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TR · P04
Nobody in a pasture knows
The people inside are happier than the people outside, and they are right to be.
The word people bring me from the later books is the Pasture, and they almost always ask the same thing: who is in it?
The novels are careful never to answer that in a way that lets the reader off.
The Pasture is not a prison and not a policy. In the books it is a condition: adapted, comfortable, useful within a range that has quietly narrowed, and content — because the narrowing was gradual, and because every single step of it was an improvement.
Nothing was imposed. Nobody was forced. Everybody involved was being helped.
The fifth book gives the rate as about nine per cent a year. That is the number that matters, and it is chosen precisely. Nine per cent a year is not detectable. It is smaller than a mood, smaller than a bad week, far smaller than the difference between one year's technology and the next. You cannot feel it and you cannot date it, and after six years you cannot do a thing you used to do without thinking.
You can test the mechanism in your own life this afternoon, and the test costs nothing.
Drive somewhere thirty miles away without the screen. Spell a difficult word without the correction. Find a piece of music that was not suggested to you. Add up a bill in your head. Recall a telephone number that matters to you. Write four hundred words without a machine offering to finish the sentence.
Some of that will be easy. Some of it will be surprisingly hard. Now consider that not one of those capabilities was taken from you. Each was replaced with something better, by your own choice, for a good reason, and you would not go back.
That is the whole of the argument, and the books add only one line to it. The person inside is not miserable. The person inside is measurably happier than the person outside, and is right to be. The novels are quite firm that this is not irony.
Which leaves the reader with the only question these pages exist to hand over.
Nobody in a pasture believes they are in one. So how would you know?
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