Цитаты из книги Harmony

We can never remove the barbarism of nature from ourselves completely. We can’t forget that before we are little admedistrative collectives, before we are part of a system or network of relationships, we are animals, plain and simple—a patchwork assortment of functions and logic and emotion all tied together into a bundle.

It was ironic. Our souls were nothing more than the product of a hyperbolic evaluation system we had developed over the course of our evolution. Perfect humans didn’t need souls.

Qualities that were vital in some circumstances became useless or even dangerous when those circumstances changed. We are just collections of DNA optimized for particular places and times. The human genome was a patchwork of solutions for a thousand different problems. It was easy to think of evolution as meaning forward progress, when in reality we, and all living things, were just assorted attempts at survival.

All the billions of people on this earth had, at some point in their ancestry, along the long path of evolution, obtained what we call a consciousness. Evolution was a very haphazard thing. Only the genes well suited to a particular environment survived. The result of these patched-together adaptations was the species of human as we knew it now, each one of us possessing that curious byproduct of evolution we called a consciousness.

Humanity had always gone out of its way to suppress nature.

We built cities, built societies, built systems.

All of these revealed an overriding human desire to take the unpredictable elements of nature and place them within a predictable, controllable framework.

“Personally, I see a big problem with the whole idea of controlling peoples’ wills in the first place,” I told him.

“I imagined you’d say that. But think about it a little. People let medicules control their bodies every day to suppress disease. Why then shouldn’t we suppress potentially harmful thoughts in the brain?”

The longer history got, the more compressed its parts became.

“We’ll be lucky if we get one minute’s time,” Miach had said once. Leave it to Miach to imagine a history lesson one thousand years in the future. And who wouldn’t want to skip such an uneventful period in favor of something more exciting? As history marched on, our time would shrink, and shrink, and shrink away until finally there’d be nothing left.

Kindness always expects compensation in kind.