This line is said by Rick at the end of chapter 20. Once I read this line I thought that this would imply that Mercer could control parts of the world. In a way Mercer is the second channel for the TV. His empathy box basically keeps humans empathetic and Buster Friendly doesn’t understand why this is important. All the humans would probably listen to him unopposed if Mercer wasn’t there. Rick decides to go and climb the hill and even “becomes Mercer.” After all of this he sees a toad. He thinks that the toad is real until he watches his wife open it. She also had told him that Mercer had to move on because he couldn’t move back time and bring back life. This has me believe that the toad was placed there by Mercer to show his understanding and also give Rick something that he could care about that isn’t a biological animal. Of course since Rick knows he was a little disappointed, but he will probably still care for it a lot since it was a gift and he found it out in the wild. Just like a real animal.
My discussion questions: Do you think that Mercer has more power than the androids realize? Do you think that he has more power than the humans realize?
I have understood mercer to be a mix of religion and a social/economic system. On their own, both of these aspects tend to cause people to do very specific things to ensure they are safe. I do believe that mercer is more powerful than the androids thinks because they don’t know how to practice religion or have their own religion to follow other than mercer, a religion based on empathy. Androids are said to lack empathy, so they can not accurately understand how mercer works on humans. Mercer is more powerful than humans realize because it forces social norms on their society and dictates how they are to value items that they own. Religion in our world is strong enough to cause wars. Mercer is even more powerful because almost everyone is practicing the same religion blindly. There is no other option but to follow mercer and that could be potentially dangerous.
If we think of Mercer and Mercerism as a religion then it is absolutely more powerful then any android or human can understand. Religion has led wars (the crusades), conquest (manifest destiny in the Americas), and helped others hold hope in desperate situations (holocaust). Religion is not a tangible thing that can be gripped and controlled, it is a belief system. This is what makes religion such a powerful device. Knowing that Mercer is a scam will not stop people from feeling and practicing empathy, which is the main threat to Buster Friendly.
I believe that Mercer has more power than the androids realize because they cannot understand how a human, or especially an android, could be so empathetic that they partake in a religion, or belief system that is told to be fake, by Buster Friendly. The humans already believe that Mercer has power, so the power that they cannot feel or experience, to them, would be greater; they would not be able to comprehend it. I believe that religion can be looked at in two different ways: as a belief-system, used as a way to brainwash and control a population, or a faith, which is more personal, and based on individual experiences between a person and a greater-being; a person typically chooses their own faith. Mercerism reminds me of a belief-system, specifically because so many people follow it in the book, and there are rules to the way that humans live. Although there are rules to the way a person of faith lives their life in the real world, it is more-so a personal or individual decision on what rules are ethical and which are not.