More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“The paradox of anti-government hysteria is it tends to lead to authoritarianism. The arrival of space aliens has not united humanity; they’ve only made us more tribal, more fractured, and it’s only going to get worse in the months and years to come. And now you have these proto-fascists arguing against the very idea of alien personhood and advocating for the creation of a whole different category of person altogether. One might almost say … three-fifths of a person.”
“But I would give it all back to be a part of the machine again. I would purge that knowledge from my mind if it meant I could be a part of the Superorganism again. No burden of truth is worth this misery. “I want to go home,” he said, and the wall between them practically burst, a flood of grief flowing through him and into her, crashing into her so hard it felt like her sternum might crack under the pressure.
Kaveh looked out over his domain—his nice-ass pool, the hot tub that flowed into it, and behind that the vista of all of Orange County in its hazy polluted glory. And it was in this moment he really understood how much power he had in the situation relative to her. Not just age, not just career, not just wealth, but in almost every way imaginable.
“I mean, I don’t have any skills relevant to this. I’m a writer, my skill set is taking information, parsing out what’s relevant to public interest, and presenting it to people in an accessible manner.” “YOU ARE A PROPAGANDIST.”
There are people in this world who look at their fellow humans and see the worst in them, and their solution is a tilt to authoritarianism. They believe that human nature is immutable, not a construct, and therefore must be controlled with an iron boot. Calling the worst, basest impulses we possess a function of human nature excuses us from change and dismisses it as impossible.
