What’s happened to us that we take killings for granted among our children? Don’t give me that hogwash about… — John Brunner

Western culture is undergoing a process of transition from guilt-oriented, with a conscience, to shame-oriented, with a morbid fear of being found out.

“But what brought about this ‘decline of civilization’?” Conroy demanded. “It can’t just have been the introduction of these weapons you’ve been talking about, this System C equipment.”

“The maximization of arms sales implied the maximization of inter-human hostility,” Madison/Gottschalk said. “All the existing sources of this phenomenon were tapped, and those proving particularly fruitful were patriotism, parochialism, xenophobia, ochlophobia, racial, religious and linguistic differences, and the so-called ‘gulf between the generations.’ It was found readily feasible to emphasize these pre-existent attitudes to the point where a System C integrated weaponry unit was so desirable among the informed populace that the possibility of another individual acquiring this virtually indestructible equipment sufficed to provoke an attack on him before he purchased one.”

She was on a pediflow, and—like so many of the devices which twenty-first century ingenuity had made available to mankind—that was something which seemed to have been destined for an altogether more rational species than the one she belonged to.