Sheri S. Tepper

“Persons inside the group are ‘us.’ All significant entities outside the group, including females, are ‘them,’ and all of them are either property, prey, or opponents.”

Even our earliest espousers of human rights limit them to life, liberty, and the pursuit of satisfactions. They do not guarantee posterity or immortality.

“Punishment is not my business,” said Questioner. “As I have said to others, it never works anyhow. Putting right is my business.

Unfortunately, when things are put right, often the innocent suffer with the guilty.”

“Handling surplus population is a perpetual challenge,” said Onsofruct. “Has it not been written that the poor are always with us?”

Questioner shook her head. “Handling surplus men isn’t that difficult. Just start a lively war or find some new frontier—there’s always dangerous work that needs doing. If that fails, one can create lethal rites of passage to kill off batches at a time. One needn’t pretend, not with men. The gang chief or general simply talks them into a fury and sends them into battle, and then gives them a medal after they’re maimed or dead. Or, the employer gets them to use up their lives in a factory and then tosses them aside with a memento and an inadequate pension. Team spirit does the rest.”

“The groups are stratified, with one or more leaders and the rest as followers. This pattern continues even today, though the acquisition of language allows such groups to be institutionalized as tribes, armies, political parties, commercial empires, religious hierarchies, or sports teams. All of these have rules requiring defense and extension of territory by carrying some play object—a ball, flag, icon, trademark, or belief system—into someone else’s territory. From the psychological point of view, there is very little difference between making religious converts, kicking the winning goal, or cornering the market on Thorbian gigarums.

“Proper gang activity requires the control of members. Gangs cannot tolerate ‘loose’ persons wandering around. One is either with the church or against it; with the company or against it; with the team or against it.”

We all know men who are angry at everything, simply because they prefer to be angry at everything. Often, they self-destruct, and sometimes they take other people with them.

The view panel was there, of course. It didn’t have to depict trees and moonlight. She could ask for virtually anything ever written to be printed or dramatized, and she’d tried that a few times, but the panel remained obdurately there, between her and whatever story it was trying to convey. A book would be better. With books, she wasn’t conscious of anything except living the narrative.

Sometimes she thought she only dreamed about dancing while her real life was lived in books. She could get lost in a book, in being someone else, in feeling amplified, complicated, her simple self fancied up with new sensations, new ideas and perceptions. In books she had family, community, a place in history; she had travels and explorations, struggle and achievement.

Bofusdiaga says past wrongs cannot be righted because past wrongs are past and time only runs one way. Bofusdiaga says all you independent creatures suffer great wrongs sometime in past, which is normal, but you stay always living in past so you can continue wronged forever! Forever miserable, forever tragical! Bofusdiaga says so long as you go chewing yesterday’s pains, you cannot eat today’s pleasures, so it is no help!

Mankind had always had a propensity for trying to govern the ungovernable and to control what was uncontrollable. Mankind had always relied upon laws and rules to direct those drives that did not care about laws or rules. Pragmatism had at last prevailed.

There is a class of person who cannot lead and will not be led. Such persons go their own way, uncorrupted by insight, unmitigated by experience. They do what they do, and usually they die of it, but they would rather die than cooperate with anyone else.

“You think staying in power is why they do it?”

“That’s usually the reason for arbitrary cruelty.”

If you have read your assignment, you know that mankind has a stratified mentality. The ancient lizard mind lies below the mammalian mind, which lies below a primate mind, which is modified by a mind adapted to language, and since these layers have developed in response to differing evolutionary pressures, they often do not function efficiently together. Human civility tries to control ape dominance, human rationality tries to control mammalian sexuality, human social conscience tries to ameliorate reptilian greed, never with total success.