State

"What do you think of the State?"
"I suppose it's a bit, or maybe a lot, like Santa Claus - a piece of make-believe which functions because we behave as though it were real."

Precipice

They built for themselves a precipice - how they did it I don't know, maybe they hacked it out of the rock -  only it turned out it seems there were too many of them there, and soon the pushing began.