"But say a man does know. He sees the world as it is and he looks back thousands of years to see how it all come about. He watches the slow agglutination of capital and power and he sees its pinnacle today. He sees America as a crazy house... He sees a whole damn army of unemployed and billions of dollars and thousands of miles of land wasted... He sees how when people suffer just so much they get mean and ugly and something dies in them. But the main thing he sees is that the whole system of the world is built on a lie. And although it's as plain as the shining sun—the don't-knows have lived with that lie so long they just can't see it."

This quote is taken from Part Two, from a chapter narrated from Jake Blount's point of view. Jake is talking to John Singer about the evils of capitalism because he thinks that Singer is someone who shares his passion for socialism. However, unlike Dr. Copeland, Blount thinks that the way to remedy all of these problems is to hold strikes and revolts to get pay raises and to raise people's awareness of the injustice under which they live. A worker's resistance to or fear of revolt baffles Jake, who assumes that any worker who would deliberately reject active social protest is also necessarily rejecting his own means of salvation.