David Brin

“Each of us remains convinced that our own subjective viewpoint is more urgent than anyone else’s—indeed, even more valid than the objective matrix that underlies so-called reality. After all, the subjective view is a grand theater. To be hero of an ongoing drama. It’s why ideologies and bigotries survive against all evidence or logic.

“Subjective obstinacy had advantages, Morris, when we were busy evolving into nature’s champion egotists. It led to human mastery over the planet…and to our species nearly wiping itself out.”

True brilliance has a well-known positive correlation with decency, much of the time—a fact the rest of us rely on, more than we ever know. The real world doesn’t roil with as many crazed artists, psychotic generals, dyspeptic writers, maniacal statesmen, insatiable tycoons, or mad scientists as you see in dramas.

Still, the exceptions give genius its public image as a mixed blessing—vivid, dramatic, somewhat crazy, and more than a little dangerous. It helps promote the romantic notion, popular among borderline types, that you must be outrageous to be gifted. Insufferable to be remembered. Arrogant to be taken seriously.

If humanity has one majestic talent, it’s an almost infinite capacity to get used to the Next Big Thing…then take it for granted.

Ah well. Heaven is a state of mind. I knew that now.

Globalization never ended human cultural diversity, but it did transform ethnicity into another hobby. Another way for people to find value in themselves, when only the genuinely talented can get authentic jobs.

He claims to have reasons. And yet, don’t all fanatics?

It’s an austere, terrifying sensation. A reminder of something we all suppress most of the time, because it hurts so much.

The stark loneliness of individuality.

The essential alienness of others.

And of the universe itself.

Well, organic imagination doesn’t have to make sense, I recalled. Nor must paranoia be reasonable. It’s a beast that barks at nothing…till the day it’s right.

It’s hard to feel completely hopeless during that special moment when you first catch sight of dawn.

Yet where were answers to the truly deep questions?

Religion promised those, though always in vague terms, while retreating from one line in the sand to the next. Don’t look past this boundary, they told Galileo, then Hutton, Darwin, Von Neumann, and Crick, always retreating with great dignity before the latest scientific advance, then drawing the next holy perimeter at the shadowy rim of knowledge.

Evolution doesn’t happen without pain or loss. A lot of fish died, in order for a few to stand. The price may be worthwhile…

The variety of inventive ideas—and ideologies—that people can come up with never ceases to amaze me, especially when they’re stoked by the ultimate drug, self-righteousness.