Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [871]

People are setting fires to get rid of whomever they dislike from personal enemies to anyone who looks or sounds foreign or racially different. People are setting fires because they’re frustrated, angry, hopeless. They have no power to improve their lives, but they have the power to make others even more miserable. And the only way to prove to yourself that you have power is to use it. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 871

Note

The anaphora of ‘People are setting fires’ accumulates a taxonomy of motive — prejudice, rage, despair — and then resolves into an argument rather than a lament: powerlessness inverted into the power to harm. The closing aphorism is chillingly symmetrical and could stand as the chapter’s thesis about violence as self-proof.