The Light Brigade

by Kameron Hurley

is like listening to a bunch of nattering old people at a dinner party trying to remember some esoteric event from when they were kids. Everybody has a different memory. When they get frustrated, they start talking real loud, like that will make their memory more true.

“Average person only shits about a pound a day,”

We kept going. Because that’s what war is. You keep going until it’s over. Or you’re dead.

You can do a lot more than you think you can. That’s what mandatory training is about.

The trick is to not offer up anything. You answer the question and only the question. Don’t start building up a story you can’t substantiate. The standard interrogation technique for TenisanaCom is PEACE: Preparation and Planning, Engage and Explain, Account, Closure and Evaluate. I have to assume you’ve done your preparation and planning. Now you’re engaging and asking me to explain and account for my actions so you can figure out how I achieved it.

Did you know that the abuse of children by corporate bosses has been shown to create more loyal adult employees? They are told they could simply leave their home corp and become a ghoul, or sell themselves off to some other corp. They are told they have choices. If we choose to stay with a corp, we have to justify our reasons. We become complicit in our own oppression.

The more fearful and out of control we feel, the more we look to some big man on a horse or a tank or a beam of light to save us.

truly egalitarian societies requires—if not an absence of fear—then a harnessing of it.

Did you know those who are mildly depressed see the world more accurately? Yet they don’t live as long as optimists. Aren’t as successful. It turns out that being able to perceive actual reality has very little long-term benefit. It’s those who believe in something larger than themselves who thrive. We all seem to need a little bit of delusion to function in the world.

seeing things as they are vs seeing thing as they could be

Perhaps those hands won’t be mine—I like to keep even my gloves clean—but

I should be full of despair. Maybe I can endure this because I have a good idea of how it all turns out.

Everything that’s going to happen has already happened. You just haven’t experienced it yet. We are, all of us, caught within a massive loop of time,

People believe what they want to believe. You aren’t here because you want your horizons shattered. You want your worldview reinforced. Maybe that’s really why you’re asking—you’re hoping to get some other answer from me than the one you have.

There’s a theory that consciousness itself begins with story. Stories are how we make sense of the world. All of us have an internal story that we have told ourselves from the time we were very young. We constantly revise this story as we get older, honing and sharpening it to a fine point.

when we encounter something in our lives, or do something that does not match up with that story, we may experience a great sense of dissonance. It can feel as if you’ve lost a piece of yourself. It can feel like an attack on who you are, when the real world doesn’t match your story.

“Your enemy is not these soldiers,” she said. “Your enemy is your own mind. Your mind is also your only means of liberation. Take control.”

deluge of propaganda foisted upon an uneducated public with no formalized training in critical thinking.

If you’re not earning for the company, you are costing it.

They won that war, is all I’m saying. They started losing when they forgot how to be decent. People will fight for the idea of decency. They will fight for someone who treats them like people. They fight for beliefs far longer and harder than out of fear.

How do you keep living through the present when you already know the future?

“Take control of the construct.” Reality is made up. Reality is what we agree on. Had I agreed to this?

Under stress, the human mind is more likely to see patterns in everyday noise. Show them a picture of random black-and-white dots while primed to remember a moment when they were out of control, and they are more likely to see an image in it. The more stressed we are, the more we believe we can alter outcomes.

So far there’s no algorithm that can accurately predict the future. This is in part due to quantum theory, which I understand isn’t the topic here, but it’s related. There is no way to predict the future because the future is always changing, always uncertain, at the quantum level. Quantum particles behave unpredictably. Unpredictability rules us at the most basic level. We yearn for certainty, but the fact is that certainty and absolutes are a fiction.

volition.

When was the last time I tried to change anything in my life instead of just reacting to it?