For nearly my entire life, the question of the value of human life has long intruded itself into my existence in odd and surprising ways. When I was a child growing up in rural Central Florida, it struck me as unsettling that signalizing an intersection, which cost about $40,000 at the time, was only undertaken in my area once an intersection claimed the life of five people in traffic accidents, which indicated that the Florida DOT valued the life of Floridians at about $8000 per life, which struck me as a low value in 1991 dollars. Later in, as a college student, I found an amusing website that purported to give a valuation of the life of the visitor of the website, who answered a set of questions and then received a value, of which mine was in the neighborhood of a million dollars or so, plus or minus. Later on, I found out, to my bemusement, that the company I worked for had kept up an annual insurance policy on me with themselves as the beneficiary, and that this was a common practice among employers. More commonly throughout my life, from my childhood to the present-day, I have found that my value in the eyes of others has largely consisted in what I could provide to them through my obvious intellect, whether that meant providing tutoring or instruction, the answers to their idle questions and more serious intellectual problems, or productive intellectual labor that served the benefit of companies and institutions. Other aspects of my life and existence and personal concern were of less interest to most of these people, except insofar as they hindered my value as a brain-for-hire.

These problems are by no means unique to me. Indeed, people in general find themselves to be valued for what they can provide to others that others cannot or do not wish to do for themselves. I have seen people valued for beauty, valued for their generous hospitality, valued for their kindness and encouragement, valued for their physical strength, valued for their abilities in car repair, plumbing, electronics, cooking, cleaning, gardening, singing, the performance of musical interests, visual art, and many other things besides this. Nor is it wrong to be valued for such things. Jane Austen, in one of her novels, comments that it is preferable to be valued in an improper style than not to be valued at all, and it is better that we be appreciated and valued for something that is useful and beneficial to others than not to be valued at all. Indeed, if we take a pessimistic view of the character of humanity at large and particularly those people who seek after and obtain power within governments, businesses, and other societal institutions, it behooves us to justify our value to such people so that our survival and thriving may be of interest to them. If we cannot trust that people will value us because we happen to be human beings created in the image and likeness of our heavenly father, or that they will value us because of our friendliness and good nature or because they appreciate our company and like us, it is of the utmost importance that we provide some sort of justification for others to wish to keep us alive, because absent such a justification, our lives rest on very unsteady foundations.

This is no joking matter. It has become popular among those who fancy themselves as our intellectual elites to think that capitalism is inherently exploitative because it places an economic worth on human beings and on everything in creation that can be bought, sold, traded, or transformed by the market or by various processes. These same elites view slaveowners and others who command the labor of others, who throughout most of humanity have been the economic and social elites of humanity, as being subhuman for their denial of the unquantifiable soul value that their slaves, servants, serfs, tenants or employees have possessed. Yet these same people do not recognize the even greater violence done to tens of millions of people in the 20th century alone by governments which professed to be the pinnacle of human enlightenment and which made statements like the following concerning their rampant waste of human life and potential: “Alive you are no use to us, dead you are no loss to us.” To be sure, we would all wish to be free people appreciated mind, body, heart, and spirit, but to be valued as useful chattel is superior to not being valued at all in a garden variety totalitarian Marxist state. We do not live in a perfect world where we can afford to be overly picky about how people value us or what they value us for. We must realistically take this world as it is and make sure that we possess as much value under whatever standard of measurement those we have to deal with have in their ledgers and account books. If, God forbid, we get to the point where we are valued no greater than cockroaches, we must hope at least that we are being valued by entomologists who may at least view sections insects as being worthy of intellectual study, though even then our lives in such circumstances are likely to be nasty, brutish, and short.

In light of the seriousness of the task of demonstrating the value of one’s existence and well-being, it is worthwhile to note that the importance of demonstrating that we have value is not in the profession of our value to ourselves, but rather to others, especially those who are not inclined to think well of us. We ought not to approach this task with craven fear, being terrified of those who can only kill the body rather than giving proper honor to the one who has power over our spirit. That said, we ought not to approach this task by arrogantly presuming that others will value us to the same extent or on the same grounds that we value ourselves. We have but limited powers to influence others and most people resent and resist attempts to manipulate and coerce them to act according to our will. It is far wiser for us to seek to understand the worldviews that govern the thinking and behavior of others and in presenting our own value in terms that they can relate to and understand. Even if we are possessed of no particular talent or interest in the arts of obsequious flattery or political glad-handing, being able to frame matters in the language and point of view of those we deal with can be of considerable importance in ensuring that our existence goes as well as possible. To the extent that we are dealing with reasonable people of reasonable perspectives, who are not implacably hostile to us, we can often be successful in bettering our condition by being aware of and sensitive to what others value and being able to demonstrate that value. Otherwise, the wise course of action is to seek to leave areas where our value is not sufficient, where seeking to demonstrate our value is too difficult or too demeaning, and to find areas where our value can be more easily and pleasantly demonstrated to the mutual satisfaction of ourselves and those around us.