It would be interesting to explore the idea that there was some increasingly celestial bureaucracy in charge of redistributing souls, and they're like totally in crises and pulling their hair out because the damn humans won't stop breeding and trying to stop dying.Souls In The Mud wrote:People are so numerous now, and souls are so desperately needed to fill those extra human slots, that the entrance requirements have dropped abysmally low. Any animal spirit can become human--for the first time in history, a majority may have no prior experience at the job. Inept souls barely ready for the responsibility of big brains and busy hands...
Conversely, animals like elephants and cetaceans were once common. Intelligent, but with toolless societies, they made a fine practice-pool for souls readying to try human responsibility--the godlike power of hands! But now, to be a rare, big-brained animal is such a choice privilege, it's only granted advanced souls. Sort of a luxury vacation...
I wonder--has this policy backfired? Is it one reason so many creatures are not doing well? Maybe it's not all poaching and habitat problems. What if these "advanced" souls, with a long history of refinement, aren't so well suited to be animals any more? Refined souls with habits like living in their heads not their bodies, like... squeamishness? Like not wanting to kill and eat their neighbors raw?
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If reincarnation's possible, this makes dangerously good sense. Wild animals WOULD be prime real estate for souls now--much rarer than humans. And scarcity creates value, right?
And humans are common--hence dirt cheap. Remember the last human lunkhead you met. Now really, wouldn't they make a perfectly good dog? What if they DID, and got promoted, but there's such a shortage of intermediate species to practice in, now, that they had to leap all the way from dog to... your neighbor?
Or your boss.
Mang, it gives me some awesomely horrible images of the guys in said organization dancing in glee every time some majorly bad stuff went down in the modern era, like WWI and WWII or the Holocaust. I mean, these guys must have loved the mass slaughters of WWI and WWII and the Holocaust and the famines under Stalin and Pol Pot. They would have temporarily relieved the shortfall! It would be like if there was a giant famine or something, and then suddenly somebody started dropping canned spam all over the landscape. I get this delightfully horrible image of some sort of lively improvised soul-auction outside Auschwitz with a million soul-collectors trying to grab the souls as they fly out the gas chambers and pawn them off to the highest bidder. All the guys in charge of distributing souls to animals would be, like, down at the Somme and Iwo Jima and Treblinka and shit, trying to take advantage of this like guys rushing a store that has a huge sale. But no matter how HUEGLY humans kill each other it's not enough to supply all the backed-up demand, so you'd have ferocious bidding wars and then fights would start breaking out over the souls and shit, and the celestial security guards would try to break them up but they'd overwhelmed and there'd be some huge free for all. Like, you can imagine some poor GI who gets shot in the Battle of the Bulge and then he dies and the next thing he knows there's twenty guys fighting over his soul being all like "he's mine!" "I saw him first!" and getting into a huge undignified brawl over him like Christmas shoppers over the last copy of the latest hot video game. And then they'd be getting all fevered as the war was drawing to a close and they don't know the next time they'll get an opportunity like this, and, like, there would have been a total madhouse down at Hiroshima and Nagasaki as everybody and his uncle rushes down there to take advantage of it before it's all over. And then, like, Japan would surrender and everybody would be happy except these guys, who'd be all sad because it's back to business as usual, and all worried because the situation is becoming ever less sustainable and pretty soon they're going to run out of souls. WHAT'S GONNA HAPPEN THEN, HUH?
Or, you can imagine how these guys would have felt about the Cuban Missile Crises. They'd have been spooging themselves at the thought of a nuclear war. Man, it'd be like ... like WWII all over again just from the bombs, and then the starvation and disease and general total collapse of civilization would set in and the human population would collapse. The good old days would be back! Why, if civilization doesn't recover ... their problems are solved! And they'd be all happy and they'd be all in Kennedy and Kruschev's face, being all like "do it man! push the red button!" But of course they're transparent ghost shit so Kennedy and Kruschev can't hear them and the nukes don't fly, and the soul-collector dudes would all be totally sad. And they're, like, trying to find out ways to somehow sabotage human civilization to get the whole thing back to a sustainable level.
Or you can imagine how these people would react when humans start talking about stuff like mind uploading and immortality research. Mang, they want to skull-rape all the immortalists so bad, only they can't because they're transparent ghost shit. It's bad enough the damn humans won't stop breeding and now they're gonna STOP DYING too? The whole overstretched system would, like, collapse instantly and nothing would be born because there are no more souls, and every animal species would die except humans because they'd stop reproducing too but they're freaking immortal so it doesn't matter for them. And the soul distributors would be out of a job and they'd have to go on celestial welfare.
Dang, I'm all channeling Shroom and rambling here, aren't I? But seriously man, I think there's some great black comedy potential here.