Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1)

by Iain M. Banks

experience as well as common sense indicated that the most reliable method of avoiding self-extinction was not to equip oneself with the means to accomplish it in the first place.

Yet an index was not the text, a street plan was not the city, a map not the land.

There’d been a little accident (life a succession of same; evolution dependent on garbling; all progress a function of getting things wrong)….

A federated disgust, a galaxy of scorn. Us with our busy, busy little lives, finding no better way to pass our years than in competitive disdain.

“Before you ask,” the drone said, “no, there’s nothing you can do.” “I had guessed that, Unaha-Closp,” Balveda said. “Hmm. Then you have ghoulish tendencies?”

“It is how you are made; you must all strive to claw your way over the backs of your fellow humans during the short time you are permitted in the universe, breeding when you can, so that the strongest strains survive and the weakest die. I would no more blame you for that than I would try to convert some nonsentient carnivore to vegetarianism. You are all on your own side.