Maybe facing the truth is really good, slavery is really bad, and humans are the rightful rulers of the future. Instead, I want to say that this simply cannot be the whole story. It cannot be the whole story because here in our real world today, we humans are in fact slaves to alien, hyperrational entities who care little about us, and who provide us with a dream world to distract us from the fact that they callously use our bodies to further their ends. We humans are not even likely to run the future, if things continue as they are. Yet when we are confronted with these truths, very few of us, the young included, rebel against our dream world. In fact, what rebels we have seem to be mostly concerned with preserving our dream world.
So who are our slave masters, and what is this dream world that they use to enslave us? Our masters are our “selfish genes” and our dream world is the world of love, humor, talk, story, art, music, fashion, sport, charity, religion, and abstract ideas that occupy the attention of our “mating minds.” Let me explain.
You are a body with a mind. Your mind is the result of activity in your brain, and your body has grown from a single cell following the instructions of your genes, which you acquired from your parents. Your parents acquired their genes from their parents, and so on back for billions of years. (The few genes not acquired from parents were created by random mutations.) The fact that you have certain genes and not others was determined almost entirely by a fierce competition between genes to create better “survival machines,” i.e., creatures that perpetuate and spread those genes. The genes that produced you are not a random sample from all possible genes; they are some of the few genes that, so far, remain in this competition.
Evolutionary biology has made enormous progress understanding the patterns of life around us by thinking in terms of “selfish genes.” That is, you would not go very wrong in predicting the patterns of life we see if you imagined that our genes were intelligent, that they wanted only to make more future copies of themselves, and that they chose the behaviors of the creatures they coded with only this purpose in mind. (And you would do even better if you figured that these creatures could not help but assume that the future would be very much like the past few thousand generations.)
Of course genes are not actually intelligent, in the sense of basing their actions on computations that they run. But since they act as though they were intelligent, they act a lot like the cruel slave masters they would be if they were intelligent. Our genes do not care whether we experience more pleasure or pain. Our genes only care that we anticipate both possibilities, so that they can control us via our preference for pleasure over pain. When our bodies are no longer capable of reproducing, or capable of helping those who share our genes reproduce, our genes literally do not care if we live or die. Our genes will happily shorten our lives, or give us great pain, if that will help those genes to reproduce. Our genes will also lie to us to promote their goals, for example, by making us think that our happiness depends more on our success than it really does. Our genes can indeed be cruel slave masters.