Evil Thoughts (really evil thoughts)

As should be obvious to everyone, the past couple weeks of my life have been characterized by a definite surplus of negative emotions. In an attempt to work that negativity into a creative expression of some sort, I came up with the following, and I want to give the following warning before I go any further.

This is a work of fiction. This is not a secret plan for world domination. This is a premise for a horribly inhumane and ethically depraved scheme to orchestrate a topically benevolent society, suitable to be used in the backdrop of a science fiction story that I may or may not write one of these years. The content below is admittedly monstrous on many levels, and I realize that it'll be equally offensive to leftwing nutbars for its flagrant abuses of basic civil rights and to rightwing nutbars for its flagrant disrespect for the principles of moral decency. Once again, this is a work of fiction. If the reader is not able to keep that in mind, then the author strongly recommends that the reader should back away from the computer and run screaming into the night. Thank you.

The aim of this document is to outline an inhumane and ethically depraved scheme to orchestrate the emergence of a benevolent future-society, in which as many of the people as possible get to be as happy as possible; a society in which there is no war, no crime, and as high a standard of living as possible. And to do it without letting ethical concerns restrain the founder's efforts in the developmental phase.

Start out with the premise of a future setting with space travel, but without faster-than-light speeds. Thus, like in the “Alien” movies, the crew of any given interstellar ship spends the vast majority of the journey in stasis; in order to not die of old age before reaching their destinations. One such ship is specifically designed to fly out to a planet which has been surveyed as potentially inhabitable, bring a bunch of colonists there (thus relieving population pressures on whatever world the ship came from), and set them up with what they need to build an initial town and basic satellite system, so they can begin developing the planet as a colony.

This ship is equipped with various things the colonists will need, such as terraforming robots, library computers, and a microbiology lab to deal with indigenous bacteria, not to mention a number of automated systems in order to allow it to traverse interstellar space without need of a full crew, instead leaving just one person on duty at a time to respond to the computer’s automated prompts and deal with problems that might arise in open space.

Of course, reviving a person from stasis is a delicate process, and one that requires direct supervision by the crewman on duty to deal with potentially damaging imbalances in the system. Therefore, at the end of each duty shift, the poor shmuck who’s at the end of his shift wakes up the next poor shmuck on the duty roster, informs his replacement of whatever’s going on, and then the new guy on duty puts the previous guy on duty back into stasis with the rest of the crew.

But one day, as the ship is nearing its destination, the on-duty crewman decides that just making another franchise of the society they just came from isn’t good enough. He’s got all sorts of idealistic ideas about how their current society is bad, and he decides to make a better one instead, for the benefit of future generations. (It’s worth noting at this point that extended isolation can have deleterious effects on a person’s mind, and this guy has almost certainly been having far too many conversations with himself by the point where he reaches this decision.)

He knows that the rest of the crew won’t appreciate his vision of a better tomorrow, so he decides not to just wake up the guy scheduled to take over at the end of his shift and go back into stasis himself until they arrive at the planet. Instead, he lets the guy wait in stasis, while he goes off to work up plans to found a perfect society.

The first thing he needs is a population that is willing to believe in his ideals, which he knows he can’t get in one step. But if he can get his hands on some kids, and control their education, then he can control what they learn and what they believe, giving him an admiring population to work with. Assuming that no other adults are around to give the children dissenting opinions. With enough crew members in stasis to experiment with, it should be possible for him to play around with the delicate settings on the revival systems and work out a way to leave the revived folks brain damaged enough to be non-threats to his agenda.

So, after however many test runs it takes to work out the right level of miscalibration, he manages to get somebody from the crew alive and well and breathing and not thinking too much. Set up some restraints, some IV tubes for nutrition and respirators and whatnot, and he’s got some technically-alive people on hand. And that gives him a gene pool from which to develop some artificially inseminated kids for him to educate in the wonderful glories of his perfect society.

(Yes, I am suggesting lobotomization, rape, and forced pregnancy as means to what are theoretically going to be revealed to be noble and benevolent ends. I did say “inhumane and ethically depraved”, after all.)

So, the kids get an education of his own design, with zero content of history, and plenty of indoctrination that he’s the great wise wonderful founder who brought them out from the darkness beyond the stars and who is preparing (using the aforementioned terraforming robots, which can easily be remote-deployed on the destination planet before the kids are old enough to be indoctrinated) an idyllic world for them to live in. This way, the population doesn’t know to question his methods, and thus they have far less reason to want to rebel against him.

In the founder’s determination, the main hazards to a stable society are as follows. (1) internal population pressures, driving down the per capita production levels and lowering the standard of living; (2) external economic pressures stemming from trade imbalances with other societies; and (3) internal social pressures for individuals and their families to achieve fame and fortune, and to develop an expanding influence from year to year and generation to generation.

The economic pressure is the easiest to prevent, simply by isolating the society. Include in the cultural indoctrination the idea that this is a wonderful world for them to live in, and the outside universe is big and bad and evil, and to be avoided at all costs. And then, when the kids eventually move planetside, set up the ship’s orbital operations modules not as communications satellites to facilitate contact with incoming spaceships, but as laser defense platforms and warning beacons.

“This planet is under biohazard quarantine. Native lifeforms are extremely hostile and toxic. Do not attempt to land. Warning shots will be fired on any ships attempting to approach the planet.” And when you’re being shot at by automated defense platforms completely flanking you on the side facing towards the planet, you don’t take the time to carefully examine the planet’s surface to notice that it really is inhabited, after all.

So now we’ve got the planet nice and isolated so that it can’t develop external economic pressures. Next is the population pressure. That’s another easy one to prevent. Simply remove the link between copulation and reproduction. Every girl gets her tubes tied or whatnot, so that unplanned pregnancies don’t happen. Every girl gets to have, over the course of her life, one daughter. Every boy gets to have one son. When premature deaths happen, additional birthings get authorized by the governmental bureaucracy. Thus, a fixed population value can be achieved and maintained, without human stupidity (like forgetting to use a condom) mucking it up. Start out with a relatively small population number for the initial move down from the ship to the first town, and expand it as they spread out over the face of the planet.

Finally, we have the hardest hazard to deal with; the hazard of human ambition giving rise to family dynasties, amassing wealth and influence over generations until they can directly tinker with the workings of the government. (This is another part where I had to be particularly evil in my scheming.)

First, you get rid of the concept of families. You have “son of” and “daughter of” as described above, but that’s it. No usage of the terms “husband” or “wife”. And since people aren’t being paired off into breeding units, there’s suddenly no need for males and females to populate the society in equal number, which means that a major stratification of society can be biologically implemented, providing an intrinsic and undeniable point of reference for the social divide between the aristocracy and the proletariat.

Now, since the founder is male, and it’s pretty well understood that people who have lots of sex wind up spending a lot of energy on being happy, leaving them with much less energy to spend on being discontented and destabilizing to society, it’s reasonable for the founder to be selective in the aforementioned artificial insemination to manipulate the ratio of males to females, setting every guy up with a harem. (Because any guy who goes out to make himself an emperor is going to set up a harem for himself, and if all the other guys get harems too, that’s one less reason for them to try to rebel against his authority.)

And, because it works with the basic premise of a harem, and it stratifies society in such a way as to prevent the proletariat from achieving rebellion, the culture is established that females aren’t allowed to own any kind of tangible property. Such as the clothes and homes in which they gain shelter from the elements, once the population moves planetside. Thus, even though the girls drastically outnumber the boys, their dependence on the property-owning men for access to the basic necessities of survival prevents any chance of a proletariat rebellion against the founder’s intended structure of aristocratic authority.

However, there is still the threat of patriarchal dynasties developing economic and political influence. To prevent this, the basic plan for authorized reproduction is significantly redrafted. In each girl’s life, she still automatically gets permission to have one daughter (assuming of course she can find a man willing to provide the sperm for her artificial insemination), with additional female birthings being authorized as needed due to premature deaths. However, male birthings become more restricted, requiring specific authorization for each. Each man’s wealth and influence is kept track of by some sort of census bureau, and those who have significantly more than average get to have multiple sons, so that when they die, their sons (each of whom will most likely have already moved out into their own homes) split the inheritance, cutting the largest shares of the society’s wealth into more equitable fractions, thus inhibiting the development of familial dynasties.

Of course, with a blatant majority (quite possibly more than 90%) of the population being female, it’s necessary for them not to be simply illiterate fuckpuppets. Plus, the point of this whole exercise is to design a stable benevolent society in which everyone is as happy as possible. Thus, everybody gets unlimited free education (and medical care) as a basic part of the government’s operating budget, and with the (property-owning) men working in particularly responsible positions in the government bureaucracy, the rest of the skilled labor jobs go to the educated women, with unskilled labor being largely subsumed by the established robotics and the low population pressure.

Additionally, if physical property is restricted to the biologically-designated aristocracy and higher education is made free to all, it becomes feasible to lower the age of legal adulthood to 14 (when children will readily be developed enough to function as fully sexually active and even potentially reproductive members of society), so that a much smaller portion of each person’s life is spent under the direct supervision of parental figures, adding another layer of defense against unwanted social influence to be exerted by the force of familial bonds, without sacrificing the ability of any given student to seek higher education.

However, with so many girls and so few boys in the population, and the basic premise that people who have lots of sex are less likely to foster rebellion, it becomes necessary to institute girl-girl sexual relations as a basic aspect of the society, if everyone is to have opportunities to be happy and productive. This decision is supplemented by careful choices of linguistics. Pre-adult males are called “boys” and adult males called “men, while all females are called “girls”, which fits with their not being able to own their own homes upon coming of legal age. Furthermore, girl-girl sex is called “play”, while girl-boy sex is called “service”. Thus, the cultural superiority of males is indoctrinated into everybody, and the “be good and productive and contribute to society” mantra leads girls right into the harem function.

Within this linguistic scheme, masturbation becomes a taboo for older children and all adults, as both “play” and “service” allow both participants to draw pleasure from the experience, and “playing with yourself” is a fundamentally exclusionary act, thus preventing the various girls in the masturbator’s life from having the opportunity to be socially-contributory in their service (or play, as the case may be). Similarly, male homoeroticism becomes anathema, as every child is indoctrinated that girls are supposed to service boys and boys are supposed to let the girls service them, so that by allowing male homoerotic urges to be indulged, the offending males are depriving all the girls that each of them knows from having the opportunity to contribute to society by servicing them.

So, let’s take the example of an adult girl. She grew up in the house where her mother was living, and at age 14 she moved out to the house of another man in order to go have her own life (and so that the society doesn’t get eroded by inbreeding). In elementary school, she learned to play with the other girls, and she is still free to do so. Also, she learned to service men, and she enjoys doing that too. She continued going to higher levels of school, learned various subjects, and now she has a career.

She doesn’t get paid for that career of course, because she isn’t allowed tangible property. The man whose house she lives in doesn’t get paid either, because she’s not a slave. She can move out to another man’s house whenever she wants, if she should choose to. Instead, there’s a calculated index of how much of a contribution she makes to society. And this is (combined with the indexes for the other people in the same household, since the girls aren’t allowed to buy groceries for themselves) used to determine how much of a share of the society’s production of goods and services it is reasonable for her household to be consuming.

And that’s basically the society as it’s set up by the great founder during his lifetime. Eventually, he dies. And, not having had access to learn about any other historical models of civilization, the people on his little planet continue his policies in the centuries that follow. Now, let’s jump our frame of reference ahead a few centuries.

We’ve got every man on this planet having a luxurious home (because there are so many fewer homes to build and outfit, there’s a lot less to be spent on redundant kitchens and whatnot), a cushy government job with a vote in the planet’s legislative Conclave, and several girls at home who have been indoctrinated from birth that it’s socially irresponsible to fail to service him. We’ve also got the girls living in his home, each of whom has free unlimited health care, free unlimited education, a lot of leeway in finding a career for herself, and no financial considerations to worry about in her life. She’s also got at least one man in her life whom she can service more or less whenever the urge strikes her, and an assortment of other girls (both at home and in the workplace) who she’s been trained to enjoy playing with (and vice versa).

Does it sound like everybody gets to be happy?
Does it sound like everybody gets to be productive?

Hope of Good Puppies

I work evening shift (noon to 10pm), and thus I usually get my "lunch" hour at roughly 4.30pm, when somebody from afternoon school runs is available to cover my desk while I get away from the office for a while. Today, when I drove home for lunch and pulled over curbside to be able to back the car up the driveway, I was met by a most endearing sight.

My cat (who was raised from kittenhood by our wonderful Malamute, and thus honestly thinks he's a very small dog rather than a cat) was sitting at the far end of the driveway, intently watching everything that went by on the street in front of our house. He was being a guard dog for his family. With Kathren gone, he's taken that responsibility onto himself, just as Rusty had always done when he was a kitten. So maybe I still have a good puppy in my life after all.

In related news, my parents and I have been looking into the possibility of adopting another guard dog to protect our family, and tomorrow we plan to go to the local Humane Society to meet a gorgeous Husky named Mia.

(I seem to lack the technical savvy to make the image appear within this blog entry, but the link is as follows: http://www.humanesocietybg.org/MiaHusky1Large.JPG)

With any luck, she'll be calm, sweet, loving, family-oriented, and willing to accept a dog-raised feline as a member of the family. If so, then she'll have a nice home and we'll have another good dog in our family. And if not... my baby boy comes first, and any threat to his safety will not be welcome in my home.

Coming up next, a proofread and readable presentation of horribly evil thoughts that have been percolating from the surplus of negative emotions due to the past week's events. Reader discretion is advised.

Where to Begin

I've been trying to decide what to say at the start of this blog. Trying to think of something brilliant, witty, sarcastic, astute, or otherwise clever. Something worth saying.

Three days ago, I watched my sister die.

That's it. That's the only declarative statement I can wrap my mind around. Kathren was a beautiful dog. She protected her family, and she loved me without question. She was the closest thing I had to a confidant. And she's dead now.

Yesterday, my brother graduated from college. It was a big social event in my family, and my father came home from work early on Thursday in something of a hurry to get everything set up to go attend the graduation ceremony. And Kathren has never been known for her ability to see a need to get out of the way of fast-moving objects several times her size. And thus the day was taken up entirely with taking her to the veterinarian, getting x-rays, and whatever procedures were done to try to minimize the bleeding.

Next would have come the surgical procedures, but the x-rays were a surprise. We knew Kathren was about ten years old based on when we adopted her, but it turns out her arthritis was five times as severe as we had guessed. And given the size and depth of the wound on her leg, infection and amputation were likely prospects. And she's not a young dog.

Even if the surgery was a success, even if she came out from under the anesthesia without incident, even if she was able to adapt to physical therapy to deal with the lack of a leg, it would cost us more than twenty thousand dollars to try. And odds were slim. So my parents made the decision that afternoon that in the morning we'd do the paperwork thing and the doctors would kill my sister.

I didn't know any of this, of course. I was still at the office, doing everything I could to hold things together while my father took most of the day off. I found out during the ride home that night. It was not my finest hour.

Friday morning, my father and I went to the veterinarian's office, did the paperwork thing, and were led into a back room where my sister was laid out on a heavy comforter folded over into quarters. She was breathing raggedly, with a huge red (actually red fabric, not soaked-through red) bandage wrapped around her right rear leg, and numerous points where intravenous lines had been inserted.

It was obvious that she was in terrible pain. Her eyes were scummy with tear-soaked goop that builds up in dogs' eyes, and she didn't even try pulling herself up to slobber all over my face and beg me to make it all stop being bad. There wasn't any choice. I did everything I could to comfort her, while my father signed the final paperwork and the doctor fetched the injection.

As the blue fluid was pushed into her bloodstream, I held my face right in front of her nose and petted her cheek and neck constantly with my free hand. And I listened to her heartbeat fade, and watched the light vanish from her eyes.

It happened so fast. So much faster than Rusty. He was a malamute, and he had his children there with him to the very end. He had so many reasons to be a tough son of a bitch that day. Kathren was a white german shepherd, and she first came to our family after she'd gotten kicked in the head by a horse (thus the earlier bit about fast-moving objects several times her size). She was never that bright when it came to the consequences of her actions.

But I was with her there at the end. I took care of her with every moment I had available from the first second that I'd been told about the accident. And now she's gone. And I'm alone.

I've always been a dog person. Sue-Bie raised me. Rusty sheltered me. Kathren adored me. Every stage of my life that I have any positive memories of is defined by the dog who I had to hug when I got cold and scared and lonely. And now I don't have anyone.

I don't know what comes next.