What is the perfect human?  This is a question that literary works have attempted to answer for the longest of times.  Although these literary works have their own unique take on the question, they all have a certain aspect in common.  For some reason, these futuristic societies that are made up perfect humans are cold.  I do not see the people in these societies smiling, laughing, or taking on adventures as we do.  These people fail to love or be loved as we do.  It is for this reason that I believe that these ‘perfect’ societies filled with ‘perfect’ people are not perfect at all.  Or perhaps these societies and people are indeed perfect, but in that case, I do not desire to ever be part of that society.

You can go and read or watch books and movies about the ‘perfect’ human, and regardless of how they got to their perfection; these people lost one part of humanity during the process.  Despite their ability to have feelings, these people lack in emotion.  Characters may like each other or dislike each other, but no one ever displays the emotions of love and hate.  Perhaps this is because emotions are flawed.  To love is not exactly logical, neither is to hate, or to break and scream in frustration at the world.  It appears that the perfect emotional response has to be logical, unlike our current emotional responses.  This brings us to a fundamental question of does becoming a perfect human require the removal of all flaws and faults, and if so, does that mean the removal of our faulted and flawed emotion?

Another thing that all these futuristic societies have in common is that you do not see people on the streets.  Poverty, starvation, etc. evidently have been eradicated in the process of creating the perfect society.  So, in that sense, through their effort to achieve perfect human, humans have perfected their humanity by finally creating equality and justice for the world and all those who live in it.  But the lack of emotion that is also displayed by these societies shows a lack of humanity at the same time.  Humanity, by many definitions, is showing or having compassion.  But compassion is rooted in love and empathy.  With the lack of our illogical emotions, love and empathy can no longer exist, resulting in the nonexistence of compassion, evidently leading to the extinction of our very humanity.

However, humanity might not even matter in a perfect society.  If everything is without flaw or fault, then why is there even a need to feel emotion to drive you to fix things?  Therefore, there isn’t a need for humanity anymore.  But with this lack of humanity and emotion, humans stop living; they will simply exist.  Without the emotion to drive people, there is no reason for them to want to grow.  Without this desire to better the world and better themselves, the only thing to do is to exist.  And if all that these perfect humans do is exist, they will become no better than puppets on strings.

But then, one must consider what he or she believes is the perfect human.  For I believe that a perfect society would consist of emotion.  I believe that there has to be a curiosity to drive us to research and discover stupid little things that lead to a bigger picture.  There has to be fear of failure, resulting from imperfection, to drive us to better our technology, our world.  There has to be inequality between the skill sets of humans so that might appreciate the talents of others.  Not everyone will be able to dance, and not everyone will be able to do high-level calculus.

Consider this; pick a person you know, any person, and think of what you love about them the most.  Maybe it’s their dimples, or the stupid bedroom rules they have, or the fact that they can sing like the heavens.  Now pick another person you know, and think about what makes them special to you.  Keep going and going, pick different people each time until you have a good list of qualities in people that you love.  Now think about this, how many of those qualities would still be there if everyone was the perfect human?  Ask yourself if you would still appreciate all of those qualities if everyone were the perfect human.  I don’t know what your answers to those questions were, but I can tell you that I wouldn’t appreciate the people I selected a quarter as much as I do now.

So, all in all, I have come up with two scenarios for the perfect human.  Option one is what you see in literature, emotionless but physically and mentally flawless.  Option two is our imperfectly perfect society and us.  Despite our fatal flaws that we are improving and are working on, we have all the imperfections that make us perfect.  Give the world a few hundred years, and we will have equality, justice, and peace.  But we will also have emotion and drive to continue living.  And, to me at least, our perfection in living our imperfect lives is far more perfect than any emotionless fictional characters existing in their perfect lives.