The great themes of this book to me are: Power is pathological and is a systemic thing. There are not conspiracies - it gains function from itself and the ince

The great themes of this book to me are: Power is pathological and is a systemic thing. There are not conspiracies - it gains function from itself and the incentives it brings along with it, which go back into the system of power and make it even more powerful. Everyone just sort of goes along with it because it's just the way things are. Pavlov's dog is brought up often to sort of illustrate this. Of course like many post modern works of fiction and philosophy it blames just about everything on capitalism, which I don't agree with for a number of reasons, #1 being we haven't really had capitalism since the 1930s. We've had something far worse which is this managed economy and governance - a system of managerial elite that we call capitalism, but it ins't. But, the type of system doesn't matter in this book. The point is wars and things as crazy as an ICBM (the book really made me think of how insane it is to have designed a missile that destroys random people 100's of miles away) exist not for political reasons so much as money and acquiring power/money. Politics hardly matters and is a distraction to get people to buy into the stupidity of it all. In essence, a condemnation of consumerist culture which has taken the world by storm since this was published. It's actually a prescient book today with AI as it's also a critique of technology and how it doesn't free us, quite the opposite, and will probably end up in the destruction of man. Either with nukes as the book is obsessed with or climate, or naughty AI. Now the best part of the book and saddest is that all this is happening. It's the natural state of mankind. But there's no way to avoid it. It's inevitable. You can't change the world. Because anything you do that you believe is changing it will just be co-opd. We see this in everything today. Any kind "Revolutionary Change" is immediately used up by corporations that see to march in lockstep as if it's a conspiracy. But it's not - it's a numbers game based on incentives. The advice granted in the book is to fly under the radar, it is all you can do. Do not participate in society at large. Do not try and change it as anything good you make will just be used for evil eventually. (like the rockets in the book. invented initially by hobbyists who wanted to go to space; co-opted by politics to make bombs) Simply avoid it and find love and friends and happiness apart from the hideous system that strangles us.