Human philosophy tends to shake down into values which might be categorizes as intellectual, religious, moral, and aesthetic. - Dan Simmons

We are created for precisely this sort of suffering. In the end, it is all we are, those limpid tide pools of self-consciousness between crashing waves of pain.

Sol realized what he had known and forgotten about very small communities: they were frequently annoying, always parochial, sometimes prying on a one-to-one level, but never had they subscribed to the vicious legacy of the so-called “public’s right to know.”

Thus evolved some members of the Core—not altruists, but desperate survivalists who realized that the only way ultimately to win their never-ending zero-sum game was to stop the game. And to stop the game they needed to evolve into a species capable of empathy.