The Gene Wizards

Chapter 4

Chapter 4: Little Red Riding Hood

"It's time for us," said one of the Philosophers' Guild, "to review the narrative. The human race has only ever had one problem: but it is a problem to which we can find no solution, for we ourselves are the embodiment of it. If, as we are determined to believe, reality is only what they can see, hear, touch, taste, smell and measure, all subject to predictable laws of physics, how then do we explain ourselves?

"How," he continued, "do we explain the origin of evil? What is it, and where does it come from?

"Because evil is not the same thing as the savagery of a cornered wild animal, or a beast fending off a competitor for a mate or food. Evil manifests itself in the human race alone. It is not found in any other species. Its core traits are pride, a false sense of entitlement and an appetite for the perverse.

"If we are natural beings, subject to natural law, including the laws of cause and effect, how or why did a species come to exist that is capable of annihilating itself and all other life on the planet? Does our own existence not rather point to the existence of something unnatural? Or, dare I say it, supernatural?"

"Clearly," the speaker continued, "we have a mystery here. And it is a mystery we of the Philosophers' Guild set about trying to solve many hundreds of years ago.

The Philosophers had long had a practice of being both outside the world, looking in, but also involved and working within it. They served different functions. The speaker, a Philosopher of the Crone ethnic group, was of medium height and aesthetically honed muscular build, with strikingly luminous eyes and a compassionate but penetrating and intelligent gaze that was mostly lost on those he served. For thousands of years, the Philosophers' Guild had commanded a deep knowledge of quantum mechanics that was only just beginning to surface in modern science. Many of the Philosophers' Guild were telepathic, for example. They also had detailed knowledge not only of history, but even of eras belonging to pre-history. His line had seen civilization on Earth develop from the Neolithic era to the post-modern culture of today. Indeed, they had helped it to do so.

The news was not good. Less than a century after the last World War on Earth, and despite a promisingly enlightened fresh start, at least in the USA and Western Europe, the inhabitants of Earth appeared once more to be hurtling towards disaster. One had to concede that the people of the Philosophers' Guild should not be all that surprised. Decades of rabid consumerism media claptrap had done their work and now threatened to erode the very thing that had enabled humans to survive for as long as they had – their native intelligence. Serious, responsible thinking can be uncomfortable. It's always been difficult to sell discomfort. The genius of Philosophers' Guild lay in its ability to turn disadvantages into advantages.

"Our core mission," the speaker explained, "is nothing less than to counteract the central dilemma of the human condition. And there is no denying that this condition is a huge challenge."

"To the best of our knowledge," he continued, "the human race is the only species with an egocentric form of consciousness. This is the unique feature of their psyche, at one and the same time their great strength and their greatest weakness."

"This is where the ancient myths and stories come in," he explained.

"What these stories do is to dramatize processes going on within the human psyche in such a way that the different aspects of the personality are dramatically brought to life in the form of different characters."

To the Philosophers' Guild, as to many ancient and pre-industrial Earth societies however, myths and fairy tales, far from being untrue, were vehicles for dramatizing truth in order to make it visible. The Philosophers knew that storytelling was vital to any thriving culture. It is through stories that children learn to listen at their parents' and other relatives' knees, and learn of the human dramas they will experience in the safety of their families.