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Comment by boothby | Hacker News Reader

My favorite (dys|u)topian setting; universal child removal to robo-nurseries, gets closer to implementable every day.

They more or less did that during the bombing of London, children were evacuated to foster families in the countryside en masse. Luckily they came to terms with the fact that this was an insanely traumatic experience pretty quickly and reverted. It's literally less traumatic for a child to be in an active war zone than to be separated from their parents.

> It's literally less traumatic for a child to be in an active war zone than to be separated from their parents.

Unless they happen to go to war themselves, vanquishing an evil queen with the help of a lion and becoming kings and queens, and reigning for a long while themselves.

Those kids seem to mostly turn out alright. Small sample size though.

I'm not so sure you're interpreting the data correctly: 1 in 4 such children become "silly, conceited" adults, forgetting all the lessons they learned on their adventure; and 3 in 4 develop vivid visions that result in them getting killed by a train.

And far far worse outcomes for those children orphaned:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-04-27/child-abuse-royal-com...

One of them (Susan) gets really into nylons and lipstick and is basically damned to hell for it, though.

I think the part where she abandoned people, including one prisoner, to a murderous gang of con artists / burgeoning cultists is more relevant than precisely what she abandoned them for. I'm reasonably sure that my interpretation is not how the author (C. S. Lewis) interpreted this part of the story, though.

Also, she wasn't damned by the end of the last Narnia book (rather, she's expected to be damned, but it is not yet certain).

Unless the child is killed in said active war zone, which was the maximally traumatic outcome they were trying to avoid. Some evacuation was reverted, but there were also later waves; I don't think it was clear that it was overall the wrong thing given the very possible outcomes of heavier bombing or even invasion.

Well obviously dead child suffer no trauma.

it seems that at least according to the german wikipedia page about the topic in germany they came to the opposite observation. children who were sent away apparently suffered less than those that stayed in the war zones.

Does this apply to babies separated at birth though?

The trauma shifts forward in time, like debt.

Amusing how many read excerpts of The Republic and come away thinking it's a utopian project, and not a thought experiment to investigate the nature of justice.

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