[b]Jack Finney
If we believe that we are just animals, without immortal souls, we are already but one step removed from pod people.[/b]
Well, then that’s what we are. You know, if that is what we are.
Would you have references?
I’m awfully sorry but I haven’t. I just arrived in New York, and don’t know a soul. Except you. I smiled but she didn’t smile back. She stood hesitating, and I said, It’s true that I’m an escaped convict, an active counterfeiter, and occasional murderer. And I howl during the full of the moon. But I’m neat.
And neat ain’t nothing, right?
The human mind is a strange and wonderful thing, he said reflectively, but I’m not sure it will ever figure itself out. Everything else, maybe—from sub-atomic particles to the universe—except itself.
Let alone the mind of a body snatcher.
I was stunned. I was, and I knew it, an ordinary person who long after he was grown retained the childhood assumption that the people who largely control our lives are somehow better informed than, and have judgment superior to, the rest of us; that they are more intelligent. Not until Vietnam did I finally realize that some of the most important decisions of all time can be made by men knowing really no more than, and who are not more intelligent than, most of the rest of us. That it was even possible that my own opinions and judgment could be as good as and maybe better than a politician’s who made a decision of profound consequence.
Damned if I didn’t learn this in Vietnam too. Not only that but while I was there.
Why do you breathe, eat, sleep, make love, and reproduce your kind? Because it’s your function, your reason for being. There’s no other reason, and none needed.
And, as likely as not, in an essentially meaningless world.
Relationship building at a distance, through the filter of a computer, is ultimately ineffective for the sincere friend seeker, but it is ideally suited to the sociopath whose powers of manipulation are enhanced when he can operate not merely behind his usual masks but behind an electronic mask as well.
Let’s go so far is to actually name the sociopaths among us here. Starting with the most obvious.