Most of the terraria offering passenger transport around the solar system were extremely fast, but even so, trips often took weeks. This was simply too much time to be banging around aimlessly; doing that one could easily slide into a funk or some other kind of mental hibernation. In the settlements around Saturn this sort of thing had sometimes been developed into entire sciences and art forms. But any such hebephrenia was dangerous for Wahram, as he had found out long before by painful experience. Too often in his past, meaninglessness had gnawed at the edges of things. He needed order, and a project; he needed habits. In the nakedness of the moments of exfoliation, the intensity of experience had in it a touch of terror—terror that no new meaning would blossom to replace the old ones now lost. Of course there was no such thing as a true repetition of anything; ever since the pre-Socratics that had been clear, Heraclitus and his un-twice-steppable river and so on. So habits were not truly iterative, but pseudoiterative. The pattern of the day might be the same, in other words, but the individual events fulfilling the pattern were always a little bit different. Thus there was both pattern and surprise, and this was Wahram’s desired state: to live in a pseudoiterative. But then also to live in a good pseudoiterative, an interesting one, the pattern constructed as a little work of art. No matter the brevity of a trip, the dullness of the terrarium or the people in it, it was important to invent a pattern and a project and pursue it with all his will and imagination. It came to this: shipboard life was still life. All days had to be seized. — 58: 790-802
Mutt moves his lips when he reads. He’s not saying the words silently to himself, he’s doing a kind of Nero Wolfe stimulation of his brain. It’s his favorite neurobics exercise, of which he has many. — 15: 199-201
Ramona turned them into this breeze with a gull’s swoop. The feel of it, the feel of flying! They relaxed the pace, settled into a long distance rhythm, swooped around the sky over Orange County. Hard work; it was one of the weird glories of their time, that the highest technologies were producing artifacts that demanded more intense physical labor than ever before—as in the case of human-powered flight, which required extreme effort from even the best endurance athletes. But once possible, who could resist it? — 17: 239-242
It was clear she was a good teacher, and that was a pleasure to see. It was important for a teacher to have a certain distance, she should be liked and admired but also at a distance, a strong personality presenting a strong and coherent portrait of the world. This is the way the world is! the strong teacher says in every phrase and glance; not to downplay the complexity of the world, but to present a clear and distinct single view of it, which students could then work against in building their own views. It wasn’t so important that the teacher present all sides of a case, or pretend to neutrality in controversial issues. Over the years the multiplicity of teachers that every student got would take care of that. What was more important was that a teacher advocate a vivid, powerful set of ideas, to be a force, to make an impact. — 90: 1374-1380
Awkwardly, hesitantly, Kevin found himself telling the story. The whole story. The childhood stuff, the softball game, the ultraflight, the night in the hills, the birthday party, the following morning. The little that had happened since. It felt good to tell it, in a way. Because it was his story, his and his alone, nobody else’s. And in telling it he gained a sort of control over it, a control he had never had when it happened. That was the value of telling one’s story, a value exactly the reverse of the value of the experience itself. What was valuable in the experience was that he had been out of control, living moment to moment with no plan, at the mercy of other people. What was valuable in the telling of the story was that he was in control, shaping the experience, deciding what it meant, putting other people in their proper place. The two values were complementary, they added up to something more than each alone could, something that … completed things. So he told them his story, and they listened. — 264: 4079-4087
“There is not much worse,” Nadezhda said to Tom, rebuking him. Then to Kevin: “Time will make a difference. When enough time is passing—” “I won’t forget!” Kevin said. “No. You never forget. But you change. You change even if you try not to.” Tom laughed, tugged at the white hair over one ear. “It’s true. Time changes us in more ways than we can ever imagine. What happens in time … you become somebody else, do you understand?” His voice shook. “You don’t forget, but how you feel about what you remember … that changes.” He stood up suddenly, walked to Kevin and slapped him on the shoulder. “But it could be worse! You could forget! And that would be worse.” He stood by Kevin’s side. Nadezhda sat on the ground beyond them. For a long time the three of them rested there, silent, watching sunlight tumble down through clouds. — 264: 4092-4100
“I just don’t want to get personal about it,” Alfredo said. He leaned forward, and his voice took on a touch of pleading: “I’ve felt what it’s like when we take this kind of disagreement personally, and I don’t like it. I’d rather dispense with that, and just agree to disagree and get on with it, without any animosity. I … I don’t like being angry at you, Kevin. And I don’t like you being angry at me.” Kevin stared at him. He took a deep breath, let it out. “That may be part of the price you pay. I don’t like your plan, and I don’t like the way you’re keeping at it despite arguments against it that seem obvious to me. So, we’ll just have to see what happens. We have to do what we have to do, right?” — 277: 4294-4299
“It’s sometimes called avoiding acquiescence,” Badim said. “Acquiescence means accepting the framing of a problem, and working on it from within the terms of the frame. It’s a kind of mental economy, but also a kind of sloth. And Devi does not have that kind of sloth, as you know. She is always interrogating the framing of the problem. Acquiescence is definitely not her mode.” “No. Definitely not.” “But don’t ever call that thinking outside the box,” he warned Freya. “She hates that phrase, she snaps people’s heads off for saying it.” “Because we’re always inside the box,” Freya supposed. “Yes, exactly.” Badim laughed. — 71: 1031-1036
You hope, the stayers replied. You will have to trust in the kindness of strangers. They did not recognize this as a quotation. In general they were not aware that much of what they said had been said before, and was even in the public record as such. It was as if there were only so many things humans could say, and over the course of history, people had therefore said them already, and would say them again, but not often remember this fact. We will trust in our fellow human beings, the backers said. It’s a risk, but it beats trusting that the laws of physics and probability will bend for you just because you want them to. — 237: 3505-3510
Angry ghosts needed to be defied as often as they needed to be placated. — 27: 372-373
“Mowlana, he has been punished worse than he thought at first. He’s no longer the same man.” “He is the same soul,” said Ali. “You are simply seeing another aspect of him. There is a secret core in everyone that not even Gabriel can know by trying to know. Listen now. The intellect derives from the senses, which are limited, and come from the body. The intellect therefore is also limited, and it can never truly know reality, which is infinite and eternal. Khalid wanted to know reality with his intellect, and he can’t. Now he knows that, and is downcast. Intellect has no real mettle, you see, and at the first threat, into a hole it scuttles. But love is divine. It comes from the realm of the infinite, and is entrusted to the heart as a gift from God. Love has no calculation in it. ‘God loves you’ is the only possible sentence! So it’s love you must follow to the heart of your father-in-law. Love is the pearl of an oyster living in the ocean, and intellect lives on the shore and cannot swim. Bring up the oyster, sew the pearl onto your sleeve for all to see. It will bring courage to the intellect. Love is the king that must rescue his coward slave. Do you understand?” “I think so.” “You must be sincere and open, your love must be bright as the lightning flash itself! Then his inner consciousness might see it, and be snatched from itself in a twinkling. Go, feel the love course through you, and out to him.” — 242: 3546-3557
He turned the skull to him and looked inside it. “He did this and no one knew,” he said. “No one knew who he was, no one remembers this act of mine, no record of it exists, except in my mind, intermittently, and in the existence of all the people here who would have died if I had not done it. This is what the human story is, not the emperors and the generals and their wars, but the nameless actions of people who are never written down, the good they do for others passed on like a blessing, just doing for strangers what your mother did for you, or not doing what she always spoke against. And all that carries forward and makes us what we are.” — 358: 5215-5219
“This is the world we want you to help us make,” he said. “We will go out into the world and plant gardens and orchards to the horizons, we will build roads through the mountains and across the deserts, and terrace the mountains and irrigate the deserts until there will be garden everywhere, and plenty for all, and there will be no more empires or kingdoms, no more caliphs, sultans, emirs, khans, or zamindars, no more kings or queens or princes, no more qadis or mullahs or ulema, no more slavery and no more usury, no more property and no more taxes, no more rich and no more poor, no killing or maiming or torture or execution, no more jailers and no more prisoners, no more generals, soldiers, armies or navies, no more patriarchy, no more clans, no more caste, no more hunger, no more suffering than what life brings us for being born and having to die, and then we will see for the first time what kind of creatures we really are.” — 490: 7164-7171
“You, a historian, say this? But the future can’t be known at all!” “Well, but it exists for us now as a project to be enacted. Ever since the Travancori enlightenment we have had a sense of the future as something we make. This new awareness of time to come is very important. It makes us a thread in a tapestry that has unrolled for centuries before us, and will unroll for centuries after us. We’re midway through the loom, that’s the present, and what we do casts the thread in a particular direction, and the picture in the tapestry changes accordingly. When we begin to try to make a picture pleasing to us and to those who come after, then perhaps you can say that we have seized history.” — 629: 9247-9251
Someone brought up the old question of whether the “great man” or “mass movements” were the principal force for change, but Zhu immediately dismissed this as a false problem. “We are all great men, yes?” “Maybe you are,” muttered the person sitting next to Bao. “… what has mattered are the moments of exposure in every life, when habit is no longer enough, and choices have to be made. That’s when everyone becomes the great man, for a moment; and the choices made in these moments, which come all too frequently, then combine to make history. In that sense I suppose I come down on the side of the masses, in that it has been a collective process, whatever else it is. “Also, this formulation ‘the great man’ of course should bring up the question of women; are they included in this description? Or should we describe history as being the story of women wresting back the political power that they lost with the introduction of agriculture and the creation of surplus wealth? Would the gradual and unfinished defeat of patriarchy be the larger story of history? Along with, perhaps, the gradual and uncertain defeat of infectious disease? So that we have been battling microparasites and macroparasites, eh? The bugs and the patriarchs?” — 691: 10163-10172
“After all, in the end all the great moments of history have taken place inside people’s heads. The moments of change, or the clinamen as the Greeks called it.” — 697: 10249-10250
“But all right, we admit that catastrophe, and the people who live go on. Go on! They knit things together as best they can. So, what Zhu Isao used to say, what my old comrade Kung Jianguo used to say, was that each time a generation pulls itself together, and revolts against the established order of things in an attempt to make them more just, it is doomed to fail in some respects; but it succeeds in others; and in any case it gives something to posterity, even if it be only knowledge of how hard things are. Which makes it retroactively a kind of success. And so people go on.” — 712: 10472-10476
So, is there energy enough for all? Yes. Is there food enough for all? Yes. Is there housing enough for all? There could be, there is no real problem there. Same for clothing. Is there health care enough for all? Not yet, but there could be; it’s a matter of training people and making small technological objects, there is no planetary constraint on that one. Same with education. So all the necessities for a good life are abundant enough that everyone alive could have them. Food, water, shelter, clothing, health care, education. Is there enough security for all? Security is the feeling that results from being confident that you will have all the things listed above, and your children will have them too. So it is a derivative effect. There can be enough security for all; but only if all have security. If one percent of the humans alive controlled everyone’s work, and took far more than their share of the benefits of that work, while also blocking the project of equality and sustainability however they could, that project would become more difficult. This would go without saying, except that it needs saying. To be clear, concluding in brief: there is enough for all. So there should be no more people living in poverty. And there should be no more billionaires. Enough should be a human right, a floor below which no one can fall; also a ceiling above which no one can rise. Enough is a good as a feast— or better. Arranging this situation is left as an exercise for the reader. — 63: 866-877
All because of the discount rate. Dick: Yes. It’s a number put on an ethical decision. Mary: A number which can’t be justified on its merits. Dick: Right. This often gets admitted. No one denies future people are going to be just as real as us. So there isn’t any moral justification for the discounting, it’s just for our own convenience. Plenty of economists acknowledged this. Robert Solow said we ought to act as if the discount rate were zero. Roy Harrod said the discount rate was a polite expression for rapacity. Frank Ramsey called it ethically indefensible. He said it came about because of a weakness of the imagination. — 133: 1874-1879
Do you ask your calculator what to do with your life? No. You have to figure that out for yourself. — 162: 2294-2295
traffic, or walking past us on the sidewalks and metro platforms. We had to do that work like any other kind of work. It wasn’t a party, it wasn’t even a revolution. At least when we started. But soon we saw that people wanted to talk to us. They all knew they were being used, that they were just tools now. I myself was a kid, the main thing that got me out there was how much I hated school, where I had always been made to feel stupid. I was slotted into the bottom classes early on and my life was sealed at that point, on a track to servitude, even though I knew I had real thoughts, real feelings. So the main thing for me in that initial break was to get my ass out of school. Although parenthetically I have to admit that I later on became a teacher. Something then caused us to all converge on Paris. In France, that’s where you go. No one had to direct us. It was Trotsky who said the party is always trying to keep up with the masses. Strategy comes from below and tactics from above, not the reverse, and I think that’s what happened here, — 236: 3374-3382
But there is change and there is change. Looking through the fence at the mountains, hazy in the late morning light, I felt a deep stab of fear at the idea that my life might really and truly change. A big change. New people. Strangers. A new life in a new city. After such giant changes, would I still be me? Of course I recalled the poem about how you can never escape yourself, every place is the same because you are the one moving to that place. No doubt true. I recalled also the old notion from psychotherapy that people fear change because it can only be change for the worse, in that you turn into a different person and are therefore no longer yourself. Thus change as death. But death of habits. That’s all it is, I told myself. Remember the poem; you can’t help being yourself. You’ll drag yourself with you all over the Earth, no matter how far you flee. You can’t escape yourself even if you want to. If what you fear is losing yourself, rest easy. No: the fear I was feeling was perhaps the fear that even if things changed, I would still be just as unhappy as before. Ah yes, that was a real fear! — 446: 6442-6450
They cross the river by feeling the stones. — 490: 7079-7080
So what we have now, I would say, is not money (very short), nor freedom (we are still registered as Ausländer), but dignity. And this is what I think everyone needs. After the basics of food and shelter that we need just as animals, first thing after that: dignity. Everyone needs and deserves this, just as part of being human. And yet this is a very undignified world. And so we struggle. You see how it is. And yes, dignity is something you get from other people, it’s in their eyes, it’s a kind of regard. If you don’t get it, the anger rises in you. This I know very well. That anger can kill you. Those young men blowing things up, they’re angry because they don’t have dignity. Which is something other people give you, so it’s tricky. I mean you have to deserve it, but ultimately it’s something other people give you. So the angriest of our young men blow things up because they aren’t given it, and mostly they blow up their own people’s chances in this world. — 523: 7571-7578
“The urge to excel and the urge to lead aren’t the same. Sometimes I think they may be opposites.” — 83: 1265-1266
“All these changes will happen inevitably,” Sax Russell said with a shrug. “Being on Mars will change us in an evolutionary way.” Arkady shook his head vehemently, causing him to spin a little in the air over the table. “No, no, no, no! History is not evolution! It is a false analogy! Evolution is a matter of environment and chance, acting over millions of years. But history is a matter of environment and choice, acting within lifetimes, and sometimes within years, or months, or days! History is Lamarckian! So that if we choose to establish certain institutions on Mars, there they will be! And if we choose others, there they will be!” A — 109: 1666-1671
It took a while to rachet them into agreement. Disarm, cooperate, organize, petition the American government for help, for justice. Put themselves in his hands, in effect. Of course it took a while. And along the way he had to promise to address every complaint, to solve every injustice, to right every wrong. It was ridiculous, obscene; but he pursed his lips and did it. He gave them advice in media relations and arbitration technique, he told them how to organize cells and committees, to elect leaders. They were so ignorant! Young men and women, educated very carefully to be apolitical, to be technicians who thought they disliked politics, making them putty in the hands of their rulers, just like always. It was appalling how stupid they were, really, and he could not help lashing into them. He left to cheers. Maya was out there in the station. Exhausted, he could only stare at her in disbelief. She had been watching him over the video, she said. Frank shook his head, the fools inside hadn’t even bothered to disable the interior cameras, were possibly even unaware of their existence. So the world had seen it all. And Maya had that certain look of admiration on her face, as if pacifying exploited laborers with lies and sophistry were the highest heroism. Which to her it no doubt was. In fact she was off to employ the same techniques in the Russian tent, because there had been no progress there, and they had asked for her. The MarsFirst president! So the Russians were even more foolish than the Americans, apparently. — 530: 8125-8137
“You can’t make people do things,” Fort said. “It’s a matter of changing ourselves. Then people can see, and choose. — 95: 1447-1448
Of course he had seen that human affairs were irrational and unexplainable. This no one could miss. But he realized now that he had been making the assumption that the people who involved themselves in governance were making a good-faith effort to run things in a rational manner, with a view to the long-term well-being of humanity and its biophysical support system. Desmond laughed at him as he tried to express this, and irritably he exclaimed, “But why else take on such compromised work, if not to that end?” “Power,” Desmond said. “Power and gain.” “Ah.” Sax had always been so uninterested in those things that it was hard for him to understand why anyone else would be. What was personal gain but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And what was power but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And once you had that freedom, any more wealth or power actually began to restrict one’s options, and reduce one’s freedom. One became a servant of one’s wealth or power, constrained to spend all one’s time protecting it. So that properly seen, the freedom of a scientist with a lab at his command was the highest freedom possible. Any more wealth and power only interfered with that. Desmond was shaking his head as Sax described this philosophy. “Some people like to tell others what to do. They like that more than freedom. Hierarchy, you know. And their place in the hierarchy. As long as it’s high enough. Everyone bound into their places. It’s safer than freedom. And a lot of people are cowards.” — 262: 4018-4030
The goal of Martian economics is not ‘sustainable development’ but a sustainable prosperity for its entire biosphere. — 433: 6627-6628
Revolution meant shattering one structure and creating another one, but shattering was easier than creating, and so the two parts of the act were not necessarily fated to be equally successful. In that sense, building a revolution was like building an arch; until both columns were there, and the keystone in place, practically any disruption could bring the whole thing crashing down. — 649: 9945-9948
“Everyone gets the treatment?” Nirgal asked. “Yes,” the woman said. “Good!” Nirgal said, surprised; he had heard it was a rare thing on Earth. “You think so!” the prime minister said. “People are saying it will create all kinds of problems.” “Yes. It will, in fact. But I think we should do it anyway. Give everyone the treatment and then figure out what to do.” — 198: 3033-3037
There’s the death mesa between a hundred hours and a thousand hours, after people have relaxed and before they’re really good, so that they get into trouble. — 402: 6149-6150
considerations; the debates would go on forever. — 404: 6183-6184
incorporating aspects of the almost-forgotten guild socialism of Great Britain, Yugoslavian worker management, Mondragon ownership, Kerala land tenure, — 484: 7418-7420
Expert, from the Latin experiri, to try. As in experiment. So it was government by the experimenters. Trying by the triers. In effect government by the interested. So yet another kind of oligarchy. But what other choice did they have? Once you had to draft members into the governing body, then the notion of self-government as an aspect of individual liberty became somewhat paradoxical. Hector and Sylvia, from Bao’s seminar, broke into Sax’s reverie and invited him to come down and hear their music group do a selection of songs from Maria dos Buenos Aires. Sax agreed and followed them. Outside the little amphitheater where the recital was going to take place, Sax stopped at a drink table and dispensed another small cup of kava. The festival spirit was growing all around them. Hector and Sylvia hurried down to get ready, glowing with anticipation. Watching them Sax remembered his recent encounter with Ann. — 487: 7455-7462
“Everything dies someday. Better to die thinking that you’re going to miss a golden age, than to go out thinking that you had taken down your children’s chances with you. That you’d left your descendants with all kinds of toxic long-term debts. Now that would be depressing. As it is, we only have to feel bad for ourselves.” “True.” — 811: 12434-12437
“One of the scientific terms for compassion,” Drepung said, looking around the ceiling as if for the word, “… you say, ‘altruism.’ This is a question in your animal studies. Does true altruism exist, and is it a good adaptation? Does compassion work, in other words? You have done studies that suggest altruism is the best adaptive strategy, if seen from the group context. This then becomes a kind of … admonishment. To practice compassion in order to successfully evolve—this, coming from your science, which claims to be descriptive only! Only describing what has worked to make us what we are. But in Buddhism we have always said, if you want to help others, practice compassion; if you want to help yourself, practice compassion. Now science adds, if you want to help your species, practice compassion.” This got a laugh, and Frank also chuckled. He started to think about it in terms of prisoners’ dilemma strategies; it was an invocation for all to make the always generous move, for maximum group return, indeed maximum individual return.… Thus he missed what Drepung said next, absorbed in something more like a feeling than a thought: If only I could believe in something, no doubt it would be a relief. All his rationality, all his acid skepticism; suddenly it was hard not to feel that it was really just some kind of disorder. And at that very moment Rudra Cakrin looked right at him, him alone in all the audience, and Drepung said, “An excess of reason is itself a form of madness.” Frank sat back in his seat. What had the question been? Rerunning his short-term memory, he could not find it. Now he was lost to the conversation again. His flesh was tingling, as if he were a bell that had been struck. “The experience of enlightenment can be sudden.” He didn’t hear that, not consciously. “The scattered parts of consciousness occasionally assemble at once into a whole pattern.” He didn’t hear that either, as he was lost in thought. All his certainties were trembling. He thought, an excess of reason itself a form of madness—it’s the story of my life. And the old man knew. — 228: 3344-3361
An excess of reason. Well, but he had always tried to be reasonable. He had tried very hard. That attempt was his mode of being. It had seemed to help him. Dispassionate; sensible; calm; reasonable. A thinking machine. He had loved those stories when he was a boy. That was what a scientist was, and that was why he was such a good scientist. That was the thing that had bothered him about Anna, that she was undeniably a good scientist but she was a passionate scientist too, she threw herself into her work and her ideas, had preferences and took positions and was completely engaged emotionally in her work. She cared which theory was true. That was all wrong, but she was so smart that it worked, for her anyway. If it did. But it wasn’t science. — 232: 3399-3404
“A good thought is one you can act on.” “That’s what mathematicians say.” — 253: 3715-3716
Now he was considering acting in accordance with his beliefs. Something else he had heard the Khembalis say at the Quiblers, this time Drepung: If you don’t act on it, it wasn’t a true feeling. — 18: 268-270
“You know, this city and the Federal government are synonymous. They stand for each other, like when people call the administration ‘the White House.’ What is that, metonymy?” “Metonymy or synecdoche, I can never remember which.” “No one can.” Phil walked inside, stopped short at the sight of the stained inner walls. “Damn it. They are going to let this city sink back into the swamp it came out of.” “That’s synecdoche I think. Or the pathetic fallacy.” “Pathetic for sure, but how is it patriotic? How do they sell that?” “Please Phil, you’re gonna wake him up. They have it both ways, you know. They use code phrases that mean something different to the Christian right than to anyone else.” “Like the beast will be slain or whatnot?” “Yes, and sometimes even more subtle than that.” “Ha ha. Clerics, everywhere you look. Ours are as bad as the foreign ones. Make people hate their government at the same time you’re scaring them with terrorists, what kind of program is that?” Phil drifted through the subdued crowd toward the left wall, into which was incised the Gettysburg Address. The final lines were obscured by the flood’s high-water mark, a sight which made him scowl. “They had better clean this up.” “Oh they will. He was a Republican, after all.” “Abraham Lincoln was no Republican.” “Hello?” — 51: 772-786
The taste of blood. Frank gestured at his cell phone, put his cold hand back under his thigh, rocked forward and back, forward and back. Warm up, warm up. Don’t bleed inside. “There’s too many . . . different things going on at once. I go from thing to thing, you know. Hour to hour. I see people, I do different things with them, and I’m not . . . I don’t feel like the same person with these different people. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know what to do. If anyone were watching they’d think I had some kind of mental disorder. I don’t make any sense.” “But no one is watching.” “Except what if they are?” Rudra shook his head. “No one can see inside you. So no matter what they see, they don’t know. Everyone only judges themself.” “That’s not good!” Frank said. “I need someone more generous than that!” “Ha ha. You are funny.” “I’m serious!” “A good thing to know, then. You are the judge. A place to start.” Frank shuddered, rubbed his face. Cold hands, cold face; and dead behind the nose. “I don’t see how I can. I’m so different in these different situations. It’s like living multiple lives. I mean I just act the parts. People believe me. But I don’t know what I feel. I don’t know what I mean.” “Of course. This is always true. To some you are like this, to others like that. Sometimes a spirit comes down. Voices take over inside you. People take away what they see, they think that is all there is. And sometimes you want to fool them in just that way. But want to or not, you fool them. And they fool you! And on it goes—everyone in their own life, everyone fooling all the others—No! It is easy to live multiple lives! What is hard is to be a whole person.” — 540: 8280-8297
“Fellow Americans,” he said, pacing his speech to the reverb of the loudspeakers, “you have entrusted me with the job of president during a difficult time. The crisis we face now, of abrupt climate change and crippling damage to the biosphere, is a very dangerous one, to be sure. But we are not at war with anyone, and in fact we face a challenge that all humanity has to meet together. On this podium, Franklin Roosevelt said, ‘This generation has a rendezvous with destiny.’ Now it’s true again. We are the generation that has to deal with the profound destruction that will be caused by the global warming that has already been set in motion. The potential disruption of the natural order is so great that scientists warn of a mass extinction event. Losses on that scale would endanger all humanity, and so we cannot fail to address the threat. The lives of our children, and all their descendants, depend on us doing so. “So, like FDR and his generation, we have to face the great challenge of our time. We have to use our government to organize a total social response to the problem. That took courage then, and we will need courage now. In the years since we used our government to help get us out of the Great Depression, it has sometimes been fashionable to belittle the American government as some kind of foreign burden laid on us. That attitude is nothing more than an attack on American history, deliberately designed to shift power away from the American people. I want us to remember how Abraham Lincoln said it: ‘that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this Earth.’ This is the crucial concept of American democracy—that government expresses what the majority of us would like to do as a society. It’s us. We do it to us and for us. I believe this reminder is so important that I intend to add the defining phrase ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people’ every time I use the word ‘government,’ and I intend to do all I can to make that phrase be a true description. It will make me even more long-winded than I was before, but I am willing to pay that price, and you are going to have to pay it with me. “So, this winter, with your approval and support, I intend to instruct my team in the executive branch of government of the people, by the people, and for the people, to initiate a series of federal actions and changes designed to meet the problem of global climate change head-on. We will deal with it as a society working together, and working with the rest of the world. It’s a global project, and so I will go to the United Nations and tell them that the United States is ready to join the international effort. We will also help the under-developed world to develop using clean technology, so that all the good aspects of development will not be drowned in its bad side effects—often literally drowned. In our own country, meanwhile, we will do all it takes to shift to clean technologies as quickly as possible.” Phil paused to survey the crowd. “My, it’s cold out here today! You can feel right now, right down to the bone, that what I am saying is true. We’re out in the cold, and we need to change the way we do things. And it’s not just a technological problem, having to do with our machinery alone. The devastation of the biosphere is also a result of there being too many human beings for the planet to support over the long haul. If the human population continues to increase as it has risen in the past, all progress we might make will be overwhelmed. “But what is very striking to observe is that everywhere on this Earth where good standards of justice prevail, the rate of reproduction is about at the replacement rate. While wherever justice, and the full array of rights as described in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, is somehow denied to some portion of the population, especially to women and children, the rate of reproduction either balloons to unsustainably rapid growth rates, or crashes outright. Now you can argue all you want about why this correlation exists, but the correlation itself is striking and undeniable. So this is one of those situations in which what we do for good in one area, helps us again in another. It is a positive feedback loop with the most profound implications. Consider: for the sake of climate stabilization, there must be population stabilization; and for there to be population stabilization, justice must prevail. Every person on the planet must live with the full array of human rights that all nations have already ascribed to when signing the UN Charter. When we achieve that, at that point, and at that point only, we will begin to reproduce at a sustainable rate. “To help that to happen, I intend to make sure that the United States joins the global justice project fully, unequivocally, and without any double standards. This means accepting the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, and the jurisdiction of the World Court in the Hague. It means abiding by all the clauses of the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions, which after all we have already signed. It means supporting UN peacekeeping forces, and supporting the general concept of the UN as the body through which international conflicts get resolved. It means supporting the World Health Organization in all its reproductive rights and population reduction efforts. It means supporting women’s education and women’s rights everywhere, even in cultures where men’s tyrannies are claimed to be some sort of tradition. All these commitments on our part will be crucial if we are serious about building a sustainable world. There are three legs to this effort, folks: technology, environment, and social justice. None of the three can be neglected. “So, some of what we do may look a little unconventional at first. And it may look more than a little threatening to those few who have been trying, in effect, to buy our government of the people, by the people, and for the people, and use it to line their own pockets while the world goes smash. But you know what? Those people need to change too. They’re out in the cold the same as the rest of us. So we will proceed, and hope those opposed come to see the good in it. “Ultimately we will be exploring all peaceful means to initiate positive changes in our systems, in order to hand on to the generations to come a world that is as beautiful and bountiful as the one we were born into. We are only the temporary stewards of a mighty trust, which includes the lives of all the future generations to come. We are responsible to our children and theirs. What we do now will reveal much about our character and our values as a people. We have to rise to the occasion, and I think we can and will. I am going to throw myself into the effort wholeheartedly and with a feeling of high excitement, as if beginning a long journey over stormy seas.” — 79: 1323-1374
One analyst of the studies had concluded by saying that we simulate in our actions what we wish had already happened. We act, in short, by projecting our desires. — 91: 1516-1517
And could these cognitive errors exist for society as a whole, as well as for an individual? Some spoke of “cognitive mapping” when they discussed taking social action—a concept that had been transferred from geography to politics, and even to epistemology, as far as Frank could tell. One mapped the unimaginable immensity of postmodern civilization (or, reality) not by knowing all of it, which was impossible, but by marking routes through it. So that one was not like the GPS or the radar system, but rather the traffic controller, or the pilot. At that point it became clear even mapping was an analogy. Anna would not think much of it. But everyone needed a set of operating procedures to navigate the day. A totalizing theory forming the justification for a rubric for the daily decisions. The science of that particular Wednesday. Using flawed equipment (the brain, civilization) to optimize results. Most adaptive practices. Robustness. Something from ecology, from Aldo Leopold: What’s good is what’s good for the land. Something from Rudra (although he said from the Dalai Lama, or the Buddha): Try to do good for other people. Your happiness lies there. Try it and see. Make the experiment and analyze it. Try again. Act on your desires. So what do you really want? And can you really decide? — 92: 1523-1534
No matter what the product or service is, you get consumers who have a ‘notional demand,’ which is what they would buy if they could, and then ‘completely adjusted demand,’ which is what they really intend to buy knowing all the constraints, using what he calls ‘expectation theory.’ Between those you have ‘partially adjusted demand,’ where the consumer is in ignorance of what’s possible, or in denial about the situation, and still not completely adjusted. So the move from notional demand to completely adjusted demand is marked by failure, frustration, dire rumors, forced choices, and so on down his list. Finally the adjustment is complete, and the buyer has abandoned certain intentions, and might even forget them if asked. Kornai compares that moment to workers in capitalism who stop looking for work, and so aren’t counted as unemployed.” “I know some of those,” Frank said. He read aloud, “ ‘A curious state of equilibrium can arise,’ ” and laughed. “So you just give up on your desires! It’s almost Buddhist.” — 127: 2116-2124
he always did in this situation, “LO AND — 155: 2578-2579
You were intended to be the Marshall Plan, and instead you’ve been the United Fruit Company.” — 178: 2972-2973
One can always just walk away. The Dalai Lama had said that for sure. Things you don’t like, things you think are wrong, you can always just walk away. You will be happier. Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive. But compassion is not just a feeling. You have to act. — 290: 4834-4836
In many senses NSF was the true government of Antarctica, and the relevant people at NSF were good to go. They saw the need. Saving the world so science could proceed: the Frank Principle was standard operating procedure at NSF. It went without saying. — 312: 5219-5221
Hope is a wish that we doubt will come true, she had once said to him, on a rare occasion when she had been willing to discuss it; she had been quoting some philosopher she had read in a class, maybe Spinoza, Charlie couldn’t remember, and wasn’t about to ask now. He found it a chilling definition. — 380: 6369-6371
“These are critical years,” Phil pointed out. “I know. But maybe they all are.” — 423: 7118-7120
That was Franklin Roosevelt, talking as president to the nation in 1936. In the same speech he said, “There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.” — 435: 7319-7321
She had always lived by Eulert’s saying: If you don’t act on it, it wasn’t a true feeling. — 60: 981-982
Surprising emotion in her voice; perhaps some accident has occurred under her leadership as well? Roger looks at her curiously. Odd to be a climbing guide and not be more stoic about such dangers. Then again, rockfall is the danger beyond expertise. She looks up: distress. “You know.” He nods. “No precautions to take.” “Exactly. Well, there are some. But they aren’t sufficient.” — 161: 2650-2655
The climb can be finished another time.” — 190: 3132-3132
Imbibition is the tendency of granular rock to imbibe a fluid under the force of capillary attraction, in the absence of any pressure. Sax became convinced that this was a quality of mind as well. He would say of someone, “She has great imbibition” and people would say, “Ambition?” and he would reply, “No, imbibition.” “Inhibition?” “No, imbibition.” And because of his stroke people would assume he was just having speech trouble again. — 336: 5519-5522
It was too loud to remember anything, but he wanted to remember to say to Ann, We ask Why all our lives and never get past Because. We stop after that word, in disarray. I wish I had spent more time with you. — 338: 5550-5552
That they have known each other all their lives; that they have helped each other through hard times; that he got her out into the land in the first place, starting her on the trajectory of her whole life; all these would have made him a crucial figure to her. But everyone has many such figures. And over the years their divergent interests kept splitting them up; they could have lost touch entirely. But at one point Roger came to visit her in Burroughs, and she and her partner of that time had been growing distant for many years, and Roger said, I love you, Eileen. I love you. Remember what it was like on Olympus Mons, when we climbed it? Well now I think the whole world is like that. The escarpment goes on forever. We just keep climbing it until eventually we fall off. And I want to climb it with you. We keep getting together and then going our ways, and it’s too chancy, we might not cross paths again. Something might happen. I want more than that. I love you. — 345: 5660-5666
We always knew we were not at home we are visitors on this planet the Dalai Lama said on Earth we are here a century at most and during that time we must try to do something good something useful The way the Buddha did with our lives the way on Mars we always knew this always saw it in the bare face of the land under us the spur and gully shapes of our lives all bare of ornamentation red rock red dust the bare mineral here of now and we the animals standing in it — 377: 6234-6241
Any difference in feng shui terms?” “Or practical terms?” Ta Shu frowned. “Feng shui is practical.” “Really? It’s not just aesthetics?” “Just aesthetics? Aesthetics is very practical!” Fred nodded dubiously. “You’ll have to teach me more about that.” Ta Shu smiled. “I am a mere student myself. You work with computers, you must do mathematics, yes? Famous for its aesthetics, I’m told.” “Well, but it has to work too. — 25: 360-364
her frown, an expression she could feel freezing — 40: 570-570
I have visited 232 countries on Earth, and now the moon too. One might say I have been everywhere. But no matter where I go, I can never escape myself, the country no one can ever really know. In that sense travel is useless. Maybe we look to the next step in order to avoid seeing ourselves. Not narcissism, then, but an attempt to forget. — 57: 829-832
It looks to me now as if I have gone mad or am suffering a seizure. But let’s agree to call this an exposure to reality. The sublime, in a certain strain of Western aesthetics, is said to be a fusion of beauty and terror. In China the Seven Feelings don’t mention this combination, but now I think I know what it is. It’s a true feeling, the sublime—it’s spirit confronted by sheer matter, as Hegel put it. Under — 70: 1027-1030
Fred felt the Earth’s gravity bearing down on him. He was confused, he didn’t know what to think. His tendency to think of the world as a potentiality state awaiting the wave collapse of a decision now mocked him. Yes, the world was a fog of probabilities, yes, one could only learn partial truths by making decisions about what to do. Now it was time to make a decision. — 101: 1469-1472
“It is not the case that this is a total surveillance society. Citizens are only partially tracked in a discontinuous network of surveillance systems that is not well integrated at any level.” — 146: 2145-2147
So now we’re all in danger, crushed under the weight of the elite’s ambitions just as thoroughly as I am now crushed by Earth’s inexorable pull. — 149: 2196-2197
Exposure, a climbers’ term, was a partial description; they didn’t say what the exposure was to, which turned out to be death by falling. — 192: 2832-2833
“Suggestive, likely, persuasive, probable, conclusive, compelling.” “What is this list?” “This is a list of scientists’ adjectives, used often in their papers to indicate their judgment of the strength of an assertion.” “Because they don’t have much imagination when it comes to language?” “No. Because they want a rough scale to indicate to each other how strong a case they think has been made in their own specialty. Scientists have to be able to communicate across disciplines to other scientists who don’t know the details of their discipline, and so they have worked up this rating vocabulary over time to suggest judgments concerning reliability of assertions.” “Do they know they have this vocabulary?” “No. It is an ad hoc system, visible in the literature, and intuitively understood by those who use it.” — 222: 3278-3285
Colleagues of mine are surveilling you and others organizing the three withouts — 256: 3779-3779
Go. Analyst removed by other people. Against his will. Will is the desire for one action rather than another. A desire is a hope for a new situation. A hope is a wish that we doubt will come true (Schopenhauer). A wish is a hope for some new thing. Tautology noted. Call will an input. Call it a clinamen, Greek for swerve. One must let them shine forth at the right time (Yijing). — 299: 4388-4391
She nodded and studied her wristpad. She typed for a while, then read. If this was Lenin on the train to Russia, Fred thought, it was also much like everything else in the cloud: tapping on screens; things then appearing on other screens; then later, perhaps, things happening in the physical world. But what was the relationship between cloud and world, between tap and act? This was always the question no one could answer. Maybe, Fred thought, the two were the same now. Maybe the question itself was simply wrong. Maybe they had always been the same. Words were acts, words were always acts; that was why he was always so hesitant to speak. He remembered a phrase that someone trying to help him had once said: If you don’t act on it, it wasn’t a true feeling. That was a thought that made him uneasy every time he remembered it, so mostly he didn’t; but it kept cropping up, usually at precisely those times when he saw he wasn’t going to act, even though he was feeling something pretty strongly — 314: 4602-4608
They had a project, a collective project, and maybe that’s what had caused this to happen, because people craved a project. — 322: 4730-4731
This was mass action, this was what mass action looked like, felt like. Despite his age, he himself had never seen it. — 323: 4734-4735
But someday the streets would fill with people. Young and old—the young without prospects, the old without the iron rice bowl—they would all take to the streets. Thirty million more young men than young women—that in itself was enough to fuel a revolution. He wondered when it would happen, and what would come of it. If he had believed in the people more, perhaps he could have helped them more. Worked from the inside to help the outside. That had been his intention all along, but now he saw that when you did it alone, in solitude, with only your AI for companionship, the dangers rose, also the possibilities for failure. The whole point of a collective national success was undercut when you tried to do it alone. He was surprised he had gone for so long without seeing that. — 337: 4950-4955
First oracle, then genie, then agent. — 375: 5522-5522
“The People’s Republic of China is a socialist state under the people’s democratic leadership led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and farmers. — 378: 5559-5561
An oracle answers questions. A genie obeys commands to the best of its abilities, and makes suggestions. An agent acts in the world. — 379: 5579-5580
We live by some bad ideas. The Seven Bad Ideas, the Four Cheaps, they all have to go. For a long time they’ve been squeezing the world. Now it’s been squeezed dry. You can’t squeeze blood from a stone, which is why the moon won’t serve as a new place to squeeze, being a stone already. So the dynasty of the cheaps is over, it’s done. Now we have to stop squeezing, and change. — 397: 5843-5845
” QED stands for quod erat demonstrandum, Latin for “that which was to be demonstrated.” Sometimes translated or paraphrased by British scholars and students as “The Five Ws”: which was what we wanted. — 402: 5912-5914