There is an important distinction to be drawn here. In a future civilisation where aversive experience is genetically impossible - forbidden not by social diktat but because its biochemical substrates are absent - then the notion of what it means for anything to go wrong will be different from today. If this innovative usage is to be adopted, then we're dealing with a separate and currently ill-defined - if not mystical - concept; and we run a risk of conflating the two senses. For if we are incapable of aversive experience, then the notion of things going wrong with our lives - or anyone else's - doesn't apply in any but a Pickwickian sense. "Going wrong" and "being terrible" as we understand such concepts today are inseparable from the textures of nastiness in which they had their origin. Their simple transposition to the Post-Darwinian Era doesn't work.

        Perhaps functional analogues of things going wrong will indeed apply - even in a biological heaven where the phenomenology of nastiness has been wiped out. So the idea isn't entirely fanciful. For the foreseeable future, functional analogues of phenomenal pain will be needed in early transhumans no less than in silicon robots to alert their bodies to noxious tissue damage etc. Also, functional analogues of "things going wrong", at least in one sense, are needed to produce great science and technology, so that acuity of critical judgement is maintained; uncontrolled euphoric mania is not a recipe for scientific genius in even the most high-octane supermind. Yet directly or indirectly, the very notion of "going wrong" in the contemporary sense seems bound up with a distinctive and unpleasant phenomenology of consciousness: a deficiency of well-being, not a surfeit.

        This doesn't stop us today from dreaming up scenarios of blissed-out utopias which strike us as distasteful - or even nightmarish - when contemplated through the lens of our own darkened minds. This is because chemically-unenriched consciousness is a medium which corrupts anything that it seeks to express. The medium is not the message; but it leaves its signature indelibly upon it. We may imagine future worlds in which there is no great art, no real spirituality, no true humanity, no personal growth through life-enriching traumas and tragedies, etc. We may conjure up notional future worlds, too, whose belief-systems rest on a false metaphysic: e.g. an ideal theocracy - is it a real utopia if it transpires there's no God? But it's hard to escape the conclusion that "ill-effects" from which no one ever suffers are ontological flights of fancy. The spectre of happy dystopias may trouble some of us today rather than strike us as a contradiction on terms. But like Huxley's Brave New World, they are fantasies born of the very pathology that they to seek warn us against.

        This is not to deny that the transition to the new Post-Darwinian Era will be stressful and conflict-ridden. We learn from the Controller that the same was true of Brave New World - civilisation as we know it today was destroyed in the Nine Years' War. One hopes, on rather limited evidence, that the birth-pangs of the new genetic order will be less traumatic. But the supposition that a society predicated on universal bliss engineered by science is inherently wrong - as Huxley wants us to believe - rests on obscure metaphysics as well as questionable ethics. Sin is a concept best left to medieval theologians.

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