Cyberpunk pt11: GATTACA
Thursday, February 18th, 2010No, I’m not talking about the amazingly good movie, even if Jude Law was extremely sexy stuck in a wheelchair.
Jude Law and his impossibly sexily superior DNA
Nor the first 7 chemical elements that certainly define us as actual human beings either.
Today’s post is about the society presented by the film The terrible terrible society (with impeccably good taste in reviving art-deco styles) portrayed in the film is on the cusp of becoming a reality.
A quick synopsis for those of you out there that are such philistines (or if you’re Jewish, filasteins): in a very near future, society has become obsessed with whether or not you are genetically valid thanks to a very liberal program of eugenics. It all starts with insurance companies getting people to take genetic tests and then basically not insuring for certain things, or entirely, because it was an unacceptable financial risk for them (basically the ultimate in insurance companies being able to fuck over their customers… We can’t cover you for this medical condition because you’re likely to have it). In the storyline of the film, since this discrimination set a precedent, it opened up into other walks of life. Schools no longer had to take students because they didn’t have the genetic aptitude to excel (although we can already determine that with league tables, IQ tests and NAPLAN!). Employers could now refuse to employ people on the grounds that they were genetically predisposed to anti-social behaviours, or not excelling in their fields. Dating basically becomes obsolete because you just need to spit in someone’s general direction and they can find out if your suitable for what they want out of a child, with minimal genetic tampering required… and allthose that don’t fit these wonderful biological stereotypes, regardless of what they actually manage to achieve are called “invalids”.
It’s kind of a more up to date, smarter version of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where the best people were actually just average, and everyone else was made inferior by pouring booze into their gestation tanks.
You want some of that hot DNA for your child. In your child. Jude Law just totally in your child...
And right now it is starting with insurance companies that want to screen people so they don’t have to insure them! From there, it’s a slippery slope not to let it go further. And in some parts of the world, such as the United States, it already has. Many high tier firms are requesting genetic samples from their employees, often under the guise (and here’s the sick part) of screening them for what the company’s insurance is actually going to cover.
The idea of breeding out unwanted traits, and then actively working in a way that enriches society seems good, especially if you are like myself, genetically superior to a large proportion of the population. Intellect, decent health, not predisposed to anything major… Why wouldn’t I want to discriminate against those that are not amazingly great, or better?
Yes, there it is. His genetic material delivery device... and soup drinker... Mmmm, Jude Law DNA....
The truth is, I don’t, and a lot of people are probably right now thinking I’m some kind of Nazi loving monster. Yes, thank you Nazis, you’ve ruined yet another area of research for everyone.
I actually do believe in liberal eugenics like this, but the operative word here is “like”. Let’s face it, as much as we all would love to believe the pap that everyone is born equal, there are those that are simply more equal than others andsomehow manage to get a few extra digits tucked in on the right hand side of their equation. I don’t think people should be negatively discriminated against because of random acts of how they were born. It’s my belief that a society like this can only be fair and functional if everyone, not just the rich, has access to technology allowing them to tamper with their potential children’s make up, adding some non-present genetic code to improve them, and removing code that is faulty. To that end, we can use genetic manipulation technology for a very positive form of eugenics.
And this is what you get if you drink from the soup of Jude Law
After two or three of generations of succesful breeding in such a manner, it would then be possible to institute discrimination like this without it being inherently unfair. Admittedly you will get morons who insist on not improving their genetic stock, or think it’s all some gub’mint program to plant tracking devices in their genes so the aliens can monitor them because the president’s really a lizard from Neptune … however, they’re likely to not only pass on inferior genetic material to their progeny, but also a lack of education which they fully make up for with various prejudices. And societies as a whole are generally better off without those sorts of people.
Oh shit yeah, we were talking about DNA and bioethics... Ummm, here's a picture of a helix!
Of course, the flip side of all this is what I like to call the Mike Judge theory of current human evolution, but everyone else calles Idiocracy. The sad fact of the matter is that certain people are breeding a hell of a lot faster, and these are usually people that are in the lower echelons of the social heirarchy. And let’s call a spade a spade here, it’s often due to some genetic inferiority *coughinbreedingcoughlikeinSouthAustraliacoughagainwiththeGermanscough* So is it really so terrible if we decide that it’s time to start handing out the good stuff to everyone? It would certainly be a more cost effective and substantially less traumatic way of improving the human species compared with other options, such as cybernetic adaption. As much as I techno-fetishize, I’d actually much rather have been born a hell of a lot better than I currently am, rather than have to have my eyes replaced to deal with my myopia, and better muscle tone instead of stealing some poor monkey’s 3rd arm.
So this brings us back to the old time of me posting these rants where I’d actually ask some rhetorical questions for you to ponder over for the week:
- We’re already tampering with animals and foodstuffs to ensure superior product, and not just for food. Is it really so different to tamper with people if they’re not actually people yet?
- If you had to submit to a genetic test in order to get insurance, would you actually go out and buy someone else’s genetic material to do it, like someone that buys urine to pass a drug test?
- Would you be desperate enough to close your eyes and suck it through a “hose” if it was the only way to get quality black market material?
- Assuming you could tamper with phenotypes and appearances of your children, would you give them that Eurasian look and a fine arse, knowing that those are things in life that would actually get them further with minimal real effort?
- As genetic defects due to inbreeding are now gone, what happens to the whole incest taboo?
- Was it ever really a taboo with identical twins? Cause, really, let’s be honest, that shit is kinda hot… Not so much a question, just something I had to get out there.
- Would such a society simply become more an more pretentious about the “quality” of someone’s genes, like in the anime series
Geneshaft?
Sadly, everything I was finding was either shit I’ve already posted or was just appallingly bad. And as we know this blog brings you nothing but quality material as you would expect of the verbose and stimulatingly intellectual conversational variety you’d expect on a night out at something like Black Widows, or maybe at the Phoenix. This frustrates me no end, because I actually do recall hours of religiously indoctrinating animated (or, if I was lucky, claymated) pap that on recollection was actually amazingly offensive, racist, or generally fucked up. The kind of stuff that would make Jesus weep… because that whiny emo only child sure as hell did a lot of weeping, and asking Roman’s to cut him because he couldn’t go through with it himself.