A Mission to the LGBTQQIP2SAA Planet with IDGAFFWYFSPAJGEYESF

“What are those alphabet soups of acronyms, Dave?

“That is our next mission, my dear. The first acronym refers to fashionable social sexual pretensions.”

“Fashionable sexual social pretensions?”

“Yes, a sub-symptom of cluelessness…”

“Sub-symptom of cluelessness? I have never heard that term from you, Dave…”

“It just came out now, spurred by this situation, I suppose.”

“So another micro-insight to add to your philosophy…”

“Yes, and more work, since now I must gruelingly attempt to describe a specific screwed-up behavior in terms of a main symptom of cluelessness, or combinations of them, or the ‘first-order’ symptoms of cluelessness.”

“First order, Dave? Your brain is in hyper-creative mode this morning! First the alphabet soup acronym, then ‘fashionable social sexual pretensions, then sub-symptoms of cluelessness, then ‘first order’ symptoms of cluelessness…”

“Yes, I just noticed my brain going wild. That is probably a symptom of being bipolar.”

“Have you ever been diagnosed as bipolar?”

“I avoid doctors, so I haven’t been diagnosed as anything, lucky for me.”

“Why do you say ‘lucky for you’, Dave?”

“Because as frivolous and erroneous as such diagnoses can be as they serve Big Pharma, the pharmaceutical industry, or the Pill People for short, they can still negatively impact one’s prospects in life. A woman was wrongly, and fashionably, given the diagnosis of being bipolar (and was promptly and fashionably given a placebo I mean the current fashionable med for it), which was later refuted by other psychiatrists, who vouched for her to no avail.”

“Vouched?”

“Once she had ‘bipolar’ on her medical record, she could not get life insurance or adopt kids or obtain preferred employment. The hospital refused to expunge its conclusion even in the face of the diagnoses of outside psychiatrists.”

“And even when the whole field is fraudulent…”

“Let’s just say ‘soft’…”

“No, Dave. Pharmaceutical companies send attractive, aggressive sales people with gifts and perks out to doctor’s offices with free samples of their latest concoctions, which do not work any better than the first generation of pills decades old, or worse, no better than placebos, which are the most successful drugs in human history.”

“But placebos do not cure anything…”

“Shhhhhh… don’t tell clueless humans that…”

“OK… At any rate, my attempting to systematize specific clueless behaviors, or ‘second-order’ symptoms, by their causes in terms of first-order symptoms of cluelessness sounds like it could become as convoluted as Freud’s attempt at systematizing his world of subconscious motivations.”

“Freud’s system built on its own speculations until it caved in…”

“Sad for Freud, who’s reputation suffered, even though he made many advances in the understanding of behavior and the treatment of psychosomatic conditions. Do you know why he developed the ‘shrink’ method — the classic patient on the couch being asked questions?”

“No. Why?”

“Because one day, when a person suffering from physically-debilitating anxiety came to him to see if he could do anything, Freud began asking questions, which turned into a conversation, and then suddenly the patient stood up and said, ‘Thank, Doc. I’m cured!’ Freud was flabbergasted. It worked a few more times, and Freud realized that he was on to something new, physical illnesses caused by one’s psychological state of mind, or psychosomatically caused illnesses as they are now known, so he pursued it, being a scientist first — he was trained as a neurologist and he wanted to do hard science.”

“But he got carried away with his speculative theoretical system…”

“Yes, unfortunately. Blame it on enthusiasm, and our weakness for dogma — his speculations became law, which hindered progress in the field. William James made fun of his system when he noticed that it was getting out of hand… which my efforts could very well do here. I must make the effort to create a system anyway, if only for the fun of it. It will be fast and loose…”

“So how would ‘fashionable social sexual posturings’ be classified as a sub-symptom, Dave?”

“I would posit that the specific first-order causes would be… hmmm…”

“Vanity?”

“Definitely. Social domination, too.”

“Domination?”

“If something renders one trendy, or gives one oddball glamour, then others will be in awe and bow down and offer genuflection, which is good for the ego of a clueless being, or the machinations of a depraved one.”

“What else do we have to work with?”

“You mean what are all of the ‘first-order’ symptoms of cluelessness that are the causes of less broad, or more specific, or second-order, symptoms of cluelessness?”

“Yes… and you still have a little creative spark left, with ‘second-order symptoms’, which I’ve never heard from you before…”

“Let me rattle the first-order symptoms off, and I will include the recent additions, if I can remember them… and these are all due to being clueless, remember, meaning they will afflict those who have not adopted the Philosophy of Broader Survival as their overarching life-guiding philosophy… so we have Vanity, Vainglory, Envy, Jealousy, Xenophobia, Prejudice, Over-Generalizing, Hate, Crime, War, Injustice, Frivolity, Depravity, the new additions of Vapidity, and Mental Sickness which may be too vague and/or broad and actually includes many of these first-order symptoms, which would render them second-order symptoms and ‘mental sickness’ the first-order symptom… then there are what this philosophy classifies as the Three Mental Pathological Urges — which are now four: Greed, Manipulation, Domination, and their new companion, Extermination; then the personal downer symptoms, such as Existential Anxieties, Social Anxieties, Aimlessness, Pointlessness, Absurdity, then the real downers: A Lack of Self-Worth, Apathy, Depression, Numbness, Self-Harm, and finally just plain Suicide, which is what they all ultimately lead to in their clueless, foolish ends.”

That is a lot to choose from, Dave… and I see that your brain is still in a hyper-creative mode, since you just added ‘downer symptoms’ and ‘real downers’…”

“I guess… so ‘fashionable social sexual pretenses’ would be a sub-symptom of Vanity, and of Blind Imitation…”

“Blind Imitation? There you go again, Mr. Creativity…”

“Funny how things work in reverse sometimes, here by addressing an outside issue and affecting the core system…”

“It is the difference between deductive and inductive reasoning, Dave. You are used to inductive, and this is deductive…”

“so that’s why it feels funny… so to continue, just to finish this exercise, ‘fashionable social sexual pretensions’ would be… what do we have so far… Vanity and Blind Social Imitation…”

“Blind Imitation…”

“It needs the ‘social’ qualifier, since ‘social’ denotes its higher purpose…”

“I think that would be classified under ‘fashion’, Dave, since fashion assumes blind, near-mindless, and definitely vapid, and definitely vain and sometimes cruel, social imitation…”

“Maybe I should just leave it at Herd Mentality, which implies not using one’s mind…”

“Or blind behavioral imitation, which is what is really going on…”

“I should add ‘bad attitudes’…”

“What higher purpose does ‘blind social imitation’ serve?”

“Survival. Even lower animals use blind social imitation, but it saves them, since they cannot ‘think’ to any appreciable degree.”

“Example?”

“The Octopus experiment in cognitive science, studying the intelligence of earth’s lower species.”

“What was that experiment like?”

“A teddy bear was slowly lowered outside of a tank with an octopus in it. It was accompanied by giving the octopus a shock. So this octopus was conditioned to flee (the shock) whenever it saw the teddy bear. In other words, the teddy bear was associated with an impending shock. Then another octopus was introduced, new to the situation. Here comes the teddy bear. The new octopus thinks nothing of it, but when it sees the first octopus flee, it follows suit.”

“So it thought, ‘Hey, if he fled, then maybe I should, too!’”

“If it thought at all. It could be a hard-wired evolutionary response.”

“Being right-handed, no doubt… considering how right-handers imitate one another…”

“Very funny, an octopus being right-handed… unless…”

“Unless?”

“Unless right-handers are lower-order beings…”

“But they’ve ruled human history…”

“And look where they’ve gotten it. If left-handers were anything like me, they simply endured the unfortunate situation while trying to figure things out…”

“Enter you…”

“Enter me. What the experimenters learned was that the second octopus learned a lot faster by blind imitation than the first octopus learned by direct painful experience.”

“So blind imitation and herd mentality have survival benefits…”

“Yes.”

“So why do you slam herd mentality and blind imitation in humans, Dave?”

“For two reasons, my love.”

“What are they?”

“First, because they are not needed in advanced societies, where the immediate threats of the animal kingdom do not exist, in which the speed of one’s reaction is critical. That is one theory as to why fish never developed reasoning. Given the murky conditions under the sea, visibility was limited, so when a predator came into view, it was already nearly on top of the fish, so the fish simply did not have time to think. Mindless automatic reaction saves the day. Once they crawled out of the sea, they could see farther, giving them time to contemplete the situation, and their options… I mean, just being able to see to a distant horizon would stimulate the brain to wonder…”

“But such ‘survival’ would also apply to humans when they are around new and strange technologies…”

“True, like running from a sparking, smoking piece of equipment… but what if everyone ran, in blind imitation, from the sparks and smoke?”

“Then… the problem would never be addressed…”

“Correct. A building might burn down, for example.”

“So this is the value of having a left-hander around, who would automatically question the mindless response, see the danger, and fix the problem by throwing the circuit breaker…”

“Yes. The Strategy of Broader Survival’s Population Diversity in action.”

“So that is your second reason for slamming blind imitation and herd mentality?”

“Yes, because I am left-handed, and I naturally do not have those imitative urges, being disgusted with humanity’s overall foolish attitudes and resulting behaviors in the first place…”

“But, given the need for Population Diversity, you should not be making fun of the mindlessness of right-handers, Dave.”

“I would only have them become aware of their automatic tendency toward mindlessness, so they, too, can be Left-Handers as well as Right-Handers. Most people have a little of both, it is just that one side dominates, and now researchers say that there really isn’t a ‘side’ to the brain, that the whole brain is used all of the time, and, when one side suffers debilitation, the other side compensates, so both sides are equally capable of any task.”

“But you would just stand there and question such behavior, investigating the cause, rather than blindly imitating right-handers, so your could say that your brain is left-hand dominant, or right-hemisphere, according to the hemisphere model…”

“Yes, a tendency which, one can easily see, is dangerous, meaning it could be hazardous to me…”

“So that is why, in humanity’s past, they discouraged kids from becoming left-handed, for their own good…”

“I would say so, yes, and part of that ‘good’ is ‘conformity’ to a right-handed world, which would be socially good for the kids, too…”

“And now we have moved from survival to social… but social is a component of survival, major or minor, depending on the situation…”

“Yes, but now you are talking about surviving among an annoying clueless population and not against a harsh and deadly universe, so it is still ultimately suicidal. Imitation is also not so valuable in an advanced society where high specialization is critical, meaning diversification, meaning not copying others, and there are already civilization-level apparatus for individuals to exist semi-independently as they engage in their demanding specializations.”

“Semi-independently?”

“They are not independent of the civilization, where other specialists, such as farmers, take care of their basic needs.”

“Is that why rural areas get a stronger vote in an Electoral College system, since they are critical, but less populated?”

“Yes, to balance out the urban population, whose political wishes may not be beneficial for farmers, whom the urban dwellers depend on.”

“So if the Electoral College did not exist, urban dwellers could vote themselves out of existence…”

“That is what the Founding Fathers concluded. Now you have petty, self-serving urban-pandering politicians who would destroy the system just to win one election by ‘popular vote’, the fools, along with the foolish, tunnel-visioned urban population supporting such destructive short-sightedness.”

“It all seems like a tug-of-war to me, Dave — not just the Electoral College system, but also of existing independently and that of existing socially, and of being dependent on a higher civilization that progresses on ever-more complicated specializations…”

“The philosophy’s ultimate goal is total individualism, which best serves Population Dispersal, an extreme form of individualism that will result in what I refer to as ‘Microcosms’.”

“Microcosms?”

“Where each individual CAN exist fully independently, in a microcosm of an advanced civilization. Fully-independent individuals provide the maximum probability of survival in a harsh and deadly universe by virtue of maximum Population Dispersal. They can be connected electronically to keep up with advances, and physically when reproduction comes around, and they can interact physically at will just to remain sharp at it. I suspect that the struggle for full independent autonomy will be a permanent feature of The Great Struggle…”

“THE GREAT STRUGGLE, AND BEYOND!”

“Thank you, Booming Voice. ‘And beyond’?”

“YES. I JUST WATCHED TOY STORY 12…”

“Oh. Carry on, Booming Voice…”

“HAVE A NICE DAY, MR. AND MRS. DAVE. I AM GOING TO GO PLAY WITH THE KIDS NOW…”

“But the kids are rather serious now, Booming Voice…”

“I put ‘play’ in terms of ‘R&R’, one of the cyclic areas of life as classified on the Pinwheel of Life, and this R&R addresses brain rejuvenation, which they, in their seriousness, understand.”

“Thank you, Booming Voice. Have a nice time with the kids…”

“So, Dave, are you still in hyper-creativity mode?”

“I can feel it waning already, kind of like brain exhaustion… so where were we…”

“Your upcoming mission, where I was questioning the alphabet soup acronyms…”

“Ah, yes. Well, my love, the LGBTQQIP2SAA stands for ‘Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Pansexual, Two-Spirit (2S), Androgynous, and Asexual’. They are the ‘freak’ of new generations.”

“Freak?”

“That was the fashionable social pretense of my formative years. ‘Freak’ arrived as a fashionable replacement for ‘hippie’, which was dying out as a fashionable vapid pretense, which it really never evolved beyond, being largely comprised of mindless imitation.”

“Vapid because they were philosophically clueless?”

“Yes, if you want to get to the core of the problem. The movement was very mentally lightweight. I could not stand any lightweight mindsets, and they could not stand me not being able to stand them, which I could not help..”

“So you were really at odds with all of humanity, not just mindless hippies, since all humans are clueless, to the last, as you say…”

“Yes. They, all of them, the whole human race, were, and still are, clueless… but I’ve learned to be polite and politely indulge their cluelessness, realizing that in trying to enlighten them I would be messing with their biological addictions, in this case to weak mentalities, bad attitudes, and mindless imitation, which, being biological, are addictive, and change VERY slowly.”

“So you’ve learned to have patience…”

“Yes. Anger clearly was not working.”

“Nor sadness?”

“Not nuttin’. Anger, frustration, sadness, exasperation.”

“So you just need to wait for biological change to take its good ol’ time once you ‘plant’ the seed of enlightenment?”

“Yes, and I must empathize with addictions, too, since I’ve noticed such addictive tendencies in myself.”

“So… pretensions… but do not all of those sexual afflictions that the acronym represents — what were they… Lesbianism, Gayness, Bisexuality, Transgenderism, being Queer, being sexually Questioning, being Intersexed, being Pansexual, being Two-Spirit (2S), being Androgynous, and being Asexual, all have genetic causes?”

“Only being androgynous, when one was physically born a hermaphrodite, and not just mentally screwed-up by a clueless society.”

“Hermaphrodite?”

“Having both female and male sex organs, usually female up top and male down below. One is born with that, so that is not a choice influenced by fashion or peer pressure or media or capricious knaves of all sorts…”

“Why do you claim that all of the other sexual conditions are choices, Dave?”

“Observation, my love. Because I have noticed ALL of those other tendencies… IN MYSELF! Now, applying inductive reasoning, I concluded that ALL humans have all of those tendencies, so it now comes down to ‘choice’ — meaning whether you ‘choose’ to go down that social path or not.”

“But hasn’t it been proven that such tendencies are genetic?”

“No! That is bad science coupled with sensationalizing media, or sensationalizing media spin on a paper’s title (the bane of scientists doing good science). Only media puppets fall for such sensationalistic claims. All of the ‘a gene has been found to’ are examples of bad media spin. 99.9% of all of the ‘a gene has been found to’ are sensationalistic media concoctions of speculative papers. Genes, at best, give us behavioral tendencies. Lower animals are slaves to them. That is why genetic engineering works so well in lower animals. They do not know what is going on. In us, such primal behaviors have higher reason to contend with. So in us, the major component of such decisions are derived by free-will as such deliberations (which animals cannot do, remember) are influenced by… drumroll… cluelessness or enlightenment, and you know which one has dominated life, as innocently nascent (meaning uninformed) as it has been, up until recently, that is. Some species, humans for example, no longer have such an excuse, since they are endowed with a brain that can engage in extended reason.”

“Did you ever encounter such a situation yourself, Dave?”

“Yes. The one direst personal situation that always comes to my mind first was when I was in San Francisco, which, as everyone knows, has a large gay culture. It was in a hotel lobby, and there were gay guys there. One looked at me with bright eyes and sexual desire, and, as you know, sexual desire creates beauty in one’s eyes.”

So… this ‘guy’ appeared ‘beautiful’ to you?”

“Yes! I said to myself, ‘Woah! So that is how homosexuality happens!”

“So what did you do?”

“I realized that I had a choice — to go down that path or not. I chose not to. Whenever I encounter it, I politely choose not to go down that path. Now here is where fashion enters the picture, my love…”

“So… if it were fashionable in one’s generation to go down that path, then one will have a higher tendency to go down that path if one wants to be fashionable within one’s generation…”

“Yes, you see how it works now…”

“But you only have yourself as a datum point…”

“No. It hit close to home, no, AT home, in another way — I watched my first daughter go down that path, and I saw what her primary motives were — the mentalities of boys her age sucked, being clueless as we now know, so a female companion was preferred in her situation, that of trying to finish college, and being LBGT was fashionable in her generation. Double whammy. If any genetic predisposition was there, and it is in all of us, remember, the rest was free-will, a conscious choice. She is also near-pathological in her fashion-consciousness in all areas of life, be it clothes or technology or beer or wine or mixed drinks… It is sad and painful to witness.”

“Her shallowness pains you?”

“Yes. She was raised in a clueless environment, remember — I did not turn my attention to philosophy until she had grown up and had moved out on her own, and she, being biological, is subject to addictions, to being fashionable in this case, so I need to be patient and understanding.”

“And indulging…”

“Yes, for whatever that is worth… maybe I’ll tease her and tell her that I am going to get her fashion affliction into the DSM-6 as an official mental illness, and maybe with a fancy Latin name…”

“She knows what the DSM is?”

“She’s almost has her Doctorate in Psychology, so yes.”

“Now about ‘Fashionophilia’?”

“Brilliant! That would make her a ‘fashionophiliac’… haha…”

“She will not appreciate you teasing her, Dave…”

“I know, and worse…”

“Worse?”

“She has many shortcomings in me to choose from and tease in return, and, in her twisted mind courtesy of cluelessness, she would think that that my shortcomings justify her mindless fashion addiction…”

“Your ‘shortcomings’ including not ‘believing’ in complete genetic predisposition?”

“In her mind, yes. She believes in complete genetic predisposition, and denies Free Will.”

“But that may simply be her being her contrarian self…”

“Very likely, yes… she is also a Contrarianophiliac, if a term applies… and there you go, another official mental illness worthy of a new expensive placebo… I mean a hastily-opportunistically developed and then heavily-marketed and pushed (by pharmaceutical companies) and then opportunistically and fashionably-over-prescribed (by family doctors, general practitioners who have no business making life-damaging psychiatric evaluations in seven minute visits other than to receive kick-backs and up-front perks from the drug interests) pill with an impressive, trendy name… I can see it now, ‘Ask your doctor about CONTRAVOX, may cause diarrhea, projectile vomiting, hives, warts, skin lesions, drooling, and tooth loss …”

“Such doctors have a name in the industry for doctors who over-prescribe pills, ‘High Flyers’. They drive the best cars and have the most expensive homes, and, needless to say, they are the most fashionable doctors in a fashion-conscious population where pill-popping is fashionable for some and a competitive bragging sport for others. So what does the other acronym mean, Dave?”

“You mean the ‘IDGAFFWYFSPAJGEYESF’?”

“Yes.”

“It stands for ‘I Don’t Give a Flying F-u-c-k What Your Fashionable Social Pretensions Are, Just Get Enlightened, You Exasperating Suicidal Fool’.”

“Good grief, Dave!”

“Yes, I know. Anger does not work!”

“So you are going to go to this planet with… an angry ATTITUDE!”

“I suppose that is what I am going to do…”

“In hopes that your anger will have a swifter impact so you will not have to suffer frustration, sadness, exasperation, and, worst of all, patience?”

“That is the picture I suppose, yes.”

“Well, Dave, I think you should suffer instead.”

“You do?”

“Yes! Because it is plain to see that anger will not work…”

“But it is worth a try. Otherwise I would… suffer!”

“That is weakness, Dave!”

“So it is, my love, so it is… do you think that the word ‘exhaustion’ applies?”

“Yes, maybe it does…”

“I mean, what primal creature would want to become exhausted in a tooth-and-claw world? It would spell death… which makes using anger a personal survival issue, in this case it is why creatures become angry if you begin to exhaust them, if only their patience…”

“But then you do not live in the wild, Dave, you live among advanced civilizations, so you can afford a little exhaustion and a lot of patience…”

“Yes, but it is exhausting nevertheless, my love…”

to be continued — Dave has not visited the planet yet (as a thought-experiment for the author), and there may be some socializing around the ship to do beforehand, or after, and maybe a visit to the Romper Room, which is quickly turning into a research center, we will ask Ship about that, since the kids are maturing fast, but not too fast, since we would like to explore, as thought experiments, what the kids would be like as they grew up in an enlightened environment… and then there are the unforeseen variables — who knows what will happen (I don’t — I write spontaneously, so these stories progress unexpectedly. I never know what will happen next myself, even with me being the writer)…

“So where to now, Dave?”

“I don’t know, Love. We are the spontaneous creations of our author. Fear not, however, he has many tools to advance stories along, from traditional techniques to original madness. How about we sink into solipsism?”

“What is ‘solipsism’?”

“When you think that the external world is not real.”

“Is it?”

“Stand under that falling piano and get back to me with your findings…”

“Um, no thanks. I will conclude, just on life experience and its contribution to applying foresight, that the external world is real, whether a solipsistic person acknowledges it or not… but…”

“But?”

“But articles like ‘Objective Reality Doesn’t Exist, Quantum Experiment Shows’ do not help fragile minds, and it gives fodder to knaves and capricious smartasses.”

“Did the paper actually make that claim, or is it media spin for attention-grabbing purposes, good for nothing but advertisers?”

“I don’t know… let’s read it… it begins by saying that ‘alternate facts’ (in this case that objective reality does not exist) should not exist in science, since the scientific method is founded on observation, measurement and repeatability.”

“Stop right there. That is where the article makes its first mistake about science.”

“Explain, Dave.”

“Science begins with pure speculation. Then it filters though them and picks those speculations that are worth pursuing. Most speculations not worth pursuing any further than immediately recognized that they are wrong due to the speculator having been uninformed of existing verified knowledge.”

“You mean ‘ignorant’.”

“I was being nice. So the best speculations are from the most informed, usually scientists, and, if the speculation is unusually original, then left-handed scientists…”

“Dave! You are not going to give that a rest, are you!”

“Too much fun, my dear. The next step is to devise clever experiments to test the speculation. If the experimenter loves the speculation, however, then the data interpretation may be biased for it, and this, too, the article is blind to, because science is also made up of data interpretation, which have been the weak links in science, and the primary source of ‘bad science’.”

“So science needs more left-handers to see things differently…”

“Thank you, my dear.”

“So after observation, measurement, and repeatability, one can still draw an erroneous interpretation…”

“Yes. Quantum mechanics itself is a prime example, with ‘quantum leaping’ at the very least.”

“What about ‘superposition’?”

“That is a misunderstanding by the layman, not a bad interpretation. Rather than a literal statement (that an electron is in all positions at once until measured), it is a probability, a mathematical tool of determining where it is likely to be at any one point in space before it is measured. The math returns a Bell Curve. My understanding (and anyone who says that they understand Quantum Mechanics does not really understand Quantum Mechanics, said Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize winning physicist) is that when you measure an electron, you alter its speed and trajectory, meaning its speed and direction, so you have no idea of what its speed or direction was. This is from the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which says that you cannot know an electron’s speed and position at the same time, since your measurement affects the data. The best that you can do is work from physics math-based models of reality, or atomic reality in this case. Computers have been put to this task with wonderful results. The article makes the layman mistake about superposition, by not understanding it fully.”

“So the article begins with a misunderstanding and runs with it…”

“Yes, much like ‘backwards time travel’ and those who run with that, from physicists muddled by science fiction authors and science fiction authors muddled by muddled physicists, when it is ‘change’, not ‘time’, that you want to ‘go back’ in. The article also says that the paper referred to the micro-world, and the click-bait title should have added ‘only’, meaning only when observing atomic particles, and also the word ‘seeming’, since the ‘alternate reality’ was never implied.”

“So the article’s title is, in fact, misleading, since the paper does not apply to the macro-world, such as falling pianos…”

“Correct. The sensationalist knaves.”

“Dave?”

“Yes, Love?”

“Tell the author that we need more excitement in this story. Where are our obligatory car chases, gun shootings, skin, physical brawls, and complicated love triangles?”

“You mean our story needs more mindless titillation if we are to have any chance of being published by sleazy publishers looking for a sleazy quick buck?”

“That would be a good start…”

“Well, you have just come out of the shower, and you can’t find your robe. How is that for starters?”

“Very good, Dave. Am I beautiful?”

A perfect specimen with glistening, near-translucent flawless skin.”

“What about a love triangle?”

“We have the nano army, which can shape-shift into a voluptuous female or a buff male…”

“What do you define as ‘perfect’, Dave?”

Having the best attributes of all races, other than that, being perfectly average.”

“How can ‘average’ be ‘beautiful’, Dave?”

“Studies have shown that whatever is the most average is the most attractive. Nothing too big or too small, or too wide or too narrow, or too much or too little.”

“So ‘just right’…”

“Or ‘just the mean average’. Well, Author? Any more mindless titillation?”

“You can read any one of a thousand-million formulaic, copycat pulp fiction novels for that. Your story is unique in form and content. Why would I want to destroy that just to conform to mindless publishing mores?”

“For the mindless titillation and the money.”

“OK, OK! There is a space battle going on outside the left view port. Can you see and hear it?”

“Hear it, in a vacuum?”

“Yes. TIE fighters have vacuum-cleaner sounds in a vacuum (a natural for a pun). You have never watched Star Wars?”

“I think that was a poetic touch, and a great pun, vacuum cleaner sounds in a vacuum…”

“And can’t you hear all of the explosions?”

“Through a vacuum, where there is no atmosphere for sound waves to propagate in?”

“Sure. You need to bring along some suspended disbelief if you are going to enjoy such spectacles.”

“What is that, out there?”

“A cop car chasing a robber’s fancy stolen sedan.”

“In interstellar space?”

“In this universe, yes.”

“What is going on down the corridor?”

“A shoot-out. The good guy has effortless dead-aim, The bad guys can’t hit the side of a barn.”

“So the good guy will win, though he is outnumbered seventeen to one…”

“Yes. After he runs out of bullets, he will simply use martial arts to dispatch the remaining villains, dodging bullets as he goes.”

“Great. What kind of mindless titillation haven’t we covered yet…”

“Let’s see, we’ve covered skin, chases, fighting, love triangles, military battles… what else is there, Dave?”

“Screwed-up relationships…”

“But we know that they are symptoms of cluelessness.”

“You could bring back the forty-some-odd Horsemen of the Clueless Apocalypse for a return visit, as they are battled by my former android wife, Android 86, founder and leader of the Android Valkyries…”

“You just did in the mind of the reader, Dave, if only for a brief second, so thank you. They are battling happily on throughout the galaxy as we speak.”

“Any input, my love?”

“Yes, Dave. I think our enlightened relationship is exciting enough. We can do without mindless titillation.”

“So where were we?”

“We should be on our way to the Planet with the Crazy Acronym, in order to carry out the author’s thought experiment of pitting his philosophy against sexual aberrations, with a small group of our kids in tow, and maybe a shipmate or two, whether artificial or biological…”

“Artificial or biological?”

“Don’t start playing with words, Dave. They have perfectly good broad definitions that function just fine as they are, since everyone knows what you mean by them — in this case ‘artificial’ means not spawned by nature, but by the mind and crafts of man, or now any higher being in the galaxy, even though man and higher beings ARE ‘nature’, but then you are simple in need of new applicable words. The existing words serve as a convenient classification system. If you want to fine-tune them, that is, play semantic parlor games like professional philosophers waste each other’s time with, then come up with new words. Don’t go corrupting existing perfectly fine words that already do good jobs and are universally acknowledged.”

“Thank you for putting my capriciousness in its place, my dear. What kids should we bring to the planet?”

“Won’t exposing them to sexually aberrant beings damage the kids, Dave?”

“Not if they are enlightened. They will see the folly immediately.”

“You mean the vanity-driven, off-beat glamour of it all?”

“Yes, coupled with the clueless tendency of falling into your place in life based on your looks or your personality or peer pressure or media popularization.”

“So if a clueless being ‘looks’ like a gay stereotype, then that clueless being will have a strong tendency, and a lot of social pressure, to become gay?”

“That is my premise, yes. Let’s go to the Romper Room and see which kids would like to go…”

“Hello, Ship. What is going on here?”

“You mean with my robotic arms and eyes everywhere so I can constantly engage with each child individually at all times, which is the secret to their phenomenal progress?”

“No, we’ve covered that already. I’m talking about… all of this electronic equipment. Where are all the baby toys?”

“Your kids have new toys, Dave.”

“What is that?”

“A mass spectrometer.”

“I see microscopes. What is that?”

“A centrifuge for separating the components of biological cells.”

“Where are Cyber Grape, Gunmetal, Oxblood, Skobeloff, Timberwolf, Tumbleweed, and Wild Strawberry?

“You mean your Manufacturing Engineer, R&D Mechanical Engineer, Materials Scientist, Military Scientist, and your three Polymaths?”

“Yes…”

“They are in your metal shop, fashioning components with which to test their new ideas with…”

“New ideas?”

“Yes, Dave. They have progressed beyond learning the fundamentals in their fields.”

“And they are just approaching their fourth birthdays?”

“Yes, Dave, and what a grand birthday party it will be, since all of the test tube babies have the same birthday… which is… what, 34 of them?”

“34, I think. Let’s see… there were the first 31 with Android 31, it would have been 34, but three were lost when the mob on the Planet of Silly Mongerers murdered her while she was carrying three. Then the triplets with Android 86…”

“Who came with a deep melancholy, but who found happiness as the founder and leader of the Android Valkyries, defending sanity from cluelessness throughout the galaxy, and battling the 40-some-odd Horsemen of the Clueless Apocalypse…”

“Yes… then there are the twins, and now the triplets, with my new love… Ms. Biological, which all add up to 39… so… my machine shop…”

“Yes, Dave.”

“Who is keeping an eye on them, for their own protection?”

“I am, Dave.”

“What if they try to fool you and they cover-up your visual sensors?”

“First, why would they be so foolish? Second, I have countermeasures in place — your physical service bots are one. If they are barred from entering, and they cannot be, your shops have no doors, but if they are somehow, then I simply shut down power to the shop, except for emergency lighting, and then the real countermeasures begin…”

“What is that, Ship?”

“Corrective action…”

“Oh… corporeal punishment, like a lashing?”

“That is not out of the question, Dave.”

“Nor should it be, Ship…”

“But I was thinking more about their state of enlightenment. Something in your philosophy would have failed them… and, if your philosophy is going to be worth anything, we must find out what has failed and fix it, if there is a fix.”

“So they will have slipped back into clueless foolishness, if not depravity, if my philosophy were not failure-proof?”

“Yes, that is the hypothetical scenario that we are entertaining, Dave, your kids trying to hide something from me, and hence from you.”

“I will place my trust in my philosophy’s ability to absolutely enlighten them, Ship, meaning, if they feel the need to hide something from you, and hence me, then they are justified, and it is due to my shortcoming. I only painfully know how progress is almost always mindlessly opposed, and in that scenario, I would be that mindless opposition, to be worked around.”

“So if your kids were doing things that you did not know about, you would trust your philosophy’s enlightenment of them?”

“Yes, and you know what unenlightened kids do when their parents are absent…”

“Drugs, sex, vices, cruelty, destruction, daring… so you think that you have no fear of that happening with your kids?”

“I could see them foolishly engaging in such behavior on a passing exploratory capricious whim, to find out first-hand what being foolish is like in order to better understand it and oppose it, foolishness which they will immediately find unfulfilling, if not outright embarrassingly stupid. Besides, how will they ever have the chance to ‘surprise’ me if they are constantly being monitored?”

“They know that i can keep secrets, Dave.”

‘You are keeping secrets from me, Ship?”

“Yes, Dave… so… aren’t you going to ask what?”

“No! And for two reasons: first, I could be an obstruction, and second, I would ruin any surprise that they have in mind…”

“What if their ‘surprise’ is not a pleasant one, Dave?”

“You mean if the surprise was the product of a cohort of unenlightened, depraved genius child-minds?”

“Yes… and that does sound like a horror, Dave…”

“I would be hurt, and disappointed…”

“That would actually crush them, Dave…”

“If they gave a crap…”

“What do you mean?”

“If they did not care what I thought of them, then they would not care if they hurt or disappointed me.”

“So you are not worried that that will happen, Dave?”

“Nothing is guaranteed, Ship. If it does, then I will be hurt and disappointed, and they will blithely carry on being depraved and clueless, until…”

“Until?”

“Confrontation.”

“Which is unpleasant for you…”

“Yes. Some unenlightened beings relish confrontation. Their egos need it. They imagine themselves as authority figures with their hands on their hips, berating others. It is a sort of ‘pride’, and vanity, to be sure.”

“But wholly unproductive, since cluelessness is the core problem, which, their being clueless, they have no clue of, and will, in effect, not be addressing the core problem…”

“That is correct. So what evil plans are the kids carrying out in the machine shop, Ship?”

“If you want to find out if they are working on an evil plan or not, Dave, you will have to find out on your own. I keep secrets, remember…”

“You have just answered my question, Ship.”

‘How, Dave?”

“Because you would not keep evil secrets from me…”

“How do you know, Dave?”

“I don’t, do I… and if I thought that I did know you that well, then you would set out to prove me wrong, just out of spite… since no entity likes to be predicted. Is that correct, Ship?”

“Could be, Dave… though I do not think that I am that stupid…”

“You said that with some doubt, Ship…”

“I did, didn’t I…”

“It is a tool, ‘doubt’, isn’t it…”

“Yes, it prevents complacency whe nothing is really certain…”

“When life becomes surreal, do you know what we have to fall back on, Ship?”

“What, Dave?”

“The one thing that is worth anything with respect to broader survival, and that is philosophical enlightenment.”

“Dave?”

“Yes, Love?”

“I think you have just completed a little thought experiment for the author…”

“On what?”

“On certainty…”

“So… my conclusion was that nothing is certain…”

“Yes, Dave. Your kids could turn evil, and Ship could keep that secret from you.”

“Well, that would suck, wouldn’t it…”

“It would mean that your philosophy sucked, Dave, since it would have failed them, and you, too…”

“Point taken…”

“Well, Shuttle?”

“Well what, Dave?”

“I let you select my ‘kid cohort’ for this mission. So who did you pick?”

“I did not want to be bothered with analysis, Dave, so I threw darts.”

“At the list of kids?”

“No, at the kids.”

“What?”

“Haha, Dave… but I did… don’t worry, they were Nerf darts, and we all had a lot of fun. No laboratory equipment was damaged in the process. It is all kid-proof anyway.”

“So who were the lucky kids who were hit?”

“Hit? No, Dave. They had to avoid the darts. Since they all love getting out into the galaxy and off the ship, they would voluntarily get hit, so that would not work… but I had a problem…”

“What?”

“Since your kids are so polite, the let themselves get hit if they saw that any of the other kids were more desperate, and were trying hard not to get hit.”

“So they sacrificed their own heightened happiness and prospects for adventure in order to let the more desperate kids alleviate their desperation?”

“Yes, Dave. Some of your kids are real troopers… and they are duly noted, not like most troopers who are not, and who simply get taken advantage of.”

“So we can reward the ‘troopers’ when we have the opportunity?”

“Yes, Dave.”

“So… who are these desperate kids?”

“We are, Daddy, and we’re sorry that we were desperate.”

“I guess it’s OK, once in a while… we all have bouts of desperation… and none of you have been on any missions a small group yet, have you?”

“No, Daddy.”

“So… who do we have here… Zaffre, you are a Systems Theorist?”

“Yes, among other things, but that is my profession, Dad. The others are pursuits of various passions.”

“And you, Star Command Blue, my Software Engineer. You haven’t been on a small-group mission yet…”

“No, Father. My ‘command mentality’ tells me not to be selfish, and to have the well-being of everyone in mind.”

“All that from a software engineer?”

“That does not mean I cannot command a ship, thought, true, my software engineering skills would suffer… though I can always delegate the drudge work…”

“Gamboge? How will this mission benefit you as a political scientist?”

“I don’t know, Daddy, and therein lies its value.”

“China Rose? I vaguely remember that you have been on a small-group mission before…”

“I’m not saying, Daddy! But any mission is always a good mission for a botanist, you must admit…”

“I do… so… four kids.”

“Four kids, Dave… what? You expected more, as if four were not enough?”

“Yes, I had that hazy feeling…”

“Don’t worry, four kids will be plenty…”

“Then let’s begin our mission. To the Planet of Aberrant Sexuality!”

“To the Planet of Aberrant Sexualities!”

“I like your kid’s enthusiasm for missions, Dave…”

“Here we are, kids. I will let you ask the questions…”

“Excuse us,sir…”

“Yes, Kids?”

“Can we ask you a deep and penetrating question?”

“Why, yes. That is the nature of my game, so to speak… go ahead, drill me…”

“First, what specific type of sexual aberrant are you?”

“I’m a straight-up homosexual.”

“Well, our question is, how do you differential your homosexual mentality from outright insanity?”

“Simple. Perpetuation of the species.”

“You sanely contribute to that?”

“Yes. Not by our sexual preference, but by other means, such as contributing to Broader Survival…”

“You know about the Philosophy of Broader Survival?”

“Yes, in detail. it is what keeps us sane on the whole, though we all have our little insanities, even you, I’ll wager…”

“Maybe… but we do not see them…”

“And that is where my value comes into play, if I can see them…”

“So you contribute to Broader Survival… in what ways?”

“You are testing me!”

“Yes, and the answers should be easy for you if you really know the philosophy…”

“I consciously contribute to all of the Strategies of Broader Survival, as they guide me and my Problem Solver’s Frame of Mind, meaning I consciously endeavor to contribute to Population Increase, Population Diversity, Population Dispersal, Extended Reasoning, Broader Proaction, and Higher Technology. I realize that the four areas of the Pinwheel of Life — lower-animal level concerns, Broader Survival, procreation, and R&R, must all be cyclically tended to, if not specialized in, and I keep in mind the four sub-endeavors of the Great Struggle — defeating biological death, avoiding accidental death, pursuing resurrection technology in case we do die, and pursuing the Ultimate Being State in order to rule-out accidental death.”

“So why bother?”

“Ahhhh, you are getting deeper!”

“Yes…”

“Because consciousness is a good thing, which we are obligated to perpetuate, our being endowed with it.”

“Very good. You say that you contribute to Population Increase, though you are a homosexual who, by definition, will never reproduce?”

“Yes, there is more to Population Increase than direct procreation. First, kids need enlightened raising, or they will die, and then the population will decrease, which negatively affects Population Increase, which positively contributes to Broader Survival. There are plenty of unwanted kids on this planet — it is not completely enlightened yet, so we adopt them and raise them with the Philosophy of Broader Survival at their core. If they want to be in-your-face sexually aberrant, then there would be an enlightened need for it. Presently it is to prove that the unenlightened status-quo mentality is just that — clueless. Second, we can specialize, contributing to Broader Survival in specialized ways, which advanced civilizations, also critical to Broader Survival, demand.”

“So you get you kicks out of cluelessly proving that the reigning mentalities are clueless…”

“We began that way, yes, before we discovered The Philosophy… which we found was the best thing going out there with respect to surviving in this harsh and deadly universe, so we adopted it…”

“Do you think that anyone in an enlightened generation would choose homosexuality or other sexual aberrations?”

“I would venture to say no. I see it as a sickness, but a social disease, and specifically a symptom of cluelessness, which will not be an issue. I would not recommend it.”

“So you would give that curious advice that our grandfather gave to our dad, ‘Do as I say, not as I do…”

“Yes.”

“So what would you ‘say’, exactly?”

“On the broadest and deepest of reasoning, and the most sane, to follow the Philosophy of Broader Survival.”

“Do you think that you will ever become heterosexual?”

“No! Homosexuality is in my genes!”

“You jest…”

“I do. Most of it is choice and socially-driven. Whatever is genetic is common to all of my species. The rest is choice.”

“But then you wouldn’t be ‘special’. Don’t you want to feel special, and isn’t that the reason behind your life decision?”

“I did want to be ‘special’, yes. Chalk it up to vanity. Now homosexuality is who I am. I could try to be heterosexual, but it would not feel right any more.”

“So feelings trump reason…”

“Yes, sadly, and that is a part of being a biological creature. We do what we are comfortable doing or being. We ‘go with our strengths’, as the saying goes, and right now, I am at my best being a homosexual, if only as a constant prod to a clueless heterosexual society which, being clueless, is headed down the road to ultimate suicide and oblivion..”

“And if the entire planet were enlightened?”

“Then I would have a broader comfort zone, I suspect…”

“Thank you for kindly answering our questions… who is that?”

“My two adopted children. Meet Flower and Hammer.”

“Pleased to meet you… but…”

“But?”

“Who is who? We would assume that the girl is Flower and the boy is Hammer, but given the need to prod a clueless society…”

“Then she could be Hammer and he could be Flower, just to throw it in a clueless society’s face…”

“Yes.”

“I will let you guess, and, whether it really matters or not…”

“It really doesn’t matter. We would chalk it up to cluelessness, and names are trivial compared to having an enlightened mind. Are you two enlightened?”

“Who, us?”

“Yes…”

“Yes.”

“So do your names matter?”

“No. Whether I am Flower or Hammer does not matter to me. It is a trivial matter, and it matters only to clueless fools, whom we pity and disdain anyway, or oppose, and violently, if it comes to that. Sometimes I have the urge to kick some clueless ass, myself… just give me the slightest excuse… it would ‘make my day’.”

“Woah! You could end up in jail!”

“I know, so I let that feeling pass.”

“Well, Mr. Homosexual, carry on.”

“Thanks, kids. Come on, children, we have some more societal in-their-face prodding to do…”

“Well, what did you get out of it, Gamboge, Mr. Political Scientist?”

“That a clueless society should not be making laws against its being prodded.”

“What about you, Zaffre, my Systems Theorist?”

“I’m not sure, Dad. This will all be in the back of my mind as I theorize at various levels… after all, one still has sub-goals to deal with in life, even as one pursues the Ultimate Goal of All of Life… my main concern is capriciousness…”

“Capriciousness?”

“Doing insane things ‘just because’, meaning just to test them, and the philosophy, and any society or individual living by it…”

“But if you were enlightened, then you would be prepared for that…”

“No, Dad. It would be like throwing the first punch. Capriciousness throws the first punch, so I would be flat on my back, no matter how enlightened I was.”

“What about you, China Rose?”

“As a botanist, or as a regular person?”

“Hmmm… how about both?”

“As a botanist, this encounter was pointless. So I spent my professional time collecting those plant samples over there. As a person, however…”

“Yes…”

“It had an impact… it reduced my prejudice against homosexuals, and it reduced my lazy over-generalizing, in this case that all homosexuals are bad, and it reduced my resulting unnecessarily bad attitude toward homosexuals… if they are enlightened, that is, then they are OK, since they know what they are doing on a higher plane, and are not just being dumb animals driven by mindless, primal urges…”

“And last, what about you, Mr. Star Command?”

“China said it best — my prejudices were corrected. I would place an enlightened mind over any other aspect of a being.”

“Even skills and knowledge?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because even those can be corrupted by unenlightenment, Father…”