These fears are reasonable considering how the majority of ancient civilizations relied on the oversimplification of certain ideas and the authoritarian style rule of absolute law. Their tendencies to wholeheartedly embrace the fabrication of reality with the overly simplistic good of God and evil of the Devil mentality led to many moral conflicts and confusion with other civilizations as well as their own and eventually resulted in their demise. Though the objective truth is not always the best thing to hear, I believe that it is much better to hear that than the simpler, happier reproduction.

Nationalism is a deathly effective tool for motivating and controlling an empire's officials. All sense of mercy and consideration for foreigners are replaced with frustration and paranoia due to the possibility of the aliens being enemies of the nation. Though the narrator clearly displays his reluctance of interrogating the prisoners, he knows that his duty as a government magistrate rises above all else and it is very intriguing to see his battle between his idealism and his obedient sense of duty. The struggle of many government workers has always been the decision between one's own sense of righteousness or the word of their superiors and what they decide depends on how far they've seen their peers push others in the name of the flag.

The irony of the student's statement against Said is that by attacking him for not having the name of not including names of scholars of a specific background, the student ends up purely appealing for the interest of a specific group of individuals rather than speaking of how to make the message itself more universally accepted. Her statement of attack clearly displays how she cares more about the status of the names mentioned rather than the messages they offer which is a mentality similar to the priorities of most upper class elites in every civilization who end up creating an unnecessary divide between people of different backgrounds.