“People are pack animals, in my experience,” Claudius muses aloud. “It’s how we adapted to survive through generations — whether you believe we emerged naked and vulnerable from the Garden of Eden, or from the primordial chaos, the unknowable Tao. We grouped together to take down larger prey, to watch each other as we slept, to build shared homes and protect each other. There are variations among human beings, of course, just as there are variations among any natural species. Some tolerate isolation better than others … and perhaps they, too, are essential to our future survival.”
He’s thinking of Lan Wangji, of Galahad, who both possess a keen sense of personal justice, who naturally resist following the pack to circle the next scapegoat. Instead, they both defend Claudius when scapegoating him for social harmony would be far too easy. Lan Wangji kept loving Wei Wuxian, whatever the cultivation world said about him. If the future of humanity included only the sort of masked wolves at Elsinore who politely declined to make waves but grouped together to condemn acceptable targets, it would be a dismal future indeed.
“But all of us,” he continues, “feel an invisible, unspoken pressure when we aren’t behaving as the pack believes we should. For many of us, that’s the only thing keeping us moral. The sense that the pack would turn us out, if we didn’t follow the same strictures. As inexplicable and lonely as a life of evil may seem to you and I … she had her own to pack to run with. Her family. As long as they supported her, I daresay she had no reason to change. Indeed, the competition among them would only inspire her to commit more evil, to secure her place in the family hierarchy. Wolves in captivity tend to develop stronger hierarchies. In your professional opinion … what do you suggest we do with her, when we find her? Is she someone we can reason with, or contain?”
no subject
He’s thinking of Lan Wangji, of Galahad, who both possess a keen sense of personal justice, who naturally resist following the pack to circle the next scapegoat. Instead, they both defend Claudius when scapegoating him for social harmony would be far too easy. Lan Wangji kept loving Wei Wuxian, whatever the cultivation world said about him. If the future of humanity included only the sort of masked wolves at Elsinore who politely declined to make waves but grouped together to condemn acceptable targets, it would be a dismal future indeed.
“But all of us,” he continues, “feel an invisible, unspoken pressure when we aren’t behaving as the pack believes we should. For many of us, that’s the only thing keeping us moral. The sense that the pack would turn us out, if we didn’t follow the same strictures. As inexplicable and lonely as a life of evil may seem to you and I … she had her own to pack to run with. Her family. As long as they supported her, I daresay she had no reason to change. Indeed, the competition among them would only inspire her to commit more evil, to secure her place in the family hierarchy. Wolves in captivity tend to develop stronger hierarchies. In your professional opinion … what do you suggest we do with her, when we find her? Is she someone we can reason with, or contain?”