angledge | No incentive to be a good person.

So I had this really weird dream last night.

It started out in the kitchen of le Chateau, where I was frying up some bacon.

evilfb was making a PB&J, & was lecturing me on the horrors of eating poor helpless animals for food. Gentle readers,

evilfb is by no means a vegetarian. If he were to lecture me on anything regarding bacon, it would probably be on why I should double the amount I was making so he could have a full share of the yummies. But I digress. In my dream he started out as an advocate of vegetarianism.

funkyplaid walked into the kitchen and, citing the old adage "you are what you eat", pointed out that pigs are more intelligent than peanuts, making bacon a better food choice than a PB&J. After all, if you are what you eat, you should eat intelligent things, thus becoming (by some strange osmotic process) more intelligent yourself. At this point, I suggested that by that logic, we should become cannibals, because (most) people are more intelligent than pigs.

evilfb, who quickly abandoned vegetarianism & jumped right onto the cannibalism bandwagon, proposed that we would have to be very selective about who we ate. You are what you eat, after all. So we decided that we would start by eating a Berkeley professor or two - bound to be highly intelligent! But then we stopped to consider - is intelligence the only selection factor we should be considering? If we are planning to better ourselves through cannibalism, should we perhaps consider other factors as well? What about only consuming very attractive people? Or very successful & wealthy people? Then I had a flash of insight: we should only eat GOOD people, very altruistic people - that way, we would also become good people!

At this point, the three of us decided that we should aim for the top. Who are the best people, the most altruistic? Nobel Peace Prize winners! That's right, we decided we needed to eat Nobel Peace Prize winners. But then one of us came up with an even better idea - what if we ran a contest in which the competitors would do their best to prove that they were the most altruistic person in the world. The catch? The contestants would KNOW going into the contest that the WINNER would be eaten by a whole bunch of other people, all of whom were seeking to become better people. What could be more altruistic than agreeing to be eaten for the betterment of humanity?

All I can say is, thank goodness the dream ended there. I would not have been happy if we had actually acted upon our plans. Cannibalism is not cool, not even in a dream.