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avevale_intelligencerJust watched this.
It's odd how, every single time someone tries to imagine the human brain (by which they always mean mind, though the two things are very different) with its full potential unlocked, they can only think in terms of it ceasing to do things, such as feeling emotions, caring, keeping things in proportion or recognising reality. A person becomes super-evolved and immediately starts killing people without compunction, behaving utterly selfishly and forgetting what being human is about.
At the root of this, I think, is a pervasive idea that thinking, in its purest sense, is good and anything else is bad; that reason and emotion are not complementary but in opposition; that once we learn to think we are supposed to give up feeling, as if having learned to swim we should forget how to walk, or having learned to walk we should scorn crawling. It's a flawed assumption, and if taken seriously can lead to real evil.
Still, of its type it wasn't bad.
It's odd how, every single time someone tries to imagine the human brain (by which they always mean mind, though the two things are very different) with its full potential unlocked, they can only think in terms of it ceasing to do things, such as feeling emotions, caring, keeping things in proportion or recognising reality. A person becomes super-evolved and immediately starts killing people without compunction, behaving utterly selfishly and forgetting what being human is about.
At the root of this, I think, is a pervasive idea that thinking, in its purest sense, is good and anything else is bad; that reason and emotion are not complementary but in opposition; that once we learn to think we are supposed to give up feeling, as if having learned to swim we should forget how to walk, or having learned to walk we should scorn crawling. It's a flawed assumption, and if taken seriously can lead to real evil.
Still, of its type it wasn't bad.
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no subject
Date: 2015-01-27 09:25 pm (UTC)If I hadn't been watching it on a plane over the Atlantic Ocean I'd have walked out.
no subject
Date: 2015-01-27 11:26 pm (UTC)As to why the writers think this is what would happen, well, to be honest it is what has happened in the past. Whenever one group has decided that it is superior to rest of humanity, they generally stop caring about the rest fairly quickly.
See history of any aristocracy anywhere any time (aristocracy supposedly means rule by the best, if memory serves). Or pretty much any major absolute system of right and wrong (Christianity, Islam, Leninism, Nazism). Or western democratic governments attitudes towards third world populations - as opposed to the governments of those third world populations.
Admittedly, most of the above didn't result in attempted genocide - though attempted ethnicide was certainly a common consequence - but that last step (extermination instead of enslavement) can probably be put down to seeking to up the dramatic effect.
no subject
Date: 2015-01-28 06:54 pm (UTC)I don't want to go into *why* as that might lead to spoilers....