Marathe and Steeply: choosing nothing to love — "now is what has happened when…"
now is what has happened when a people choose nothing over themselves to love, each one. A U.S.A. that would die—and let its children die, each one—for the so-called perfect Entertainment, this film. Who would die for this chance to be fed this death of pleasure with spoons, in their warm homes, alone, unmoving
Context
The serial's thesis stated outright, and it's a thesis about love, not technology. The lethal thing works only on "a people choose nothing over themselves to love" — a population that has elevated nothing above its own self, and so has no counterweight when a perfect pleasure arrives. The image Marathe reaches for is domestic and infantile: citizens "fed this death of pleasure with spoons, in their warm homes, alone, unmoving," the adult returned to the high chair, dying in comfort. The horror isn't that the Entertainment overpowers people; it's that they would choose it, would "die for this chance," because they were never given anything larger than themselves to choose instead. The weapon's lethality is a measurement of a prior emptiness.