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“He’s abrasive. Difficult. Dismissive of anyone not as smart as he is, which means he’s dismissive of pretty much everyone.”
The desire to organize was ingrained in DNA; groups fared better than individuals, and so, a priori, the individuals around whom groups naturally formed tended to be very attractive. A survival advantage reinforced evolutionarily.
Left untended, the holes through which freedom escapes widen. When politicians restrict our rights in order to “protect us,” freedom is lost. When the military refuses to disclose basic facts, freedom is lost. Worst of all, when fear becomes a part of our lives, we willingly surrender freedom for a promise of safety, as if freedom weren’t the very basis of safety.
Cooper had a theory about personality. Most people considered personality to be a singular identity. Malleable, sure, but essentially cohesive. But he tended to see people as more of a chorus. Every stage in life added a voice to that chorus. The different iterations of himself—lonely military brat, cocky teenager, faithful soldier, young husband, dedicated father, relentless hunter—they all existed within him.
Could life be so delicate? You know that it can. The world worked because people agreed to believe it worked. He could hand a piece of paper to a clerk and walk out with clothing because they agreed to ascribe value to the paper. He could interact with people thousands of miles away and call it chatting. The d-pad in his pocket could access the sum total of accumulated human knowledge, from setting a bone to building an A-bomb. And none of that was real. It was a shared and beneficial hallucination. What happens when we can’t believe anymore?
Smith would have spent years preparing for this moment, but strategies always changed in execution, always.
Now sit down and shut up, you autocratic frat boy. It’s adult swim.
The truth was, everything in life came down to intentions and results. Cooper’s intentions in killing Peters and releasing the video had been good; the results had been a disaster. Did that make his intentions wrong? If so, that meant morality was really only a
way of talking about how we wished things were. Hope, empathy, idealism—maybe they didn’t matter. Maybe the only thing that counted was results.
