Lost in Imagination

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Quotes from the book

Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism. It is the belief that problems can be solved, differences resolved. It is a type of confidence. And it is fragile.

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Unable to attribute misfortune to chance, unable to accept their ultimate insignificance within the greater scheme, the people looked for monsters in their midst. The more the media peddled fear, the more the people lost the ability to believe in one another. For every new ill that befell them, the media created an explanation, and the explanation always had a face and a name. The people came to fear even their closest neighbours. At the level of the individual, the community, and the nation, people sought signs of others' ill intentions; and everywhere they looked, they found them, for this is what looking does. This was the true challenge the people of this time faced. The challenge of trusting each other.

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"There need be nothing special about the match that lights the fire," was their motto, "save that it is the match that lights the fire." But they too paused when they said his name.

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For those who wish to understand what it was that made Adam the way he was, the answer "everything, and therefore nothing" does not rest easy.

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History has shown us the futility of the conspiracy theory. Complexity gives rise to error, and in error we grow our prejudice.

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For a society to function successfully perhaps there needs to be a level of empathy which cannot be corrupted.

"Are you saying a society wracked by plague is preferable to one wracked by indifference?"

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But time passes. Fear becomes a memory. Terror becomes routine; it loses its grip. People were starting to ask questions about The Outside. Others were questioning The Republic itself. There had been protests, murmurings of discontent. Only three weeks before the arrest, a woman had been shot in the street, trying to protect her child from termination. Most importantly of all, the leaders themselves were being questioned. The promise of The Republic was that the best and the brightest would become Philosophers, and these Philosophers, trained in the art of understanding, would promote wise and enlightened policies from which all the people would benefit. Spectacular promises had been made regarding the Artificial Intelligence program. It was claimed a new breed of thinking robot would save the next generation from the drudgery of labor. The policy, "Your Children Shall Not Be Laborers," was vigorously promoted but, as is so often true, the greater the promise, the more spectacular the failure.

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The only thing binding individuals together is ideas. Ideas mutate, and spread; they change their hosts as much as their hosts change them.

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I have found what I have found by first doubting it.

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I have found what I have found by first doubting it.

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It is in conflict that our values are exposed.

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You think you're the end of it, but that's what thinking is best at: deceiving the thinker.

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The Idea enters the brain from the outside. It rearranges the furniture to make it more to its liking. It finds other Ideas already in residence, and picks fights or forms alliances. The alliances build new structures, to defend themselves against intruders. And then, whenever the opportunity arises, the Idea sends out its shock troops in search of new brains to infect. The successful Idea travels from mind to mind, claiming new territory, mutating as it goes. It's a jungle out there, Adam. Many Ideas are lost. Only the strongest survive.

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"I am not a machine. For what can a machine know of the smell of wet grass in the morning, or the sound of a crying baby? I am the feeling of the warm sun against my skin; I am the sensation of a cool wave breaking over me. I am the places I have never seen, yet imagine when my eyes are closed. I am the taste of another's breath, the color of her hair. "You mock me for the shortness of my life span, but it is this very fear of dying that breathes life into me. I am the thinker who thinks of thought. I am curiosity, I am reason, I am love and I am hatred. I am indifference. I am the son of a father, who in turn was a father's son. I am the reason my mother laughed and the reason my mother cried. I am wonder and I am wondrous. Yes, the world may push your buttons as it passes through your circuitry. But the world does not pass through me. It lingers. I am in it and it is in me. I am the means by which the universe has come to know itself. I am the thing no machine can ever make. I am meaning."

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Change had come too quickly for the people. Beliefs became more fundamental, boundaries more solidly drawn. In time, no person was left to be an individual: all were marked by nationality, by color, by creed, by generation, by class. Fear drifted in on the rising tide.

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Change brought fear, and fear brought destruction.

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To arrest change is to arrest decay. To bury the individual beneath the weight of the state, is to bury too the individual's fears. It was possible to see what they were trying to do, but easy too to see, from this distance, that no state can ever weigh that heavily. Always, the individual's fears will wriggle free.

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"It is possible to know without understanding," Pericles had told her once. "Knowing starts as a feeling. Understanding is the process of excavation, of clearing a path from feeling to daylight."

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"I have learned to value the things others are reluctant to give."

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"You know the very first thought I think, every morning when I wake? I think, I have to get out of here. Every spare moment, when I am not distracted from the task by your noises and their experiments, I ask myself how. How will I change this? How will I escape these walls? I don't have to think this way. I am only torturing myself more. It would make better sense, perhaps, to accept this. To give thanks that I have my life at all. Perhaps I could try to remember the meditation techniques I learned when I was younger. Perhaps I could make peace with my surroundings, convince myself that the pressing emptiness of this small room, this lonely, pointless existence is enough; is all there ever is. But I will not. I cannot. I awake to memories. Laughter shared, lovers half forgotten. Every beating of my heart is another moment marked off, another precious second away from the life I yearn to live. You and I are different. I don't wish to call it consciousness any more. Half the people I have met are no more conscious than you are. And I don't want to call it free will, because it is not choice that drives me. I cannot choose to ignore this feeling, of life slowly bleeding out of me. I cannot ignore the fact that life only makes sense to me when I see a smile, or feel another hand in mine. So I will call it difference. And in that difference you are less than me. Yes, you are cleverer than I am, and you will be able to explain away everything I say, but that will not change the fact. You are less than me."

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So long as we do not know the evil we are capable of there is a chance we will never embrace it.

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