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This is who we had become by then, people who gathered in the rain, arguing over whether or not they were getting wet.
“We became the commodity. Our data. This is the secret of modern life. We went from being citizens to consumers, and now to commodities. Our personality profiles, our social and financial history, our likes and dislikes, all used to accurately predict future behavior. How will we vote? Will we take to the streets or roll over? The data knows all, which is why today our data is more valuable than our bodies.
“Those frightened people were our parents,” he tells Simon. “And rather than raising us, their children, from a place of love, they raised us in fear. Doesn’t it stand to reason that their fear would shape the adults we become? Anxious, plagued by a constant sense that something, everything, is wrong. Their fear has crippled us, and our inability to function only feeds our anxiety. We are failing at life. So now all we are is failure.”
There are two major political parties in America.
the Party of Truth and the other the Party of Lies. But here’s the catch. Members of each party believe their party is the Party of Truth and that their adversaries belong to the Party of Lies.
our youngest adult generation has never known a time in which their country was not at war. It is their permanent reality. For them, combat is normal, and—in the same way a bee can see only flowers—a country at war comes to accept war as its natural state of being.
What if empathy doesn’t lead to anything? What if—like happiness or misery—feelings of empathy hit you intensely in the moment but then wane over time? For example, when we see a homeless child, we feel a swell of empathy. The feeling brings with it a bloom of moral righteousness—I feel empathy, therefore I am a moral being. This, in turn, increases our conviction that we are good people. We carry that feeling of moral goodness with us through the rest of our day, and yet the child is still homeless. What have we done to help her, other than feel her pain?
