Guilt -- if there was any guilt -- spread out and diffused itself over everybody and everything. . . . Perhaps at some point in time, at some spot in the world, a moment of responsibility existed.
Interpretation
Guilt can be pervasive and affect many people, often diffusing responsibility among all involved.
In this quote, Philip K. Dick reflects on the nature of guilt and responsibility. He suggests that guilt is not always felt by an individual alone, but rather can spread out, affecting a larger group or collective. This indicates that moments of accountability may be fleeting, and often responsibilities are shared in a diffuse manner, complicating the recognition of who is truly responsible for an action or event.
In practice
In a discussion on the impact of group decisions, this quote could illustrate the spread of guilt and accountability.
We are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, and some alteration in reality occurs. We have the overwhelming impression that we were reliving the present - deja vu.
Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.
On some other world, possibly it is different. Better. There are clear good and evil alternatives. Not these obscure admixtures, these blends, with no proper tool by which to untangle the components.
"Do you have information that there's an android in the cast? I'd be glad to help you, and if I were an android would I be glad to help you?" "An android," he said, "doesn't care what happens to another android. That's one of the indications we look for." "Then," Miss Luft said, "you must be an android."
The universe is information and we are stationary in it, not three dimensional and not in space or time.
A man is an angel that has gone deranged.
In the world of tomorrow, the new man will 'think' the place he wants to go, then his mind will take him there.
Eager souls, mystics and revolutionaries, may propose to refashion the world in accordance with their dreams; but evil remains, and so long as it lurks in the secret places of the heart, utopia is only the shadow of a dream
I think life is difficult and that's that. I am not at all - absolutely not at all - interested in the pursuit of happiness. I am not interested in the pursuit of positivity. I am interested in pursuing a truth, and the truth often seems to be not happiness but its opposite.
If you say: I believed in God, I trusted God and He didn't come through - You only trusted God to meet your agenda.
Life is like a wheel. Sooner or later, it always come around to where you started again.
All grandeur, all power, and all subordination to authority rests on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple and society disappears.
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