Sunday, January 01, 2006

It must be the hottest day ever in the history of the planet, first day of 2006 and i finished work and went straight for surf. It's messy brothers and sisters but the one wave that hurled me through the space-time barrier was worth it. Now earlier in the piece Aline asked about a drug company curing selfishness with a drug it had manufactured.
Lets consider the options. Firstly any drug company operating at the moment needs to be looked at through cynical lenses. So we would need to consider what do the drug company get out of a cure for selfishness? Is the drug safe? What are the side effects? How is it distributed and who has access to it? Perhaps if all Americans where given the drug free or it was administered in their cornflakes, without any one knowing, the planet would change radically, perhaps if the rich were given the drug, the distribution of wealth may balance itself but really if a drug company had a cure for selfishness what form would it take, pill, injection, methinks gene manipulation possibly. Okay so what does the drug company hope for? It's motives will not be benevolent; such is the nature of drug companies.
But there is a deeper much more philosophical question that needs to be investigated. This is the spiritual one. If one can take a short cut to learn unselfishness, is it not denying the individual the journey to the destination, after all it is the journey not the arrival that makes travelling an evolutionary path worthwhile.
Let's look at the young man who observes the larva eating and struggling its way out of the cacoon. He watches in wonder as the little thing pushes and rips at the cacoon to escape its confines, a poor little thing, faced with an overwhelming battle, for hours it pushes apart the skin of the cacoon. The observer faced with unselfish consciousness intervenes and assists the moth by prying open the cacoon with the end of his pencil. The result is the moth clambers out. But the observer notices a deformity, its limbs have not built up the muscle it needs to form structural integrity, it is crippled, it cannot fly and hobbles out from the cacoon. The observer acts honourably, unselfish in intent but the results are chaos for the creature.
So i think that the idea of a pill to instant cure to selfishness from external factors usually have ramifications that lead to entropy and not harmony.
So your question, 'What happens to the Ally man?'

The DNA engineering requires a cloning procedure to create the unselfish version. Once this version has been cloned the drug company has to obliterate all evidence of the original, so he is incinerated. The clone lives an unselfish life. Neither doing harm to himself or to his environment and peers. However side effects of cloning include rapid aging and an overwhelming sensation of loss and incompleteness. These result in psychiatric conditions that are treated with further experimental drugs, compounding the health of the clone. However with the right kind of care the clone manages to live a relatively normal existence until the build up of repressed selfishness results in a killing spree at the local school where several children and teachers are murdered in a jealous rage. At the court case the Clone is able to have charges dismissed as at the time he was insane, and he is also able to sue the Drug Company for an undisclosed sum, rumoured to be in the billions.
Currently the Clone is on a secret island location cloning himself in the hope of reaching eternal life. However all subsequent clones are selfish and plot against him, resulting in death and anarchy.

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