"...for there is a well-attested correlation between depressed mood and low social status. The manifestations of melancholic depression and, conversely, euphoric mania are also uncannily typical of people occupying omega and alpha status-roles. Evolutionary psychology suggests that depression is part of an adaptive coping process. It involves the passive submission to a prolonged or uncontrollable stress. The persistence into the post-hunter-gatherer era of depressive states continues to foster (relatively) stable hierarchies of social dominance. Yet pecking orders aren't an immutable law of nature. Huxley got it wrong. The project of radically enhancing everyone's mood and motivation is likely to be subversive of authority. It will leave people much less, not more, vulnerable to exploitation by a power elite. In Brave New World, members of the populace are (effectively) the opiated dupes of the ruling authorities. Soma is a pacifying agent of social control. The consequences of genetically pre-programmed happiness, however, will be very different. This is because everyday mental super-health will undermine the biological underpinnings of the dominance- and submission-relationships characteristic of humanity's ancestral environment. Happiness, and an enhanced responsiveness to a wider range of rewards, is empowering. It tends to help people take control of their own lives. Boosting the efficiency of tyrosine hydroxlase, for instance, won't merely act to elevate mood. The consequent enhanced noradrenalin function in the locus coeruleus will tend to diminish subordinate behaviour. Super-well people don't let themselves be bossed around. Contrary to a billion-and-one sci-fi dramas, post-humans aren't doomed perpetually to re-enact the power-plays of hunter-gatherer society..."
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