‘an equal society’ seems to mean a society where everyone is treated equally by all of the forces that are out of their control. that would include what kind of careers they end up being stuck in forever?
imagine an asteroid hits the earth, big one. kills everyone except you and a few others.
you meet them on the intergalactic red cross spaceship that startrek-ly refused to interfere on earth until it was certain we’d die without them. you all decide to go work at the same job so you can hang out and be friends.
its a factory full of real smart aliens, who happen to genetically have less functioning brains then any of their smarter speciesmates. its a big complicated machine you have to use, requiring you to solve a paragraph’s worth of logic problem every time you want to push a button.
obviously the aliens solve logic problems pretty fast and the gang of humans feels really out of place, but theyre just barely good enough to have a secure well paying job.
all the aliens in the society look down upon you, they really dont think you are worth much at all, and they dont include you in their superphysics conversations (thats what we would call metaphysics, if we knew all the answers to what we now call metaphysics).
you and your pals think its just great, “theys aliens sure is smart, theysacan learn me all about Diatronic Pancensianism and its postulation” you say, right after you hit your head on the machine.
why are you ok with the fact that everyone thinks you talk like and are an idiot? because you [size=200]KNOW[/size] that you talk like and are an idiot compared to them and always will be.
the end
appendix a
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is a book about a society where all the jobs that need doing have a genetically identifiable and appropriate portion of humanity requisitioned to be cloned.
the book happens to divide all of humanity into like 4 or 5 greek letters’ worth of castes from strong dumb gammas to smart perfect alphas. i’d make it a little more interesting and make sure everyone is as well suited to their job as possible, so that we could maintain some more diversity.
there would most likely actually be a way to only change a specific part of the dna to make it an alpha, leaving the rest as it was to make people as diverse as a population of their caste’s size could be. if it gets too undiverse, we ought to know how to diversify some clones to fix that.
everybody is kept in line with soma, a great drug.
I dont remember how the economics works out in the book, but when im world emperor id make it so they all get paid according to exactly how much real work they do. i would of course find out exactly how to measure that, and i imagine it ought to work out to pay everyone roughly what theyll think they ought to be paid.
one thing the proles would not have to worry about is the fact that they or their kids are never going to get a more intellectually stimulating job. because they understand that not only do they not deserve it, they dont want to try because they know theyll fail. in todays world nobody knows if youre where they really belong.
its either this kind of genetic manipulation,
or its a capitalist economy and government that looks like ours but is able to offer to the proletariat what is showered upon us white stereotypes: toll free highway to a career, especially if we have a brain. not only can many of the people in our stereotype end up not being the best guy for the job that landed in their lap, but plenty of proles have kids that are totally able to do the alpha job better than plenty of alphas.
in a Brave New World, anybody born a prole is definetely a prole and will know it. but just to put a smile on their face, as world emperor id give any prole the opportunity for them or their children to test out of their caste and take a shot at the next. because maybe even robots spill test tubes.
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so if you assume that god doesnt expect us to believe that cloning is wrong without any apparent reason, why might this system not work out?
