Is all she says true?" Asura whispered. "Ah," Pieter said, smiling. "Now, that is a question. Let's say it is all based on truth, but the facts are o… - Iain Banks

The underlying point held; experience as well as common sense indicated that the most reliable method of avoiding self-extinction was not to equip oneself with the means to accomplish it in the first place.

One believed what one was told to believe, what it made sense to believe. Unless one was a foreigner, of course, or a philosopher.

It was a truism that all civilisations were basically neurotic until they made contact with everybody else and found their place within the ever-changing meta-civilisation of other beings, because, until then, during the stage when they honestly believed they might be entirely alone in existence, all solo societies were possessed of both an inflated sense of their own importance and a kind of existential terror at the sheer scale and apparent emptiness of the universe.