Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

Crazytown was repelled by facts and knowledge, as oil fled from water, but was fascinated by the absence of hard facts, since it provided vacant space in which to construct elaborate edifices of speculation.

Sinjin nodded. “What’s the point? The mass of people are so stupid, so gullible, because they want to be misled. There’s no way to make them not want it. You have to work with the human race as it exists, with all of its flaws. Getting them to see reason is a fool’s errand.”

Once they had got the gist, their attention drifted back to the here and now. Julian and Phil took turns reading the graffiti on the door, a palimpsest of slut shaming in which they found undue fascination and furtive amusement—exhibiting social, verging on moral, retardation that Sophia’s expensive training had given her all the tools to perceive and to analyze but no weapons to change.

“Just saying that for everyone else in this car the post-Moab world is basically all we’ve ever known. Where people can’t even agree that this town exists.” “What was it like when people agreed on facts, you mean?”

“I would say that the ability of people to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible—states of affairs removed from them in space and time—ramped up from a baseline of approximately zero to a pretty high level around the time of the scientific revolution and all that, and stayed there and became more globally distributed up through the Cronkite era, and then dropped to zero incredibly quickly when the Internet came along.

“Identity” had been forever changed by the Internet; formerly it had meant “who you really are” but now it meant “any one of a number of persistent faces that you can present to the digital universe.”

Yet she couldn’t help seeing all of this through their eyes. Jihadists, who were obsessed with a particular kind of religion, would see the gyms and the restaurants as temples to a false god, where people went to distract themselves from the reality that they were all sooner or later going to get sick and die. After which, if you believed what they believed, you’d meet your maker and be duly punished for having spent so much of your life reveling in pleasure.

To treat of appearances as if they were real was to make himself foolish and weak in the grip of one such as El who knew and was the master of the powers upon which those appearances were founded.