As in all too many matters, the consensus of opinion was starting to resemble what the Culture had to say on the subject. The Culture would lay down the law (except, of course, that the Culture didn’t have any real laws) about what being human was, or how intelligent a particular species was (while at the same time making clear that pure intelligence didn’t really mean much on its own), or on how long people should live (though only as a rough guide, naturally), and people would accept these things without question, because everybody believed the Culture’s own propaganda, that it was fair,
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