bleourta's review
5.0
This just contains some quotes that made an impression on me while reading. Obviously, there's very heavy spoilers.
People who made decisions created an atmosphere.
Scientists had always been bad at this. That was because the facts could be dry and were often complex; yet by necessity the truth
must be plain enough to withstand repeated inquiry, all of which made it unappealing.
Okay, people were allowed to grieve, fine. If one of my friends died, I’d grieve. But to sit back and judge someone else’s choice, someone completely unrelated to you—to talk about “public property” and “resource
awareness” when someone just died to justify giving someone’s life a cold look? That was what I called arrogance, and I wanted no part of it. Miach would have thought the same thing. Rather, Miach did think
that. But not the rest of the world.
The only reason the suicides weren’t punished was because they were
dead.
Beyond the admedistration’s reach. Finally
Suicide was an offense punishable by disdain. Even if it wasn’t technically a legal offense. I remembered Miach telling us how the Catholics buried their suicides in the middle of a crossroads as punishment for betraying God.
Admedistrative society, lifeist society, hadn’t quite figured out how to
treat suicides yet. The gravediggers wanted to know if they were victims or
perpetrators. So, uh, ma’am? Should we just go ahead and dig this hole in the crossroads here, just to be safe?
"And because we possess a hyperbolic value system, we make illogical decisions and take precipitate actions. When a chance to profit
presents itself clearly before our eyes, we erroneously believe its value to be much greater than it actually is. There is an ongoing survival game between the agents of short-term desire and long-term desire, and we call this game will."
"The pain we feel the moment we prick our finger with a needle is nothing more than another agent trying to leave an impression and get selected. The hyperbolic time axis in this case is very short, making it easier
for the pain to be chosen.” I frowned. How could pain be chosen? “But you can’t accept or deny pain,” I said.
“Actually, you can. Surely you have heard stories of people who are so focused on some activity that they only realize their finger or arm has been cut off some seconds after the fact. This is because the pain competed with, yet failed to overcome, the hold that activity had on their consciousness.”
“I see.”
“That is why we understand pain to be a subjective experience. For a physical sensation, it is highly dependent on environmental factors to determine whether or not it is selected and to what degree. That is why there is no absolute scale to measure pain."
Humanity had always gone out of its way to suppress nature. We built cities, built societies, built systems. All of these revealed an overriding human desire to take the
unpredictable elements of nature and place them within a predictable, controllable framework. In order to live through an
age of nuclear fallout and plagues, we had striven to conquer the last remaining vestiges of nature within us, and had largely
succeeded. We installed medicules in our bodies and linked up to health supervision servers. We thoroughly rid our society of
lifestyle habits that were bad for our health. Our victory was complete, with the exception of old age, of course. Wasn’t the brain also part of the body? What possible reason
could there be not to control it as well? I lost my conviction and sat down on the sandy riverbank. My gaze wandered off down the
river. In the distance, I saw several young boys playing with a dog.
If that dog had a will of its own, then how could we say our souls are any more valuable than the soul of that dog?
If the feedback web reached perfect harmony and all decisions could be made without any
conflict and all actions taken clearly, what would that mean? It would mean nothing less than “I” was on the line.
“You killed consciousness.”
For someone whose every desire was self-evident, there was no need to make decisions. If their feedback web worked on clear, logical values, no will was needed to choose between one thing or the other. Consciousness was no longer required
“We announced our findings to the other researchers and investors in the working group, that perfect harmony invariably meant the absence of consciousness. That consciousness was indeed only a mechanism for choosing between the various agents of desire teeming in our subconscious,the result of conflicts that required conscious thought to resolve, and the acting upon those conflicts. These choices were obvious to a perfectly harmonious will, thereby removing the need for a will to determine actions. We were chasing after the perfect human but ended up killing consciousness, for it was no longer needed.”
It was ironic. Our souls were nothing more than the product of a hyperbolic evaluation system we had developed over the course of our evolution. Perfect humans didn’t need souls.
“What happens when you lose your consciousness? Do you just sit
there all day in your chair, drooling?”
“Nothing of the sort. You go shopping, you eat, you enjoy entertainment—you merely no longer have to make decisions what to do at
any given time because everything is self-evident. It’s the difference between having to make choices and having it all be obvious to you. That’s all it is. That’s what divides the world of the consciousness and the world
without. People have absolutely no problem living without consciousness or will, Tuan. They live their lives as normal. People can be born, grow old, and die without consciousness. Consciousness has very little to do with culture, really. From the outside, it’s nearly impossible to tell whether someone has a consciousness or is merely acting as though they did. However, because their system of values is fashioned to be in perfect
harmony with society, there are far fewer suicides, and the kinds of stress we find in our admedistrative society disappear completely.”
Something about the way his eyes looked through me made my finger pause, motionless, on the trigger. Here, beneath the rapidly darkening Iraq sky, I was about to kill someone for the first time in my life. Right here, in this very moment. I was making the same decision that had been forced on
billions of people across the world.
This would free me from having to make that choice in a few days, I realized. It felt like cheating. The guy was begging me to do it, and I would even be avenging my father’s death. You couldn’t make up a better
rationale than that. I steadied my grip on the gun and felt intense selfloathing.A thought occurred to me. Why had my brain developed this function it was expressing now? In what environment would self-loathing give me
an evolutionary advantage?
I pulled the trigger.
“I realized that’s what we had to do. There are tens of thousands of girls and boys killing themselves in the world right now. Adults too. We can never remove the barbarism of nature from ourselves completely. We can’t forget
that before we are little admedistrative collectives, before we are part of a
system or network of relationships, we are animals, plain and simple—a patchwork assortment of functions and logic and emotion all tied together into a bundle.”
“So you thought that if people were dying because they couldn’t get used to this world—”
“Yes. That we should give up being human in the first place.”
"The old folks think the end of consciousness is a kind of death. Even though there had been a minority living in the Caucasus mountains for thousands of years without anything like a consciousness. As long as a mature system is in place, there is no need for conscious
decisions. We have a sufficiently mutually beneficial system, we have software to tell us how to live, we’ve outsourced everything possible, so what need have we of consciousness? The problem isn’t our consciousness, it’s the pain that our having a consciousness brings us when we are forced
to regulate ourselves for health or for the community.”
People who made decisions created an atmosphere.
Scientists had always been bad at this. That was because the facts could be dry and were often complex; yet by necessity the truth
must be plain enough to withstand repeated inquiry, all of which made it unappealing.
Okay, people were allowed to grieve, fine. If one of my friends died, I’d grieve. But to sit back and judge someone else’s choice, someone completely unrelated to you—to talk about “public property” and “resource
awareness” when someone just died to justify giving someone’s life a cold look? That was what I called arrogance, and I wanted no part of it. Miach would have thought the same thing. Rather, Miach did think
that. But not the rest of the world.
The only reason the suicides weren’t punished was because they were
dead.
Beyond the admedistration’s reach. Finally
Suicide was an offense punishable by disdain. Even if it wasn’t technically a legal offense. I remembered Miach telling us how the Catholics buried their suicides in the middle of a crossroads as punishment for betraying God.
Admedistrative society, lifeist society, hadn’t quite figured out how to
treat suicides yet. The gravediggers wanted to know if they were victims or
perpetrators. So, uh, ma’am? Should we just go ahead and dig this hole in the crossroads here, just to be safe?
"And because we possess a hyperbolic value system, we make illogical decisions and take precipitate actions. When a chance to profit
presents itself clearly before our eyes, we erroneously believe its value to be much greater than it actually is. There is an ongoing survival game between the agents of short-term desire and long-term desire, and we call this game will."
"The pain we feel the moment we prick our finger with a needle is nothing more than another agent trying to leave an impression and get selected. The hyperbolic time axis in this case is very short, making it easier
for the pain to be chosen.” I frowned. How could pain be chosen? “But you can’t accept or deny pain,” I said.
“Actually, you can. Surely you have heard stories of people who are so focused on some activity that they only realize their finger or arm has been cut off some seconds after the fact. This is because the pain competed with, yet failed to overcome, the hold that activity had on their consciousness.”
“I see.”
“That is why we understand pain to be a subjective experience. For a physical sensation, it is highly dependent on environmental factors to determine whether or not it is selected and to what degree. That is why there is no absolute scale to measure pain."
Humanity had always gone out of its way to suppress nature. We built cities, built societies, built systems. All of these revealed an overriding human desire to take the
unpredictable elements of nature and place them within a predictable, controllable framework. In order to live through an
age of nuclear fallout and plagues, we had striven to conquer the last remaining vestiges of nature within us, and had largely
succeeded. We installed medicules in our bodies and linked up to health supervision servers. We thoroughly rid our society of
lifestyle habits that were bad for our health. Our victory was complete, with the exception of old age, of course. Wasn’t the brain also part of the body? What possible reason
could there be not to control it as well? I lost my conviction and sat down on the sandy riverbank. My gaze wandered off down the
river. In the distance, I saw several young boys playing with a dog.
If that dog had a will of its own, then how could we say our souls are any more valuable than the soul of that dog?
If the feedback web reached perfect harmony and all decisions could be made without any
conflict and all actions taken clearly, what would that mean? It would mean nothing less than “I” was on the line.
“You killed consciousness.”
For someone whose every desire was self-evident, there was no need to make decisions. If their feedback web worked on clear, logical values, no will was needed to choose between one thing or the other. Consciousness was no longer required
“We announced our findings to the other researchers and investors in the working group, that perfect harmony invariably meant the absence of consciousness. That consciousness was indeed only a mechanism for choosing between the various agents of desire teeming in our subconscious,the result of conflicts that required conscious thought to resolve, and the acting upon those conflicts. These choices were obvious to a perfectly harmonious will, thereby removing the need for a will to determine actions. We were chasing after the perfect human but ended up killing consciousness, for it was no longer needed.”
It was ironic. Our souls were nothing more than the product of a hyperbolic evaluation system we had developed over the course of our evolution. Perfect humans didn’t need souls.
“What happens when you lose your consciousness? Do you just sit
there all day in your chair, drooling?”
“Nothing of the sort. You go shopping, you eat, you enjoy entertainment—you merely no longer have to make decisions what to do at
any given time because everything is self-evident. It’s the difference between having to make choices and having it all be obvious to you. That’s all it is. That’s what divides the world of the consciousness and the world
without. People have absolutely no problem living without consciousness or will, Tuan. They live their lives as normal. People can be born, grow old, and die without consciousness. Consciousness has very little to do with culture, really. From the outside, it’s nearly impossible to tell whether someone has a consciousness or is merely acting as though they did. However, because their system of values is fashioned to be in perfect
harmony with society, there are far fewer suicides, and the kinds of stress we find in our admedistrative society disappear completely.”
Something about the way his eyes looked through me made my finger pause, motionless, on the trigger. Here, beneath the rapidly darkening Iraq sky, I was about to kill someone for the first time in my life. Right here, in this very moment. I was making the same decision that had been forced on
billions of people across the world.
This would free me from having to make that choice in a few days, I realized. It felt like cheating. The guy was begging me to do it, and I would even be avenging my father’s death. You couldn’t make up a better
rationale than that. I steadied my grip on the gun and felt intense selfloathing.A thought occurred to me. Why had my brain developed this function it was expressing now? In what environment would self-loathing give me
an evolutionary advantage?
I pulled the trigger.
“I realized that’s what we had to do. There are tens of thousands of girls and boys killing themselves in the world right now. Adults too. We can never remove the barbarism of nature from ourselves completely. We can’t forget
that before we are little admedistrative collectives, before we are part of a
system or network of relationships, we are animals, plain and simple—a patchwork assortment of functions and logic and emotion all tied together into a bundle.”
“So you thought that if people were dying because they couldn’t get used to this world—”
“Yes. That we should give up being human in the first place.”
"The old folks think the end of consciousness is a kind of death. Even though there had been a minority living in the Caucasus mountains for thousands of years without anything like a consciousness. As long as a mature system is in place, there is no need for conscious
decisions. We have a sufficiently mutually beneficial system, we have software to tell us how to live, we’ve outsourced everything possible, so what need have we of consciousness? The problem isn’t our consciousness, it’s the pain that our having a consciousness brings us when we are forced
to regulate ourselves for health or for the community.”
vangluss's review
4.0
I consider this novel a dark, uncompromising damnation of the caring industry of the 21th century. The plot gets put aside in favor of the themes. This isn't a bad thing and manages not to harm the quality of the book. Harmony reads like a (much too sanitized) PKD book in the most unsettling way possible.
rufus666's review
5.0
The ending was very satisfying. There was a moment where I doubted whether the author would actually go through with that sort of ending. But then he did, and gained my admiration. Very philosophical, heady, psychological. A real book of ideas.
djotaku's review
5.0
This book is clearly a reaction to Japanese society, but it's also prescient (given when it was written) about our current situation where no one wants to experience anything that could bother them. It's incredible that he saw this coming 11 years ago. This is not to say that I'm one of those people who rails against "cancel culture" and so forth. I think it's a positive thing, in general, that folks who traditionally did not have a voice in the world now can speak out against injustice. But there is definitely a vocal minority who refuses to deal with anything that might unnerve or challenge them. Of course this thin line (which I imagine myself to be on the correct side of) is why I originally considered starting off this review with the sentence "This book is dangerous." I could definitely see some people taking this book as an example of why everyone should be able to say and do anything; who cares what others think?
As to the Japanese part (I am, admittedly, speaking second-hand), there has been a growing sentiment (certainly extant when Project Itoh was writing this book) that the society has become polite to a fault. That those who express their discomfort or issues with others are committing a faux pas against the greater society. And so Harmony conceives of a Utopia that is also a dystopia for some. The suicides mentioned in the book mirror the increasing numbers of Japanese men checking out and/or committing suicide. (And we see some evidence of the same happening in China and maybe among Gen Z here in America)
The other brilliant aspect of this book is the way it shifts between parts. Originally you think the story is going a certain way and then with each part, it shifts and now you're in a different story than you thought it was going to be.
I think the fact that I liked it so much and had such a hard time truly explaining it to others, means it'll probably be incredibly divisive. Still, I recommend it to folks as more relevant now in 2021 than it was when it came out in 2010.
As to the Japanese part (I am, admittedly, speaking second-hand), there has been a growing sentiment (certainly extant when Project Itoh was writing this book) that the society has become polite to a fault. That those who express their discomfort or issues with others are committing a faux pas against the greater society. And so Harmony conceives of a Utopia that is also a dystopia for some. The suicides mentioned in the book mirror the increasing numbers of Japanese men checking out and/or committing suicide. (And we see some evidence of the same happening in China and maybe among Gen Z here in America)
The other brilliant aspect of this book is the way it shifts between parts. Originally you think the story is going a certain way and then with each part, it shifts and now you're in a different story than you thought it was going to be.
I think the fact that I liked it so much and had such a hard time truly explaining it to others, means it'll probably be incredibly divisive. Still, I recommend it to folks as more relevant now in 2021 than it was when it came out in 2010.
greenskydragon's review
2.0
I'd heard good things about this book. Sadly, I feel that perhaps I've outgrown the target age group by the time I found out about it.
The fundamental flaw with this novel lies in its core idea. If a society is truly perfect, one in which evil truly can't exist, is it really worth rebelling against? If humans are made morally good and cured of their negative shortcomings, should they strive to throw off such progress? Would they even want to? These were the questions I had within the opening segment of the novel, and by the time I gave up the novel had yet to address, or even raise, these questions.
What was left was a group of selfish individuals who, rather than be heroes, were left to be utter villains. The system of morality of the main characters makes no differentiation between the freedom to choose evil and not act on it, and simply choosing to be evil. They behave in evil fashions as demonstrations of their "freedom" from a system designed to create paradise on earth.
Perhaps I missed something. Perhaps I quit before the point at which the novels justifies itself. But rebelling against perfection, simply because it is perfect, leaves me no room to root for these characters. There's nothing redeemable about pure, unadulterated evil
The fundamental flaw with this novel lies in its core idea. If a society is truly perfect, one in which evil truly can't exist, is it really worth rebelling against? If humans are made morally good and cured of their negative shortcomings, should they strive to throw off such progress? Would they even want to? These were the questions I had within the opening segment of the novel, and by the time I gave up the novel had yet to address, or even raise, these questions.
What was left was a group of selfish individuals who, rather than be heroes, were left to be utter villains. The system of morality of the main characters makes no differentiation between the freedom to choose evil and not act on it, and simply choosing to be evil. They behave in evil fashions as demonstrations of their "freedom" from a system designed to create paradise on earth.
Perhaps I missed something. Perhaps I quit before the point at which the novels justifies itself. But rebelling against perfection, simply because it is perfect, leaves me no room to root for these characters. There's nothing redeemable about pure, unadulterated evil
alexanderpaez's review
3.0
Tiene ideas buenísimas, pero el desarrollo de la novela, tanto personajes como trama me ha resultado muy insatisfactorio. Especialmente los personajes protagonistas. Insufribles. Sería un libro de 2 estrellas, pero la subo a 2,5 porque el planteamiento me ha gustado lo suficiente como para aguantar todo el libro.
krisis86's review
1.0
I don't know if it was just a bad translation or what, but this book is awful. I didn't finish it, didn't get much past page 50 because the writing is so bad. Yuck.