I have finished reading The House of the Scorpion, by Nancy Farmer. This book follows the life of a boy named Matt who discovers he is the clone of a wealthy drug lord. In Matt's world, clones are generally regarded as the scum of the earth.
In part of the book, the wealthy drug lord who Matt is a clone of (who is very, very old), is in an extremely critical medical condition. He needs Matt's heart to be transplanted into him in order to survive. Matt is about to be butchered against his will to save this man, but then Matt's caretaker speaks up. It turns out that she has been secretly giving him doses of arsenic and foxglove (which are poisons) in his meals in order to make his organs unstable and therefore unable to be used for transplants. However, Matt's caretaker did not feed him enough poison to harm him permanently.
This got me thinking as to how much or how little our immoral actions "harden" our conscience. The wealthy drug lord is a mean old crow of a character, and built his entire drug empire on killing, brainwashing, and enslaving others. Was the drug lord's decision to preserve his own life and to end Matt's life partly influenced by his extensive immoral criminal activities? I think that all of his killing, brainwashing, enslaving, murdering, stealing, butchering, pillaging, slaughtering activities were just callusing his conscience more and more until he really didn't feel any remorse in unethical deeds. This makes me wonder how much everything around me has influenced my future decisions as well. I never liked the video game and movie rating system, since my mother still doesn't let me watch R movies or play M video games, but now I'm starting to wonder if they are crucial to keeping us sensitized to immoral acts and violence.
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