“You know! You probably have it dinned into you a dozen times a day at your work! ‘Be an individual!'” Conroy contrived to make the slogan sound obscene. “And what’s this been twisted into? The biggest Big Lie in history! It’s no use making your life so private you refuse to learn from other people’s experience-you just get stuck in a groove of mistakes you need never have made. We have more knowledge available at the turn of a switch than ever before, we can bring any part of the world into our own homes, and what do we do with it? Half the time We advertise goods people can’t afford, and anyhow they’ve got the color and hold controls adrift because the pretty patterns are fun to look at when you’ve bolted and barred your mind with drugs. Split! Divide! Separate! Shut your eyes and maybe it’ll go away!
“We mine our gardens, we close our frontiers, we barour cities with Macnamara lines to shut off black from white, we divide, divide, divide!” A stamp emphaeach repetition of the word. “It gets into our families, goddamn it, it gets into our very love-making! Christ, do you know I had a girl student last year who thought she was having an affair with a boy back home and all they’d ever done was sit in front of the comweb and masturbate at each other? Twenty miles apart! They’d never even kissed! We’re going insane, our whole blasted species-we’re heading for screaming ochlophobia! Another couple of generations and huswill be afraid to be alone in the same room with their wives, mothers will be afraid of their babies, if there are any babies!
“And for what purpose? Why are we encouraging the spread of this lunacy? I mean we here, in North AmeriI don’t mean the Afrikaners sitting smug on top of their pullulating heap of poor black devils hungry, half-naked and diseased, the richest people in the world battening on the poorest. That’s just greed, which is a comparatively clean kind of vice. I’m talking about perhorrible, disgusting, systematic, deliberate perof the power of reason to destroy people without killing them, to strip them of their initiative, their joy in life, their hope, for Christ’s sake, their last ultimate irreducible human resource, hope. Out of sheer desperamillions of people are abandoning the use of reason, bankrupting themselves to buy mass-produced plastic idols, in a last puerile attempt to outdo the bastards who’ve made’reason’ a dirty word.
“They’ve done it, you know-it’s the dirtiest word in any human vocabulary right now. And it’s been brought about in my own lifetime, almost entirely. Cold rational decisions, every step leading to them perfectly logical, underlay the wars in Asia, the war in Indonesia, the war in New Guinea, and at every step we lost. Not just the wars, but bits or ourselves. Compassion. Empathy. Love. Pity. We systematically chopped ourselves down to the measure of a machine.
“How could you expect a man to be a good neighbor when he’s spent years shooting at shadows, moving tree-branches, silhouettes on window-shades? How could you expect him to be a good citizen when he’s seen his government authorize the killing of thousands, millions of other human beings? How could you expect him to be a good father when he’s spent his early twenties torchildren to get information about enemy troop positions? That started as far back as the seventies, wasn’t it? Madison, you were in the Army!”
As though an ebony statue had acquired the power of speech, the kneeblank’s lips parted. “United States Army Intelligence Manual Volume Five, CountersubverSection Nineteen, Residual Intelligence from Non-combatant Sources, Chapter Two, Correlation of JuInformation, paragraph twelve, Reliability of Information Obtained Under Duress.”
“My God!” Reedeth whispered, barely audible. Conignored him and plunged on.
“Right, right! We’ve been laid out on the Procrustes bed of the computer, and instead of our toes being chopped off we’ve lost little bits of our brains!
“And now the Gottschalks, who’ve already degraded the institution of the family by turning it into a skeleton for the foulest monster ever dredged out of the human subconscious with their grandfather-father-son rank orand their monosyllabic/polysyllabic gimmickry, now they’re apparently going to equip people who’ve had this done to them with-how did you put it, Madison? ‘Equipment adequate to raze a medium-sized city,’ is that right? Flamen, instead of comping some petty little story that’s going to do no more than reinforce your own worthless image to the public, why don’t you comp something important, like asking your beloved machines to estimate the human race’s chance of surviving past the end of the century? That would-Why, child! You’re crying!”