Echopraxia (Firefall, #2)

by Peter Watts

people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy.

Truth had never been a priority. If believing a lie kept the genes proliferating, the system would believe that lie with all its heart.

And from those humble beginnings we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favors the paranoid.