This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It (John Dies at the End, #2)

by David Wong

“Congratulations, now you know the single reason why the world is the way it is. You see the problem right away—everything we do requires cooperation in groups larger than a hundred and fifty. Governments. Corporations. Society as a whole. And we are physically incapable of handling it. So every moment of the day we urgently try to separate everyone on earth into two groups—those inside the sphere of sympathy and those outside. Black versus white, liberal versus conservative, Muslim versus Christian, Lakers fan versus Celtics fan. With us, or against us. Infected versus clean.

“Which brings us back to the Tower of Babel. Humans were always destined to be derailed by this limitation in our ability to cooperate. At some specific point, determined by the overall size of the population on the planet and a host of other factors, we will destroy ourselves. That is the Babel Threshold. The point at which the species-wide exhaustion of human sympathy reaches critical mass.”

Nobody involved in a conflict thinks they’re the villain.

All moral choices seem easy when you don’t actually have to make them.”

A perfect, undeniable symbol for the price the innocent pay for unchecked paranoia.