Alien Clay

Empathy is a hole that lets the rain in. That’s how they get us.

You hear “survival of the fittest” and imagine evolution like a boxing match, where the last champ left in the ring takes the belt. What makes you “fittest” isn’t being bigger and stronger than everything else. It isn’t even necessarily being better at any given thing than everything else. Because you need everything else. That’s how biology works.

The base unit of life is all life.

Having someone else to lean on isn’t a thing anyone should be ashamed of.

And this was Clem’s cardinal sin. Not that he dared to raise a hand against his betters, but that he brought people together to do it.

That kind of game-theory thinking only works if you treat the people around you as resources and dead weight. If you assume the natural unit of survival is one individual, and not the group.

The greatest privilege of power is being able to overlook that you’re even wielding it.

But it’s deviation from truth that lets them do these things. It’s the lies, at all levels, which mean when they come for you and yours, the others won’t lift a finger, because they’ve believed the lies spread about you.

We could have obliterated the very mind of the world in our search for builders who were just like us.