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.
The man who lives in division is living in death. He cannot find himself because he is lost; he has ceased to be a reality. The person he believes himself to be is a bad dream.
Small miseries, like small debts, hit us in so many places, and meet us at so many turns and corners, that what they want in weight, they make up in number, and render it less hazardous to stand the fire of one cannon ball, than a volley composed of such a shower of bullets.
A traveller I am, and a navigator, and everyday I discover a new region within my soul.
I knew that was really the only purpose of life: to be our self, live our truth, and be the love that we are.
There is perhaps no more obvious vanity than to write of it so vainly.
Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.
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