Words&Dirt

“All those gut feelings, right or wrong, that had kept the breed alive on the Pleistocene savanna––and they were wrong, so much of the time. False negatives, false positives, the moral algebra of fat men pushed in front of onrushing trolleys. The strident emotional belief that children made you happy, even when all the data pointed to misery. The high-amplitude fear of shards and dark-skinned snipers who would never kill you; indifference to all the toxins and pesticides that could. The mind was so rotten with misrepresentation that in some cases it literally had to be damaged before it could make a truly rational decision––and should some brain-lesioned mother abandon her baby in a burning house in order to save two strangers from the same fire, the rest of the world would be more likely to call her a monster than laud the rationality of her lifeboat ethics. Hell, rationality itself––the exalted Human ability to reason––hadn’t evolved in the pursuit of truth but simply to win arguments, to gain control: to bend others, by means logical or sophistic, to your will.

Truth had never been a priority. If believing a lie kept the genes proliferating, the system would believe that lie with all its heart.”

––Echopraxia, by Peter Watts, pg. 176-7

“DuBois prophesied that the problem of the twentieth century would be the ‘problem of the color-line.’ However, as industrial capitalism increasingly dominated the economy, the landscape, the politics, and the social relations of the United States, the problem of the twentieth century also came to involve the poverty line, the class line. White did continue to lord it over black in most cases, but as the twentieth century neared, a vast gulf grew between the few white families that owned most of the nation and the rest of the country who were struggling to make do.”

––American Stories: Living American History, Vol. II: From 1865, by Jason Ripper, pg. 17