We- Symbol/Theme

Something that I noticed in We was the large use of numbers and logic. Noticed, of course, is a little bit of an understatement. The references continue throughout the book. I personally think that it all refers to the summation speech by the Benefactor at the end of the novel, and how inhuman a "true love of society" is. What I believe is trying to be conveyed is the idea that logic and reason really cannot be applied to something that does not always function as predictably as a computer program, namely human beings.

The Table of Hours seems to be more than just a freakish way of setting up the lifestyle of the community. It dictates exactly what the people need to be doing exactly when. However, the entire process is much like a pre-programmed system that is able to operate autonomously. There really isn't anything the Benefactor and Guardians needed to do other than to remove any bugs in the system. The community of OneState is mechanized; it is no longer a community but a program or a machine. The life had been more or less sucked out of it. Considering this, D-503's remark about the system is that everything would be 100% perfection if the Table of Hours listed directions for every second of every hour of every day for all eternity. The system is idle for those free hours; it needs to be doing something. Otherwise, the system is dead until it awakes again. D-503 is talking from the perspective of a machine at this point. Now a complete mechanized society whose only objective is to continue existing actually IS SOMEWHAT UTOPIAN when it comes down to the technical stuff. Tell you what: program a computer with a short little schedule and tell it what happiness is, and it would tell you continually that it was happy. Is it really happy? Not really, because it has no idea what happiness is, besides whatever you said it was, but it is content with doing what it needs to do. What it thinks it must do. It assesses situations and responds with a technical answer. Thus, this community can be loosely called utopian only when mankind is completely mechanized.

Now, there's just one little problem with living beings: they think. Computers don't think, they compute. Machines just act. We think, and when we think we really explore many things that a computer might call absolutely pointless and stupid. They would explode trying to just accept the fact that we actually waste time living. Now, I'm going to say that this translates roughly to the fact that HUMANS ARE NOT PERFECT, and cannot achieve a status of perfect happiness. At least, not while being human. D-503 can still think about the square root of negative 1; a computer would just put it out of mind and only read ERROR if it saw it. But D-503 can think about it. This causes him to attempt to understand, find some answer to, explore further, get irritated over, rack his brain about, etc. etc. etc. until he snaps. As long as we can think, as long as we have free will, as long as we have a soul with preferences and emotions, we cannot achieve paradise on earth. There are too many, if one can call them, variables, to completely deduce the equation Happiness. As a result, we are doomed to the bad times as well as the good. We can't just have one without the other, because we exist on several planes of existence. Computers don't; either it is or it isn't, and this is how it's done. However, some people can waste their lives chasing perfection rather than living. D-503 spends most of his time in the novel fretting over why why why. He wants to be "happy." He doesn't care much about anything else. Thus, the Benefactor in the end of the novel gives him exactly what he wants. He extracts D-503's imagination (and free will) and makes him a mindless drone. The Benefactor has done this to the whole world, as far as we know. How "nice," giving the whole world the "happiness" they always wanted. See what I mean?

This is actually quite cruel. Humanity wants to exist and know they're existing. They do not want to simply perform task, compute result, begin next task, 1010010101010. (That's binary computer-talk, by the way.) However, society is going to pieces in the search for said perfection. The Benefactor has granted their wishes. In a sense, it is the best thing for the world. No hunger, no discrimination, no suffering, no unhappiness. All problems solved. Thus, it can be noted that society should really be glad they can live rather than wanting more, wanting constant bliss, wanting an easy life. Live how you'd like, but don't waste the time you've got. Just live. This society has already become mostly computer, and at this point knows of no other way to achieve happiness. If they already have all this granted to them, why not continue on and get the rest of the problem fixed, to never suffer again? Another thought D-503 had was about how happiness was always thought to be a plus. He often noted several other items as a plus or minus, to express his opinion. He later begins to wonder about the inherent opposite to that number, and how it must exist and must be included somewhere in the equation of life. The extraction of imagination solves the problem: set everything to zero. It isn't quite positive, but it sure isn't negative, and that's all that matters. D-503 also tries to make a function out of love and death. That he had quite a bit of difficulty with, because it isn't necessarily true. He was trying to mix both the logic of mathematics and the emotions of the soul he was experiencing. Those two really don't mix, accentuating how different the logical road to success is from the emotional and gut feeling road.

This novel seems to exaggerate the mathematical concept of perfection, and how inhuman it really is. But this, I think, is the purpose of that exaggeration. The logic behind perfection and paradise is highly inhuman and is not supposed to be applied to unpredictable humans. We cannot follow a system like a computer. We only know how to live by our own beliefs. As a result, it attempts to show how utopias are really impossible for us, and also not to worry about living as much as actually living. Logic cannot be applied to life to receive an all-powerful result. That result is somewhere near infinity, and the only beings that know of that number are the inhuman, soulless ones that live in the realm of probability, theorem, and instructions. They can determine how to live perfectly; only we can live, and we can only live by living, not computing.