A Commonplace Book

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Cat 7s Cradle 8Vonnegut 9

 

[H]umanity is organized into teams, teams that do God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass....

"If you find your life tangled up with somebody else's life for no very logical reasons," writes Bokonon, "that person may be a member of your karass."

[A] karass ignores national, institutional, occupational, familial, and class boundaries.

... a false karass, ... a seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done, a textbook example of what Bokonon calls a granfalloon. Other examples of granfalloons are the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows--and any nation, anytime, anywhere.

-- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Cat's Cradle. 1963.
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