http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=707
This process is called “optimization.” It leads to a “blessed clarity that filled my being,” the narrator says; or, more objectively, it leads to an “absolute clarity of thought, even during emergencies. Freedom from prejudice and superstition. Freedom from the tyranny of emotion.” Instead, when you are optimized you have access to “information” that previously you had “ignored or repressed.”.....

Optimization makes for perfect corporate employees. I would think, as well, that it makes for the sort of “bright,” rational, and illusion-free personality type so desired by rationalist crusaders like Richard Dawkins. Indeed, one of the effects of optimization is that it leads almost immediately to the rejection of any prior religious beliefs: their delusive, compensatory quality simply becomes too obvious, and is no longer required....

The narrator of “Wild Minds,” however, is a reactionary and an ironist; he chooses not to be optimized, and he fervently embraces the illusions and consolations of religion. He clings to Catholicism’s sense of guilt, repentance, and possible redemption. “The thought,” he says, “that a silicon-dosed biochip could make me accept [the murder he committed] as an unfortunate accident of neurochemistry and nothing more, turns my stomach.” He clings to his sense of guilt precisely because he knows that after optimization he would no longer feel this way; that doing what turns his stomach would insure that it would no longer turn his stomach. He accepts that “being human” is no longer “essential”; yet he “cling[s] to the human condition anyway, out of nostalgia perhaps but also, possibly, because it contains something of genuine value.”