Marathe and Steeply: choose your temple (pp. 107–108)

This is the doctrinal heart of "choosing your master," delivered from a wheelchair on a rock. Marathe's argument is that everyone worships something — "we are all of us fanatics," the word itself meaning worshipper-at-the-temple — so the only real freedom is the choice of what to give yourself to, and it is a choice most people never consciously make. His pivot lands as an indictment of the entire American project: "Who teaches your U.S.A. children how to choose their temple? What to love enough not to think two times?" A society that treats the choice as automatic, that never teaches it as a choice at all, has left its citizens defenseless against the first sufficiently pleasurable thing that comes to their door — which is precisely why a cartridge in the mail can depopulate a room. The Entertainment is lethal only to a people who were never taught to choose their master, and so choose by default.