The Immortal King Rao: A Novel

It wasn’t that Shareholders were too afraid of the Board to call them out on their lies. It was more insidious than that. Shareholder Government had so fully aligned its citizens with corporate interests that no one cared to call the Board out. You didn’t gain Social Capital for swearing off fossil fuels, going vegetarian. You gained it by consumin

To offer examples, she said—her arms flying, recalling, in fact, my father, more than anyone—would be no different from sending us to the soap aisle at some Shareholder supermarket, showing us all the dozens of brands lined up in there, and claiming this represented freedom. The examples were as endless as the whole wide universe was endless; she c

You aspire to something all your life, and then you do it and find yourself—it’s shameful even to articulate it—purposeless.

Unless you had created and sold some valuable piece of IP, your best bet on this continent, that is, if you were good-looking and charismatic enough, was to try to make it as an influencer. Otherwise, you were left to look after those who had made it—to nurse their children, scrub their toilets, trim their hedges, stencil their toenails.

“A person who has been seduced by the consumer value system, whose identity is dissolved in an amalgam of the accouterments of mass civilization, and who has no roots in the order of being, no sense of responsibility for anything higher than his own personal survival, is a demoralized person. The system depends on this demoralization, deepens it, i