Suvudu Universe

There's a din of excitement in the air as you attend a campaign rally for the strong front-runner candidate in the 2064 Presidential Election. You're waiting to see a candidate speak with thousands of other people near the front of the gathering. She's your favorite candidate, but also the favorite of the thousands of others in attendance here. You waited through long lines just to get in, and now wait yet more and before you know it almost two hours seem to go by. But she's supposed to be out soon, you hear your fellow supporters around you saying, so you ignore that part of you that just might have to go to the bathroom. But finally after a still longer time she steps out and starts waving to the crowd as inspiring music is playing. You start applauding her too, instinctively. You can't help but get wrapped up in the moment as the energy of the crowd starts pouring out and your pride in your decision to support her swells up and you're involuntarily smiling. After all, she doesn't just look the part of a Senator about to win the next Presidential Election, she looks more that part than anyone you could ever imagine would who you would ever see in your life. Her charisma just seems to grab you for some ineffable reason, her beautiful face is preternaturally alluring and a compassionate but staggering intelligence just emanates from her as she scans the crowd, beaming with an internal optimism. This is all happening because she and her Congressman running mate and her top campaign staffers who organized this event aren't like you. Unlike you they were genetically engineered.

Well, something like this could happen in the future at least. Our society may be just on the cusp of having the technology to radically alter people's genetic code, and therefore to allow expecting parents to make elective decisions to dramatically enhance genetic features of their children. This would mean they could make their children better looking, healthier, taller, and perhaps most controversially of all, smarter. So much ink (or I guess now bytes) has been spilled over this, and many fear the implications of it. Some have discussed if society allowing this would inevitably move everything towards a caste system, at least in practical reality (de facto) if not by official and pronounced declaration (de jure). There could be many possible aspects to how things would play out if our society embraced or even just allowed elective genetic engineering. But I think one under-explored aspect of it is what would happen in the political world for the candidates American voters would choose.

As I've said many times on here, I don't see any reason to think the US will become anything like a dictatorship or some constrained, horrible society. There's nothing indicating that the problems of the future in America will be so obvious and straightforward. In fact they will be more complicated, subtle and intractable. One of these issues could be the way the genetically engineered people rise up in a society that values public choice. If some decades from now we have a generation of adults that includes many genetically engineered people, might we not see that those are the people who keep becoming our leading political candidates/? After all, if elective genetic engineering is available won't expecting parents typically use it to make their children better looking, taller and smarter? Are those not traits that correlate with people becoming political leaders? I believe America, for all the flaws and decline we could have, will remain a republican-democracy for at least another century, if not the next millennium and beyond. Though democracy is the best political system, it's certainly imperfect. The popular choice of the public can be swayed by fiery rhetoric or popular emotion, or most certainly the charisma of a candidate.

Well the genetically engineered by their artificial nature will be made to have the facial features that are considered attractive. They'll probably often be quite sure of themselves and intelligent, and how does this combination not in all likelihood add up to them possessing a great deal of charisma? And will they not have the intelligence to know how to manipulate a crowd or an entire political movement in their favor? Will they not know how to tell the people and the bloggers and vloggers exactly what they want to hear?

Perhaps this won't entirely be bad; we may soon have genetically engineered candidates who know very keenly how to advance their political careers, but who also genuinely believe in a well intended set of public policies for the people. But still, probably most of us find this disquieting. We can't help but think that if our candidates in the future are engineered persons that somehow means they are manipulative people. Well many would say that politicians have always been manipulative people, who really just know how to tell the American people what they want to hear and often win on charisma and various tricks. Now I don't think it's so simple when it comes to politicians. I see most of them as cynical idealists, who often have a lot of good intentions but also want a lot of power. Who want to do the right thing but will stoop awfully low to accomplish that. But if politicians are at times manipulative people, and in some decades there are millions of engineered people who are artificially better at so many things than so many others, won't many of them be shockingly good at doing political manipulation?