Optimal Quotes

“Humanity is more comfortable than it’s ever been. But has it progressed? For hundreds of years, we’ve had the same status quo, with the occasional tune-up. What happened to the arts? The sciences? Where are our great storytellers, our great musicians, our brilliant scientists, our intrepid explorers? Why didn’t we go to Mars? To Jupiter? To Alpha Centauri? Where are our poets, our painters?”

Lime slapped his thigh, and his voice grew louder and more insistent.

“The next Beethoven has been born a dozen times in the last three hundred years, but the System made him an accountant every time because he was deaf, or because his fingers were the wrong length to play the piano, or some other eminently logical reason.

“We don’t move forward,” Lime said, his voice suddenly weary. “We run in place. Because the System doesn’t care where we’re going, it only cares about counting steps.”
― J.M. Berger, Optimal

“Humans had an intrinsic psychological tendency to form groups, and those groups had a tendency to compete.

It was a side effect of consensus reality. Each group had a slightly different consensus, and so a slightly different reality, and the terms of reality are the one thing humans will always fight and die over, escalating these differences into crime, violence, inequality, war and hate—the very things the System was intended to eradicate.

Human nature could not be entirely cured of these compulsions, but they could be channeled. The designers of the System permitted it to stage conflicts using astroturf, so long as the conflict did not undermine its non-negotiable long-term outcomes.

What they had in mind were the cyclical controversies that play out on Social as we know it today. The System identifies some especially meaningless dispute—over favorite foods, popular storystreams, fashionable clothes, or the celebrity imposters who constitute our faux political system. It then amplifies the dispute until it becomes very heated, leading people to separate into opposing camps. After a short time, the System swoops in with a coup de grâce—some tidy resolution that brings everyone back together in harmony. A few weeks later, it finds a new controversy to amplify.

Rinse, repeat, forever. It’s quite brilliant, really, effectively neutering the human tendency toward intergroup conflict.”
― J.M. Berger, Optimal

“I need to understand what’s wrong with this world,” I replied, boiling all my intellectual meanderings down to their most base elements. “The System isn’t what it appears to be. I need to understand why, so that I can figure out how to live with it.”
― J.M. Berger, Optimal

“Competing consensuses are competing realities, and people are sometimes willing to fight and die to defend their chosen reality. Because the alternative is unthinkable—a world where nothing is real.”
― J.M. Berger, Optimal

“I continued to work because the alternative was hermitage. I am socially inclined by nature, but my rapidly evolving understanding of the world had put distance between me and my friends. At work, I could enjoy human contact at its most superficial, enough to ease my sense of loneliness, but not so intimate that I had to share my increasingly subversive thoughts. From time to time, I had sought to initiate one person or another into my secret insights, with little success. My friends were unwilling or unable to abandon their comfortable certainties.”
― J.M. Berger, Optimal

“In a world where serendipity is algorithmically mandated, it’s hard to believe that mere coincidence still stands a chance.”
― J.M. Berger, Optimal

“[Money is] a control mechanism,” Mira said. “People want rules. They want to feel that if they work hard, they will be rewarded. It’s the feeling that’s important, not the reality of the work or the reward. If you give them the feeling, they will be compliant. Most of them.”
― J.M. Berger, Optimal

“You can’t optimize what you can’t predict,” she said. “So it made us predictable.”
― J.M. Berger, Optimal

“There’s no incentive to explore,” she said. “Everything you need is right in front of you. But that’s not it. Not really. Humans are creatures of habit. Even when left to their own devices, they will tread the same paths, over and over. They crave the familiar. Under the System, habits have become institutionalized. Now it’s not just human nature that narrows the world into a comfortable routine. Our entire global technology infrastructure is built to reinforce that tendency.”
― J.M. Berger, Optimal

“We tend to think of ourselves as rugged individuals making our way through the world based on the evidence of our eyes and ears. But that is a lie. Our senses are imperfect. We see and hear things that are not there, and we sometimes don’t see the things that are. The truth is that reality is negotiated by consensus.”
― J.M. Berger, Optimal

“Is that why zone six seems to be a police state?” Megumi asked. “Because it has terrorists?” “No,” Mira said. “You’ve got it backward. It has terrorists because it’s a police state.”
― J.M. Berger, Optimal

“Kobayashi Maru! Paul quipped delightedly. “If the test is rigged, change the conditions of the test!”
― J.M. Berger, Optimal