Carlos Lavín

“If the Good Lord made a mistake in us people it was in making us want to live when we’ve got the least excuse for it.”
― Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

“I am for that thing in your genome that demands it. I am for that thing which keeps you animals alive. I am, at most, a slice of monkey suspended within the stuff of universal intelligence. You are a monkey in nice clothes.

In the harsh environment you refer to as a habitable planet, group behaviors are required to survive long enough to procreate. Since you are stupid monkeys, you have no natural affinity for group altruism.

And so you have evolved a genetic pump that delivers pleasant chemicals to your monkey brains. One that is triggered by awe and fear of an anthropomorphism of your environment. Earth mothers. Sky gods. Bits of bush that catch fire. Interesting-looking rocks. An oddly-shaped branch. You’re not fussy.

When your brain does this idiot work, you stop in front of that bump or stick and consider it fiercely. Other monkeys will, like as not, stop next to you and emulate you. Your genetic pump delivers morphine for your souls. You have your fellow monkeys join in. Perhaps so they can feel it too. Perhaps because you feel it might please the stick god to have more monkeys gaze at it in narcotic awe.

The group must be defended. Because as many monkeys as possible must please the stick god, and you can continue to get your fix off praying to it.

You draw up rules to organize and protect the group. Two hundred thousand years later, you put Adolf Hitler into power. Because you are, after all, just monkeys.

I am your stash.”
― Warren Ellis, Supergod

“Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“...perhaps, when it got utterly dark, the peace of the darkness would become the same as light so that my last experience would become as mysterious and musical as my first, so that in my last darkness there might not be the same need of understanding anything so far away as the world anymore.”
― Derek Raymond, He Died With His Eyes Open