I like your ideas, too. I especially love the idea for tech that can block ment abilities in an area, though I’d want to make that available to people for home protection. You could get it installed with your home alarm. I could see the ad now: For 150 years, ADT has been helping protect every second with everything we’ve got. And now, we can protect your mind while at home, too!
Can you imagine how incredible it would be for Button to have their own house and have this? It would make the romances more palatable, too, since the LIs wouldn’t hold all the power and there could be some semblance of equality, at least at Button’s house.
Huh, got an idea, I think we can agree that nobody needs to be a Ment, you dont need to be born into a minority privileged with superpowers to live a good, healthy, happy life.
Why not focus on finding a way to stop further generations of being born with powers/ remove powers upon birth? This guarantees “equality of power” for future generations, and doesn’t involve removing innocent people senses that they have grown to rely upon (and all the stress that it would cause).
Removing powers runs into the early point of the government fucking with peoples brains is bad, and the other idea, so how removing the ability from even existing to begin with in future generations, that would require invasive genetic tampering that doesn’t exist yet and would be absolutely immoral to force on people
But the government having acess to soldiers who can (and since its the USA, probably do) breach most people’s independence, privacy and will is not bad?
There is never going to be a fair and equal society if you allow a minority of people to be born with the magical ability to fuck other people’s lives.
We can keep dreaming about tech that is going to bridge the gap between normal people and ments, but there always going to be a power disadvantage.
Why? There are already (dangerous) trial stages of drugs that can temporarily supress Ments powers, how much of a leap is one that does it permanently?
As for the unity thing, the government having people on their payroll that can read everybody’s brains, that’s not Great either, but that’s several steps below forcibly reprogramming people on a mass scale
Humanity has been using technology to try and give everyone a fair chance to live a normal life for centuries, that why we make glasses, and cure cataract, and make phrostectic limbs.
Now what is more realistic:
Giving everyone ment powers, somehow.
Making it so gradually, with no one getting hurt or traumatized by having their senses forcefully removed, we make everyone grow up powerless. (Using further developments in already existing tech)
Everyone gets the same shot at life. Nobody is going to be born with inherent advantage over other people.
We can go on forever with slippery slope fallacies and whatnot. I think this is a good solution for a difficult topic.
People are already born with inherent advantages over other people; look at guys like Michael Phelps, with the specific body profile he was born with, it gave him a huge step over other swimmers to being the best in the world. This is nothing different. nobody ever suggested the problem to people with cataracts is blinding every other person on the planet so they would all be on the same footing
Principle is the same; a small minority of people have a certain advantage over everybody else, an advantage that exists entirely out of their control, and the solution is to use all available resources to target them in such a way that it’ll supposedly even the playing field.
We use technology to help people with disadvantages. We don’t use technology to bring down the advantaged. To keep the eye sight example going: we have glasses, seeing eye dogs, and canes to help people. So if we look at mind blind, a natural solution would be to create a device to block out telepathic signals. Not genetic engineering or brain surgery. Does that make sense?
To be fair, this conversation is basically something that has happened in X-Men isn’t it? I’m sure there’s been a plot-point about curing mutants at some point, as well as a plot where someone wanted to turn everyone into mutants. At this point it’s basically a 1-1 comparison between Mind Blind and X-Men, and about the rights of the ments/mutants. The idea is exactly the same.
