Nicole

“The Mandate is very into polar binaries, it’s in all their rhetoric. “What?” they’d say. “You don’t want this unpleasant circumstance we’re forcing on you? Then you’re obviously in favour of this absurdly exaggerated opposite we’ve just invented.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay

“They have full protective gear on, masks included, and gas grenades in case they need to put down a general riot. But most of all, they spark fear. That’s how they get you. How a small group of uniformed stormtroopers can always face down a turbulent crowd. Fear of their weapons, of their discipline, of the brutal force they can mete out.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay

“They want very specific answers from science. Black and white answers to complex questions. Everything sorted into predetermined boxes.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay

“Cognitive dissonance, yes. It’s not enough to be able to do a thing. People, human people, want to be able to believe it’s right to do so. The first thing those in authority do, after they’ve used main force and brutality to take over, is paper over everything with reasons why they were right to do it. Both because it helps you keep people in line if you can get them to believe it, and because it makes it easier to enjoy the spoils of your brutality if you convince yourself you’ve earned it. Human history is full of social conventions designed to salve the consciences of the mighty and curb the ambitions of the small. There’s something in the way humans are wired that means we want to be right by some external measure. So we invent philosophies to tell us we were right to do what we did and we’re allowed to do what we want. You find a god, basically, who tells you you’re okay.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay