virus: Bed Time!

Eric Boyd (6ceb3@qlink.queensu.ca)
Wed, 11 Feb 1998 02:56:19 -0500


Hi virions,

I've been reading a list called "Taking Children Seriously" -- you might
consider visiting them at

http://www.eeng.dcu.ie/~tcs/index.html

Anyway, I couldn't help but see this -- a cool example of a meme, I think
you'll agree:

Subject: Re: Bedtime - what is it for?
From: David Deutsch <d.deutsch1@physics.oxford.ac.uk>
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 00:56:49 +0100

What is bedtime for?

Compulsory bedtime has only this purpose: To make children feel
frustrated, excluded from the world, powerless to allocate their
time and resources, and neurotic about sleep, and to make them
insecure about whether their values and priorities carry any
weight at all in the scheme of things, so that when they grow up
and have children they will feel similarly powerless and neurotic
about time, sleep etc., in precisely the way that is required to
make them want to enforce bedtimes upon their own children.

"No, no, that isn't our purpose", I hear all you parents saying.
But I never said it was *your* purpose, folks. It is the purpose
of bedtime.

-- David Deutsch
Meme theorist.

ERIC