Elsewhere

by Dean Koontz

Sometimes, however, common sense required paranoia. It seemed that the political elites were striving, with admiration for George Orwell and rare unanimity, to ensure that the totalitarian state in the novel 1984 would be realized no later than fifty years after the author predicted.

The only virtue is vice, and the acquisition of power justifies all things.

Evil people thrived on your fear; they fed on it; they could defeat you only if you made yourself a banquet of fear and were consumed by your enemies.

this was an America where fascists didn’t pretend to be antifascists, didn’t conceal their faces behind black masks, operated openly and boldly; this was an America ruled by brute intimidation, harassment, and violence.

“The mind and the heart—intellect and emotions, facts and feelings. They’re both important. But to live well, we need to make decisions based on logic and reason modified by emotion. If we’re guided only or even largely by emotion . . . Well, the heart often wants what it doesn’t really need, and sometimes it wants what it shouldn’t have, something with the potential to ruin your life. It wants something so intensely that we find it easy to do what the heart wants even if we know it’s reckless.”

“There is a timeline in which the United States endures a societal convulsion similar to the French Revolution, but even worse. It is led by modern Jacobins, not spawned by the lower classes but by the highest, by privileged young men and women made ignorant by the most expensive universities and schooled

Spot on

in violence by the culture of death that produced them. It is as though Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities had been rewritten by a violence-porn hack, filmed by the most deranged talent in Hollywood. The streets run with blood, as they did in the Dickens novel, as in fact they did in France between 1789 and 1794, during the Reign of Terror. Everywhere, scaffolds are erected in the streets, and the condemned are hung by their wrists to be eviscerated. Children are beheaded in front of their parents, the parents stoned to death by mobs. Tracts of houses and apartment buildings are set afire to exterminate residents who’ve been declared moral vermin. What we think could never happen here happens there, as it happened in Germany in the 1930s, as it happened in China under Mao. Nihilism and

irrationality spread like a plague. Crazed, bestial emotion replaces logic and reason. Madness is redefined as moral clarity. The past is destroyed and reinvented to ensure a future of utopian justice, though justice no longer exists, has become mere revenge, often revenge against enemies more imagined than real, even revenge of Jacobin against Jacobin, as the insanity breeds more paranoia. I’ve seen women gang-raped in the streets by men urged on by other women waving banners of female solidarity. I’ve seen the heads of babies...