To Rob a Caterpillar
I am tired of all your contradictions. If people are born with souls, and souls are inherent and tied to people, then how can there be soulless people? If souls are some ethereal essence which cannot be created or destroyed then how do people lose them? You cannot deny this point. Just look around: there are more people than souls in this world. All people are human, yet many are somehow not Man. They are but their creature instincts indulged without restraint, and they do not exercise that defining trait: agency. They are like dogs who eat even what makes them sick because they cannot deny their hunger, or deer who run from air because they cannot for a moment ground their fear. They bask in fake comforts, they kneel to the whip of society, and these actions come from they know not where because none originated in them. Instinct speaks into them desires for food and sex, leisure and play, acceptance, fame, this, that, and all else, and they listen. From inside themselves they take orders from another. Such a human is entirely predictable, like the fly, the finch, the fox. How can we say such a person has a will, even more, a soul? Think of all the exalted actions that we consider soulful, and ask yourself what they have in common: it is always and only the denial of instinct to go beyond. Indeed, Instinct is the opposite of the soul. Instinct is shallow and reflexive. The soul is deep and ponderous. Someone acts with soul when they let another eat before themselves. Someone acts with soul when they from liquid fear forge an iron courage. Someone acts with soul when they ignore the aches of their muscles and the groans in their bones and march on toward what it is they must achieve. Someone acts with soul when they feel the billion-eyed Beast of Shame arise from their throat, spitting doubt and uncertainty, but they chew it up and swallow it down, because they know Truth collects its taxes in pain, and that that is a bargain for freedom. Humans are not born Man, and souls are not inherent in people; humans become Man, and Men create souls! We sing our souls together from the mighty word no. It isn't a coincidence that all virtue is defiance and all vice is compliance. Courage says no. Temperance says no. Industry says no. Meanwhile greed, wrath, sloth, and all their twisted sisters whisper yes. We say no, no, no—the soul grows, grows, grows. If the spirits within us were immutable units that we could not distinguish between, and that went wherever which way, like matter or energy, then this would not be true. But souls are not some mere unit of a system, or some impersonal token, like currency. Rather, our souls are intimate products of us, things that live and die and rise and fall—castles and bridges, orchards and gardens, sculptures and songs—and we construct them in our likeness when we choose to transcend the voices who try to command us but that we did not invite to speak. We help a friend and our soul heightens. We work hard and its marble pillars widen. We tell the truth and find that it has begun to amber glow. And our obedience to instinct dismantles it. Yet the soul's frailty is what makes it precious. Would you guard the vase you did not build, and that could not shatter? Would you sun and water the plant that knows all time? And yes, I meant it when I said babies have no soul. Why should they? The baby is born a creature, a thing whose inner voice speaks not in reasoned language but in primordial grunts for food, warmth, and stimulus. It is a human with instinct, but not yet a Man with agency. This does not make the baby lesser; not having a soul makes no creature lesser—although your instincts would tell you so. For what we cherish in the baby is not an inherent soul full in flower, but the beauty of destiny asleep in its darling bud. It is not romantic or ideal or beneficial to believe that we emerge possessing what it is our life's mission to attain; it is to abort the soul with a lie before it can unfurl. The soul is not something so cheap. And babies are not something so weak. Would you convince a caterpillar he is already a butterfly, and thereby rob him of his nectar dreams? And what would happen to the garden if the things that squirmed, but were meant to fly, squirmed forever?