A Future Without Another Adam Lanza: A Rant by Giftorcurse

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Peter Lanza, the father of this boy Adam, was interviewed recently, and the things he said chilled me to the bone. I wish that he was never born. Those words have been echoing in my head since yesterday. I've been thinking long and hard, about human nature, our flaws, and what we can do to prevent another Adam. A terrifying vision of the future entered my mind.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeqbxjebGck[/youtube]
With prenatal genetic screening a reality, the concept of designer babies is slowly becoming a reality. Within a decade, parents will be able to choose the traits of their dream child. These "perfect children", born to wealthy and influential families, would come of age in a world where they are the subjects of envy by the Average Joe. They're harder, better, faster, stronger. Eventually, the Over-Children will become Over-Men and Women, and potentially reach positions of power and influence greater than their parents, like the Oval Office, for instance. Having been created and raised in a world rife with human error and fault, they would come to the conclusion that, in an effort to prevent tragedies like another Holocaust or Newtown massacre and to validate their own feelings of superiority, we the Average Joes will have to be subjugated (if not outright eliminated) by The Over-Party for the good of the Earth. UnThought, mindless and unquestioning complacency, is the order of the day. Thought and sexcrime are grave sins in the eyes of the Over-People, for it is free thought and sexual love that necessitated their takeover in the first place. When not being rounded up and slaughtered on a daily basis, the Average Joes are left to their own devices in the ghettos while the Over-People, the citizens of the State, live in luxury within the cities, living luxurious, but empty lives under the watchful eye of Thought Control, the night-walking Sex Squads and other bodies of the powers that be.

I apologize for the rambling. Apparently, I've been reading too much dystopian literature.

Last edited by Giftorcurse on 11 Mar 2014, 3:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I think the future is here now.

You say:
"Eventually, the Over-Children will become Over-Men and Women, and potentially reach positions of power and influence greater than their parents, like the Oval Office"

How is this NOT like the present situation?? Political positions handed down from father to wife, or son or daughter (etc.) is rampant. Whether these members of our "royal families" are healthier and longer living is a moot point: THEY HOLD THE POWER! And they "keep it in the family" just as the members of Hollywood dynasties keep their progeny on the "billboards". And it shows no sign of changing in the immediate future.

denny

There apparently was a scifi novel dealing with this idea. I think it was called Beggars In Spain, and the author was Nancy Kress. I'm not sure though. It's long out of print, you may find a copy on Amazon. In the novel, the world's billionaires uses genetic engineering to create perfect people. The perfect people are the sons and daughters of the billionaires. They have every advantage, and eventually there's a war between them and regular humans. Also, you can watch the movie Gattaca, which dealt with a similar idea, a dystopian world where genetically engineered perfect people rule. This is not a new idea. In fact, the Nazis were trying to create a "master race" in the 1930s through selective breeding. Imagine if Hitler had today's technology!

The problem is, genius and madness exist not as opposites but as a spectrum, like autism does. There are rarely "pure" geniuses, they tend to have major mental issues too. Watch A Beautiful Mind, about a brilliant mathematician who suffered greatly from schizophrenia. Nikola Tesla was one of the smartest men to ever live, yet he had mental issues which created a lot of suffering in his life, and actually stole opportunity from him, he could've been a billionaire if he'd been a little more ruthless with Westinghouse (can't remember his first name) who kept making big mistakes. Instead Westinghouse got rich and Tesla died poor. Warren Buffett is another genius who has a very limited diet and who can't dress himself in the morning. Henry Ford was brilliant mechanically and dumb in everything else.

One interesting fact is that ASD, genius, and crazy seem to all be related. The thing you will note about Tesla, Buffett, and Ford is that they've all been claimed to have had AS. You apparently can't divorce genius from madness from autism. This is where German Eugenics breaks down. You can't have a genius OR a crazy person. Exterminating crazy people would lead to societal stagnation and ultimately collapse. German Eugenics, if taken to its logical end, would result in a society of idiots who would be at risk of mass death in a pandemic owing to inbreeding.

This has been tried everywhere. The results have never been good.

While it may seem some are better, give it a few generations, wars, economic change, climate change, what used to look good does not function well in the new world.

The families that made Rome, became the ruling class, then killed each other for more of a limited supply of power.

In Egypt they kept it in the family till a girl had her father for a husband, her grandfather and great grandfather were the same man, and her mother was sister to her father/husband, and half sister to her daughter.

The Inca had about the same system, but did take in new blood and send out some royal blood to the better families. It worked, till the Spanish showed up, then the flaws in the system showed.

The Royal lines of Europe were inbred, and fell to ressive genes.

In China Civil Service was by test of the classics, and those who did well on tests were not fit to manage an empire.

Selecting for any trait seems doomed to produce other much less desirable behavior.

As for reducing the less disireable traits, everything has been tried, but as fast as they are burned at the stake, hung, locked up, others take their place, and a market develops for whatever they were accused of.

If someone is burned for making a deal with the devil for power, and gets caught robbing people on the road, a smarter person would also seek the deal, but only use it for getting elected, or bank loans.

Now in Mexico Curados are in demand by the cartels for magic protection spells, and devining who is trying to kill them. This was driven by people getting away with a lot before they were killed. They claimed magic protected them.

Where the Church would swear on the body of Jesus in the Vatican cellar that the Devil and Black Magic were very real, and only their Magic could protect people, Psychology claims there is no such thing, and only their spells can cast people into preventive drugging.

Traits are known to skip generations, you are more like your grandparents than your parents, and your children will be a curse of revenge upon you. Some times the better traits are joined in one person, but their offspring can have all the worst of the last thousand years.

Cloning has the same problems, a thousand Bill Gates would most likely produce cellar dwelling geeks playing video games. The odds of producing the next richest man are slim to none. Luck, timing, cultural shoplifting, joined to form a one time event.

The main problem between rich and poor is the poor can live on a lot less, but being rich costs, even when the market is down, the dollar inflated, and places to invest at a profit beome rare. To keep up with what made the money we need another planet to loot. There is already too much Capital seeking returns of 10%. China exports are down 18.5% from last year. all things have an end. Dollars are harder to make, but trillions can be lost in a day.

A few degrees warmer, crops failing, cattle dying of drought, the traits needed for survival change, just as they do if it starts snowing and does not stop, as it has several times before.

Some periods one might predict a future of gradual change. In 1859 the Industrial Revolution and mass production of metals showed the next decade to be one of increasing production. Then the war started.

In the 1930s electronics, radio, TV, all metal aircraft, showed a new and richer world, then the war broke out.

Our post industrial present is not the age of knowledge it was supposed to be. Roads and bridges are failing, and our education system is failing. The Net Worth of most is in decline. Most industry has been bought by government pension funds. If you ever wonder why Corporate Capitalism seems to get a free pass from government.

The greatest people of the next age may be the ones who can produce the most food on an acre, with only human labor, through adverse times. Everyone else dies, we can make fun of them.

I see no way to produce a Superman, or to prevent Lex Luthor from his evil plans.

Besides which, it would ruin the comic book market.

History shows us that Reality keeps getting stranger.

so to prevent genocide, they'll commit genocide?

For their own safety and "for our own good", they'd either do that or at least pack us into ghettos.

When I read that I thought what he should say is he should have just gotten a vasectomy early on and never had kids. If a parent is gonna go and say that about their kid, they shouldn't even be a parent. Really makes you wonder...

He's just trying to distance himself from his son as hard as he can. I can't say I blame him. I mean, who wants to be Jeffrey Dahmer's Dad? Or Ed Gein's?

So in other words his dad has a moment of catharsis over something he could never have known would have happened when having a romp with the misses, he feels better that he might have lightened the load of the 'serial-killer's dad' label and in the meantime he just made a statement that caught fire in the eugenics debate.

I think this just needs a lot of editorial help from various thinkers on the topic. I liked Inventor's post on the topic a lot as he hit on just how much of a churlish statement this was by the dad with no thought for secondary consequences. Also yes - eugenics are a pipe dream.

I think it's the opportunities and what people are able to make of their lives. They start with a certain pre-script, parenting has a certain amount to do with it, and it seems like mass murderers can be made with circumstances just as quickly as can breakthrough billionaires.

Quite sadly when an autistic or other permanent outsider runs into the high school mentality of pop culture, the archetypal movie/sitcom jars that it rather lazily tries to break and shove people into, and gets slated all day long with negative options from society that pretty much say "we want you gone - either commit suicide or go climb a clock tower and let the police do it for you" - it takes a heck of a strong person to refuse both options and be dead set on making their own way out of that. What's far more phenomenal to me, not just among autistics but everyone living in a 'hell on earth' scenario is that out of those suffering such pain, far less than one percent - closer to one percent of one percent - make the headlines. That actually says a lot of positive for the human spirit. Clearly though I'd love to see the number of people suffering such social oppression diminished and of course by other means than genetic screening.

The father hadn't even contacted the kid in two years. He doesn't sound like a very loving father from what I have read. Just a distant one. Then he goes and says he should have never been born? Something is obviously seriously dysfunctional here.