He loved the game. The battle that raged inside each player's head. The little ball that sat motionless, defying you to hit it. No defenders, no game clock, no excuses. And maybe that's why the highs were so high and the lows felt so low. Could you in the moment quiet your thoughts and execute? It was glorious when you did!

Detective, what I'm trying to tell you is that there's no point in my being at this desk. Or anywhere else! We set it all into motion perfectly, and now the system itself can see to everything. It's like they're just keeping us around as... I don't know. Furniture? To occupy themselves? Learn from us? Or... maybe it's a form of tribute.

Why should everything that happens be the entire world's business?

It's a bunch of people with master's degrees coming in and using us as guinea pigs. … Because they think they're social workers. But their minds work like anthropologists or missionaries trying to save the natives. They're so out of touch from our experience. They've never suffered, they've never been desperate—so the ideas that work in their world just won't take down here.

Everyone thinks their revolution is about to break out and win the day.

Modestianity exists today because there was a pressing need for a philosophy that looked at the present in order to face the future, rather than looking backward for guidance today.

And then what? Kate would teach this baby words… in order to tell her how privileged she was? To start planting those seeds of doubt and self-recrimination before she'd even taken her first steps? Make this child question herself, rather than blossom confidently?

A large banner above the teaching board read, 'Everything is racist. Everything else is a human right.

A large banner above the teaching board read, Everything is racist. Everything else is a human right.

Have we not already seen the cultural malaise of the past fifty years, as people living within this worldwide cargo cult have been divorced from the need to produce anything, as well as from the consequences of their own actions? They have incrementally been separated from the land, from their factories, from creating art, and now they even abandon marriage and reproduction.