“You can have it,” said Nagle, “if you can accept the cost. You know what it’s like. You’ve seen a little, but it’s only a sparkle of light reflected in a drop of water, compared with the full, sweeping image available to you.
“You’ve felt a little of the terror that keeps men from dropping the old, outmoded solutions to problems and facing the problems anew to get fresh, workable answers. If you look any farther, you’ll know that every man is the heir to all the terror and risk the human race has experienced in three billion years of development. It’s the terror that plagues him in nightmares and insanities and whittles his abilities to those of a midget when he ought to be a giant.
“It takes courage. We can stop the Mirror down to a microscopic aperture, so to speak, but you have to contribute your own courage or you will see nothing. If you have it, however, you can make all the wisdom of the race your own personal possession. The kind of wisdom that enabled it to develop through three billion years of boiling and flooding, attack by all other life forms and slaughter by its own kind. He’s made a lot of mistakes, but Man has become a very tough critter, and his wisdom is enormous in a racial sense.”
“I’ll tackle it,” said Montgomery. “I may not make it, but I'm willing to be one of the expendable ones.”
“The expendable ones —”
“It’s my own term, but I think it fits. I got a glimpse of what you meant by the homeostatic mechanisms of the race. The expendable ones are those who dare to attempt functioning without the homeostats.
“I thought that first day you were trying to tell me the homeostats should be destroyed, that the schools, for example, should be replaced. I see I misunderstood you. The school is necessary, so are all the other homeostatic mechanisms, in order for the race to function as a unit.
“The race can’t afford to take a chance. It has to be sure its movement is in a forward direction. Sometimes we think it is going full speed in reverse, but over the last three billion year period the general direction has been forward and up. To make sure it doesn’t go off at a wild tangent and lay itself open to every crackpot idea that comes along, it provides homeostatic controls to suppress the wild fluctuations of its members. The school, the church, the media of communication all act to inform the individual members that This is the Way. Anything else is out of line.
“The controls are pretty hard to keep in adjustment. They get set too low in periods of widespread, compulsory education, as you tried to tell me. Compulsion breeds rebellion, and the school begins to fail as a learning factor. It needs to be put back on the pedestal where it once was, and admission made a goal, not an obstacle.
“As it is, we are approaching a standstill. The One Right Way is suffused with bitterness and rebellion in all segments of society. The fire is burning pretty low.