The Burning White (Lightbringer, #5)

by Brent Weeks

If an institution presents itself as uniquely moral but is secretly monstrous, isn’t that proof that its very ideas are corrupt and corrupting, rather than that only some few of its practitioners are corrupt?

“We humans, we’re social. Sometimes we’re scolding squirrels, or monkeys shrieking and flinging excrement. At better times, loyal dogs or wolves hunting together to take down prey that none of us could face alone. Like other endotherms, we care about our pack, in our cases the family, the tribe, the satrapy, even the empire. We care deeply about our position within those groups. We are zoon politikon, social animals. There’s great strength in this, of course. A man alone in the wilderness will have trouble even surviving. We care for our sick, our elderly, and our children. But there’s waste and danger to living in society, too. We obsess over trivialities.