The theors built the Everything Killers. Afterward they agreed to be segregated from the rest of society, and that agreement became the Reconstitution. Nobody imposed the walls from outside. The people who built the dangerous thing locked themselves up. The cage was the profession taking responsibility for what it was capable of. Ripped from the novel: "the complicity of theors in the development of this praxis led to universal agreement that they should henceforth be segregated from non-theorical society, a policy that when effected became synonymous with the Reconstitution."

— In our words · Source: Anathem (Neal Stephenson)