Episode Details
Back to Episodes
The world’s worst people have a plan
Description
“The nature of the ultimate revolution with which we are now faced is precisely this. That we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy to get people actually to love their servitude.”
~ Aldous Huxley
The Parable of Two Brothers
Imagine, if you will, two brothers.
Born at the very dawn of the 20th century, into a dynasty of scientific titans, the intellectual elite of a civilization awakening to the raw power of science and technology.
They shared the same elite education, the same inherited social status, the same genetic code. But when the two brothers looked to the future of the human race, they saw two entirely divergent timelines.
Created by the very same technology.

The elder brother looked at the tragedy of the human condition – the bodies that age and decay, the minds that fade into dementia, the agonizing, inescapable ticking clock of mortality – and decided it was nothing more than a biological flaw.
Nature made man to die. But man could remake man to live.
Humanity’s ultimate destiny, our moral imperative, was to seize control of our own biology. The elder brother dreamed of a world where we could engineer away disease, upgrade our fragile flesh, and consciously direct our own evolution. He pursued the prize that has ensnared men since time began: the end of human suffering.
The younger brother looked at that same dream… and saw a meatgrinder for the human soul.
He understood the trap. He saw that all human fear was the fear of our own suffering. Instead of facing our fear, humanity would obey any authority that promised to eradicate suffering. The authoritarian cage would not be built with iron bars or enforced by a jackboot stamping on a human face. It would be built of test-tubes, genetic