The thing about forcing utopia on us is: We weren't MEANT to live in utopia. We weren't MEANT to be at peace. If we were meant to be free of conflict or any negative emotions, we would've been wired to do so in the first place. We would've never been designed to be angry. We would've never been designed to be sad. We would've never been designed to be annoyed. If we were meant to be at peace, we wouldn't have these emotions in the first place. But we do, and there has to be a reason for this.
Well that's a bit of a cop out, no? You could apply that argument to any level of being, and say that Jasmine herself was designed to be able to control us, and her not doing so is her going against
her nature. The very fact that she is able to do it shows that we (as a quasi-ficticious people in the boundaries of the program, at least),
are designed to be controlled and overruled.
The thing is: what right does Jasmine have to force utopia on us? What right does she have to tell us that we're not living our lives the way we should? She was interfering with our nature. Is it ridiculous for me to be against the fact that I could be, say, saved from a serial killer or theif thanks to Jasmine? Perhaps. It's not my fault that someone wanted to kill me/steal from me, so why should I be against an act of God to help save my life? The thing is, I shouldn't have to justify myself to some self-proclaimed higher being. Neither does humanity.
Firstly, she is not a self proclamed higher being. She
is a higher being. Secondly, again, the fact that she can interfere with our nature shows that our nature is flexible and thus not the absolute foundation that people cling to. And you wouldn't be justifying yourself to her. You wouldn't need to by default. Thats the whole point.
Sure, you can say "But if you were under Jasmine's spell, none of the things you complained about would matter. Because under Jasmine's spell, you wouldn't care about those things anymore". You can also apply that same logic to murder. Why should we care if someone decided to murder every single being on the planet? Whatever we have against that, it's not like it's gonna matter once we're dead. Kinda hard to care when you're ability to have emotions are no longer existant, right? That's basically what Jasmine did to us. Jasmine murdered humanity, because inside, we were truly dead.
Like I said in my previous post, in this situation life and death as concepts would have to be re-examined. Death is only a problem to those left alive, especially in the Buffyverse where there are very established heavens and hells. Now, if someone killed everyone in the Buffyverse before Jasmine took over, that would be ambiguous, as a lot of people would suffer. Afterwards - not a problem, as they would all (eventually) go to paradise. In the real world, where we don't know for sure the existance of any kind of afterlife, the only effect of death we can possibly judge is on the living. In that regard we are hugely biased and cannot really look at the matter objectively. If everybody died, would it really be so bad? We can't really know. If the certainty was that everyboy was eternaly happy (paradise or Jasmine's reign), then it's a perfectly viable alternative.
I'm not saying Jasmine counts as a villain, more like an anti-villain. She had good intentions, but essentially what she was doing was interfering with nature. If we truly want the world to become a better place, we have to improve ourselves. Our technology, our knowledge, our act, our education, you name it.
Again, I say that in the very act of her interfering with this "nature", she exposes it's unreliability. Why is it such a violation? In the Buffyverse, it will have been the PTB that constructed it in the first place. We know they, and The First guide it. Jasmine is effectively removing the Evil component of this guidance. Is she perfecting nature by doing this? Or is evil something that is important to humanity?
With the freest of will that I possess I wholeheartedly disagree with you. Free will makes you who you are. Every choice you make determines who you were and who you will be. You take that away and you are a puppet. Happiness would cease to exist if our right to choose was taken from us. We only recognise joy becuase we have sorrow to compare it to. If you take away that bad then you also take the good. Free will is ESSENTIAL to who we are as people. There is a reason people have fought so doggedly for it since the dawn of time. Free will is like oxygen. We need it to survive.
There were 5 times in your post where you expressed how you felt or thought. Without free will you would not have been able to do that.
Free will is not a catalyst for happiness. That much is clear from the depiction of Jasmine's followers in the Buffyverse, and logically makes sense. Whether happiness is purely a chemical situation or partially a metaphysical state, why would people need to choose things to be happy? The very nature of what Jasmine did (and, I do realise that this is what makes it completely impossible on a human level: there absolutely needs to be some kind of divine intervention) is to take people's free will and replace it with happiness. There is no way you can say that people need free will to survive. It has never been taken away before.
And about my thoughts and feelings in these posts: I cannot see your point. Yes, I have free will. So? My being able to come to this conclusion in no way would affect the situation we are discussing. If we were all Shiny Happy People, then I wouldn't
need to come to any conclusion. There would be absolutely no use for free will. So, did you mean something else that I am missing?
[br][/br]
Edit:
[br][/br]
If you didn't have free will, you wouldn't be posting in this thread right now because you'd be too busy doing whatever was programmed into you by your dictator. I don't think the people who say "free will isn't great" actually understand the importance of free will. Without it you're just a fleshy computer, meaning that you're incapable of feeling anything anyway. You couldn't be happy. You could have happiness programmed into you, but that wouldn't be happiness, that would be another layer of the program.
There is no way to say that without free will we cannot feel. And what's the difference between feeling happy and being programed to feel happy? The emotion would be no less real to the person feeling it.
The part where there's no distinction between you and a laptop is the problem. A world with no art, no music, no writing, just people programmed to work and work, the highest form of slavery forced upon a people knowing no better. Without free will, we wouldn't exist. Only a shell would exist.
But all these things only matter
because we have free will. Yes, art and music are wonderful, but without free will there would be no desire for them. They would not be missed, and we would be happier even without them. Yes, we may work as a slave, but not as a shell. We would still feel, and all we would feel would be joy. Working as a slave seems like the bad alternative now simply becase it would cause great mental and physical stress and pain. That wouldn't be the case in Jasmine's utopia.
