We Resemble This Remark

Leadership in this society here would naturally fall to the paranoids. . . . But you see, with paranoids establishing the ideology, the dominant emotional theme would be hate. Actually hate going in two directions; the leadership would hate everyone outside its enclave, and also would take for granted that everyone hated it in return. Therefore their entire so-called foreign policy would be to establish mechanisms by which this supposed hatred directed at them could be fought. And this would involve the entire society in an illusory struggle, a battle against foes that didn’t exist for a victory over nothing.

--Philip K. Dick, Clans of the Alphane Moon, 1964

I stole the quote from an interesting rumination on Dick by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker which comemmorates the publication of some of Dick's best work by the Library of America.