved crime, shouldn’t the opposite be the case? Shouldn’t Texas have less murders?

The way to create a civilised society is not by imposing laws, because laws can never govern consciousness. Internal reality is primary. External reality follows. The way to create a civilised society is by creating a consciousness that does not need to be governed by laws.

Take a child and raise them in a loving home, with patience, tolerance and deep understanding, surrounded by their natural environment and they will develop an innate understanding of natural law.

Balanced between freedom and responsibility.