Is There Really a Black Cat, in the Dark?

Out here on the Edge, it's peaceful but isolated; a place where one can watch society engage in, well, being a society.

It seems that almost everyone carries a piece of it. Some are wholly immersed! Others pick and choose...perhaps rejecting the more outlandish or destructive parts, but holding on to a basic 'human nature', a sense of belonging and community. Reflecting faith in their own fundamental influence on the internal workings of the machine—and the criticalness of the machine to themselves.

I suppose it can't be "lost", if you never really had it in the first place.