{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/whorl/1398",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "whorl",
  "thread": {
    "id": 1398,
    "subject": "Yet another Secret theory: we have met the enemy and he is us",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2001-04-23T20:14:30+00:00",
    "last": "2001-04-23T20:14:30+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<whorl-v0012-0709@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Adam Stephanides",
        "address": "adamsteph at earthlink.net"
      },
      "date": "2001-04-23T20:14:30+00:00",
      "subject": "(whorl) Yet another Secret theory: we have met the enemy and he is us",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Say what you will about Nicholas Gevers' proposal, he's got people thinking\nabout the Secret again.  After some thought, I have a new theory, which\nseems to me to answer the difficulties around the Secret better than any\nother I've seen.  In particular, it answers Kevin Maroney's question: what\ndoes Jahlee's revelation add to what we'd already guessed?\n\nWhen Jahlee says that the inhumi take their children's minds from the humans\nwhose blood they drink, she is not merely referring to their intelligence.\nThe children's spirits (perhaps their souls, if inhumi have souls) are taken\nfrom humans.  Krait is Horn's son, not just by adoption, but because his\nspirit is the same as Sinew's.  This is why, during astral travel, the\ninhumi appear human.  This is what Jahlee means when she tells Horn: \"_You_\nare my race.  You know that, why won't you admit it?  Inside, I'm one of\nyou.  So was everybody who fought for you at Gaon.\" (IGJ, 376)  Horn \"knows\nthat\" because he knows the Secret.  It's what Horn means when he describes\nthe inhumi, talking to Vadsig, as mirrors, and when he tells her that \"Many\n[Neighbors] had left the whorls already, fleeing the inhumi but taking\ninhumi with them....We cannot run away from ourselves\" (RttW, 236).  The\nNeighbors brought inhumi with them, because they were themselves inhumi: the\ninhumi were their dark side.\n\nSo the way in which the Secret can be used as a weapon is indeed the Golden\nRule bit proposed here before.  If humans loved each other enough and were\nunselfish enough, then the inhumi, drinking their blood, would produce\nchildren who were too unselfish to drink human blood.  Then the inhumi would\nlose their intelligence, and this would not be cruel to the inhumi because\nthey were meant to be just animals: they have no spirits of their own (this\nis what I take to be Wolfe's view, not necessarily my own).  The inhumi as\nthey exist now are monstrosities, albeit pitiable monstrosities, like the\nbeast-men of \"The Island of Doctor Death\" (sorry, alga, but I think that\nthis fits Wolfe's portrayal of the inhumi better than visions of\nhuman-inhumi brotherhood [*] do).\n\nThere is still the objection raised to the Golden Rule idea when it was\nfirst brought up: how can the inhumi, having observed the colonists, believe\nthat they could achieve this level of unselfishness?  I don't have a real\ngood answer to this.  Maybe even the remote possibility of this occurring is\nenough to alarm the inhumi.  Or maybe they think that Silkhorn's powers of\npersuasion could convert the colonists.\n\nIn any case, apart from the numerous objections that have been raised to\nNicholas Gevers' specific proposal, I don't think that the key to the Secret\nor to how to reduce the inhumi to animals is any sort of improved strategy\nor technology.  Horn tells Hide that the Neighbors \"tried in their\ndesperation to become stronger still, to know more and more and more, and\nsucceeded, and were doomed by that success.\" (IGJ, 353)\n\n--Adam\n\n[*]  Apologies for the sexist terminology; but I can't think of a suitable\nnon-sexist substitute.  \"Fellowship\" sounds like a bunch of Rotarians;\n\"brother-and-sisterhood,\" aside from its awkwardness, implies that one\nspecies is the \"brother\" and the other the \"sister,\" which is not what I\nmean.\n\nWhile I'm apologizing, apologies if somebody else had anticipated this\ntheory on the list.  I tried to search the archives to see, but the relevant\nvolume is too large for my computer to download.\n\n\n*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun."
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}