Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

Almost as miraculous as life itself was the number of ways it could end, or at least turn into a living hell.

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.

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.”

Speech is aggression Every utterance has a winner and a loser Curiosity is feigned Lying is performative Stupidity is power

“Per stirpes,”

“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.

The only thing that could give time meaning was change, and nothing was changing.

Agreement got by compulsion or trickery is not agreement, but a thing akin to slavery. Free minds are the only company worth having.

The tragedy—and the entire point—of being a parent was the moment when the story stopped being about you.

Why are we disturbed by psychotics? Because they see and hear things we don’t, and that’s just wrong.

The hero who falls because of a cramp in his hamstring is not sung of.”