“Maybe the word ‘emotion’ is misleading. It’s subtler than that. Conscious judgment is beyond the reach of the Coryphaeus. But consider how much of human cognition is unconscious. For instance, Mr. Findley, both you and I often make decisions on the basis of moral intuition. We call that intuition ‘conscience.’ Conscience doesn’t arise out of deliberate, systematic reasoning. Which is not to say it’s unreasonable or illogical! Suppose you see a man drowning in a river and you swim out to save him—do you think about it first? Do you calculate the risks against the benefits? Obviously not; you act out of an instinctive identification with the drowning man; you feel his distress as if it were your own and you act to relieve that distress despite your fears. Or, if you fail to act, you might feel guilt or remorse. This isn’t a trivial phenomenon. Acts of conscience have overturned governments and toppled empires—even in your time.”

“And we didn’t need nodes or Networks to do it.”

“No. But at the same time, individual conscience is notoriously unreliable. An individual might talk himself out of doing the right thing. Or he might be genuinely uncertain about what the right thing is.”

“You’re no more infallible than I am, Oscar.”

“But when I sum my conscience with a thousand or a million others, errors become less likely and self-deception almost impossible. That’s what the Coryphaeus does for us!”

He had given me a textbook argument for limbic democracy, and he was utterly sincere about it. But he hadn’t really answered my question. “I don’t want to know what it’s good for. I want to know how it feels.”

He thought for a moment. “Take the recent food rationing. Historically, rationing has always produced black markets, hoarding, even violent resistance—yes? But you won’t find any of that in Vox. Not because we’re saints, but because our collective conscience is muscular enough to prevent it. The sum of our better instincts—which is just another name for the Coryphaeus—knows the rationing is necessary and fair. And so, as individuals, we feel it as necessary and fair.”

“It still sounds like coercion.”

“Does it? Tell me, did you ever break into a neighbor’s house and steal his property?”

“No—”

“And is that because you were coerced, or because you knew it would be wrong? Only you can answer that question, but I have to assume it’s because you felt it would be a shameful act, that you would make yourself abhorrent in your own eyes and in the eyes of others by committing it. Well, that’s how I feel about cheating on my rations. And I’m secure in the knowledge that my neighbors feel exactly the same way.”