chillingly average: the democracy of the cage
human volunteers lining up literally around the block outside the place, able-bodied and I should remember to recall mostly young Canadians, lining up and literally trampling each other in their desire to sign up as volunteers for p-terminal-electrode implantation
Context
The datum that universalizes the addict and makes the theme's argument about everyone, not just the diseased. When word of the pleasure-terminal leaks, "mostly young" people trample each other to volunteer for fatal brain implantation "in full knowledge of the rat’s and dolphin’s death" — and the psych-screening finds them not deviant but "chillingly average, normal," nonabnormal on every axis. The horror is the ordinariness: addiction is not a defect of the weak or the damaged but the default response of a normal nervous system offered direct access to the lever. The p-terminal exposes the addict as latent in everyone, the cage a universal susceptibility rather than a personal failing.