"So it is!" He chuckled. "That's your everlasting premise, isn't it? If all the people understood themselves, they'd live according to their understanding, and be well, wise and happy, if not particularly wealthy."
"Doctors, like factories, would be scarcer in the better world."
"But what in hell would people do?"
"Oh—they'd do unto others as they'd be done by. And they'd add a step even to the Golden Rule. They'd do unto the unborn generations as they would wish their ancestors had done unto them. The existing Golden Rule—which nobody practices anyhow—is objective. Its subjective counterpart refers to the people to come, not the people around at the moment. That's the Golden Rule of instinct—what instinct is all about. Evolution. The increase of consciousness down the aeons. Obvious, isn't it—that the history of evolution steadily spells increasing consciousness? Logical, therefore, that such is the inevitable bent of the future of life—as life is conveyed in man, or as it might someday be conveyed in another form, if man doesn't catch on, consciously, to the scheme behind his consciousness."
"Biological immortality," Tom said.
"Psychobiological immortality. Only—modern man, being so pompous about what goes on in his cortex and repressing so much of what goes on in the rest of his brain, has construed the 'immortal' aspect of instinct as a property of his ego. The natural urge to live through his species, through kids—to love, that is—to be man's father—is drained off into the asinine notion that his personal ego will live in a slap-happy eternity."
"Man," said Tom, "has a pretty damned powerful feeling about that personal immortality. Hard to shake."
"Why not? It's fashioned out of his most powerful instinct. The one that supports life itself, reproduction, and that at least accompanies evolution. Man takes that billion-year-old galaxy of instincts, filters it through his cortex, and comes up with the idea of Heaven. It's a childish mistake. But even a child, when it's mistaken about the actual nature of an instinct, still has as powerful a compulsion in his error as he would have if he were correct. Say he's frightened by something that isn't really frightful: he's still just as much afraid. And we—most of us—are in that state about pretty much all of our inner selves."
"And have been, you think, for a long while?"
"Sure. Since thousands of years before Christ. You guys in medicine ought to quit studying tissue per se—and study its functioning some more. Contemporary man—as a rule—never gets even a glimmering of how his personality is split and how the conscious part can bamboozle the unconscious part—and believe it has got away with it. You know the fact—you ignore the implications. For instance, Tom, we actually see upside-down, right?"