Truth of the Divine (Noumena, #2)

by Lindsay Ellis

“Ampersand told me something like that once,” she said. “That he believes that if there are two cultures, the dominant one will always try to reshape the less powerful one, and if they can’t do that, they destroy them. And it’s a pattern of human history, of their history, of nature, of everything.”

Eventually, he responded, “You swore you’d never hurt me.”

It wasn’t just that humanity had built a civilization whose inertia toward its own self-destruction was too strong for it to change. This was a civilization that, in the face of adversity, turned on itself, devoured itself, ate its most vulnerable. Flesh-eaters, pugilists, militarists. This was a civilization that did not deserve to be saved. “Yes,” she whispered.

Calling the worst, basest impulses we possess a function of human nature excuses us from change and dismisses it as impossible.