The greatest privilege of power is being able to overlook that you’re even wielding it.

And this was Clem’s cardinal sin. Not that he dared to raise a hand against his betters, but that he brought people together to do it.

You hear “survival of the fittest” and imagine evolution like a boxing match, where the last champ left in the ring takes the belt. What makes you “fittest” isn’t being bigger and stronger than everything else. It isn’t even necessarily being better at any given thing than everything else. Because you need everything else. That’s how biology works.

Having someone else to lean on isn’t a thing anyone should be ashamed of.

He is torturing himself in his sealed box with thoughts of how terrible it would be to lose his self. His inviolable, separate selfness that he cannot abide to share. He is consumed by the drive to know, but not at the cost of being known by others.

Empathy is a hole that lets the rain in. That’s how they get us.

Sometimes you go through your whole life not rocking the boat and they throw you over the side anyway. Any oppressive system needs an element of arbitrary punishment just to keep people properly on their toes.

But it’s deviation from truth that lets them do these things. It’s the lies, at all levels, which mean when they come for you and yours, the others won’t lift a finger, because they’ve believed the lies spread about you.

That kind of game-theory thinking only works if you treat the people around you as resources and dead weight. If you assume the natural unit of survival is one individual, and not the group.