In Dick’s world, it is hard to keep the police separate from the corporations or distinguish the state’s propaganda from capitalism’s. Or maybe they’re all space aliens. The idea isn’t so much to crush the citizens—Orwell’s notion of “a boot stamping on a human face—forever”—as letting them know who is boss, and getting another buck out of them
Better than any other SF writer of his era, Dick nailed a future where machines are neither masters nor tools but both at once. On the Internet, he is celebrated as a prophet. “There will come a time,” he predicts in a quote that circulated widely post-Snowden, “when it isn’t ‘They’re spying on me through my phone’ anymore. Eventually, it will be ‘My phone is spying on me.’ ”
The message from Dick is Disbelieve! “We are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms,” he wrote. “I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.”
I think some extraordinarily good writers are appearing: Sladek, Malzberg, Disch. I hate to name specific ones, because I’ll leave out one that I really like.
DICK: Well, the I Ching gives advice beyond the particular, advice that transcends the immediate situation. The answers have a universal quality. For instance: “The mighty are humbled and the humbled are raised.” If you use the I Ching long enough and continually enough, it will begin to change and shape you as a person. It will make you into a Taoist, whether or not you have ever heard the word, whether or not you want to be.
COVER: Doesn’t Taoism fuse the ethical and the practical?
DICK: This is the greatest achievement of Taoism, over all other philosophies and religions.
COVER: But in our culture the two are pitted against each other.
DICK: This always shows up. Should I do the right thing or the expedient thing? I find a wallet on the street. Should I keep it? That’s the practical thing to do, right? Or should I give it back to the person? That’s the ethical thing. Taoism has a shrewdness. There’s no heaven in our sense of the word, no world besides this world. Practical conduct and ethical conduct do not conflict, but actually reinforce each other, which is almost impossible to think of in our society.
DICK: Well, in our society a person might frequently have to choose between what he thinks is practical and what is ethical. He might choose the practical, and as a result he disintegrates as a human being. Taoism combines the two so that these polarizations rarely occur, and if possible never occur. It is an attempt to teach you a way of behavior that will cause such tragic schisms not to come to the surface. I’ve been using the I Ching since 1961, and this is what I use it for, to show me a way of conduct in a certain situation. Now first of all it will analyze the situation for you more accurately than you have. It may be different than what you think. Then it will give you the advice. And through these lines a torturous, complicated path emerges through which the person escapes the tragedy of martyrdom and the tragedy of selling out. He finds the great sense of Taoism, the middle way. I turn to it when I have that kind of conflict.
COVER: What if a person should come to a situation in which the ethical and the practical cannot be fused under any circumstances?
DICK: One thing that I have never gotten out of my head is that sometimes the effort of the whole Taoist thing to combine the two does not always work. At this point the line says, “Praise, no blame.” Those are code words to indicate what you should do, and the commentary says that the highest thing for a person to do would be to lay down his life rather than to do something that was unethical. And I kind of think that this is right. There never can be a system of thought that can reconcile those two all the time. And Taoism takes that into account, in one line out of over three thousand.
COVER: What did you try to accomplish in this speech?
DICK: I tried to define the real person, because there are people among us who are biologically human but who are androids in the metaphoric sense. I wanted to draw the line so I could define the positive primary goal of stipulating what was human. Computers are becoming more and more like sensitive cogitative creatures, but at the same time human beings are becoming dehumanized. As I wrote the speech I sensed in it the need for people who were human to reinforce other people’s humanness. And because of this it would be necessary to rebel against an inhuman or android society.
COVER: What do you believe defines a human being?
DICK: For example, the capacity to say no when what one was told to do was wrong. Someone saying, “No, I won’t kill. I won’t bomb.” A balking. And this balking I saw in the teenagers, in the so-called “punks.” A nonpolitical rebellion of the youth, which in the long run, without their realizing it, had very great political significance. Not in terms of elections and parties, but with the emergence of kids who could not be bribed, who could not be intimidated, who would not listen to propaganda. I saw the need of an illegal rebellion against what was basically an illegal system. In other words, you can’t say to a kid, “Don’t break the law. Always obey the law,” because the law was in itself unjust. I was very lucky, I had a powerful unconscious. It drove me out of the academic community, it drove me out of double-domed intellectual pursuits and into—
WILLIAMS: Double-domed?
DICK: Double-domed. Egghead stuff that I was into. It drove me out of the cloistered realms where I would have been cut off from the broader, truer world, and drove me into the real world. It drove me into a job, and marriage, and a career in writing, and a more substantial life.
WILLIAMS: Would you agree that writing is a form of therapy?
DICK: Well, for me, it’s more than that. It is a more vigorous, more active thing than most therapy. I think that’s not a proper description of writing, in a way. It’s a misleading thing to say, “Yes, it is a form of therapy,” but certainly it would be more misleading to say, “No, it is not.” I would say that it is a superior form of activity in terms of bringing about integration of the mind than therapy as such is.
But it should never—the goal of writing is not therapy. That’s not its goal. So, it would be saying, “Is an automobile an attractive thing?” Well, attractiveness is not the prime purpose of an automobile. I mean, form follows function. The function of writing is not therapeutic. It may be as a spin-off that it will make you feel better
*****
DICK: That’s it, yeah. It’s assuming motive when there is none. But you know, that article in Harper’s is important, because it shows how this is a degenerated form of the old idea of a cosmology in which there are no accidents, and everything is part of God’s plan, providence. We lose God and what are we left with? A network of connivance, without any benign center. And this assumption that people are motivated by hostility, that their motives are—that they’re doing something bad when you can’t understand what they’re doing. I think there’s more to it. I don’t think any theory of paranoia really explains it, except the very classic clinical paranoia.
For the paranoid, there are no surprises; everything happens exactly as has predicted, everything finds a place in his system. For us, it is not possible to have a system. Perhaps all systems—that is to say all formulations, verbal, symbolic, semantic or otherwise, that claim to explain the universe by a universal hypothesis—are manifestations of paranoia. We must content ourselves with the mystery, the absurdity, the contradictions, the hostility, but also the generosity that our environment offers us. It’s not much, but it’s always better than the deadly, defeatist certainty of the paranoid.
DICK: I am very conscious of the reader. I am saying to the reader, The greatest menace in the twentieth century is the totalitarian state. It can take many forms: left-wing fascism, psychological movements, religious movements, drug rehabilitation places, powerful people, manipulative people; or it can be in a relationship with someone who is more powerful than you psychologically.
Actually, I was told by a fairly good analyst that I’m not cold-blooded enough to be paranoid. He said to me, “You’re melodramatic and you’re full of illusions about life, but you’re too sentimental to be paranoid.” I took the Minnesota Multiphasic psychological profile test once, and I tested out as paranoid, cyclothymic, neurotic, schizophrenic … I was so high on some of the scales that the dot was up in the instructions part. You couldn’t even find the dot. But I also tested out as an incorrigible liar. You see, they’ll give you the same question phrased in several different ways. They’ll say something like: “There is a divine deity that rules the world.” And I’d say, Yeah, there probably is. Later on they’ll say: “I don’t think there is a divine deity that rules the world.” And I’d say, That’s probably correct, I can see a lot of reasons for agreeing with that. And later they’ll say: “I’m not sure if there’s a divine deity that rules the world.” And I’d say, Yeah, that’s about right. In every case I was sincere.
The Buddha, seeing the evil of the world, came to the conclusion that there could be no creator god, because if there were, it could not be this way, there could not be so much evil and suffering; I had come to the conclusion that there was a deity in this world, and he was evil.
*****
I had formulated the problem again and again in books like Maze of Death and Ubik and Three Stigmata and Eye in the Sky. Some transcendent divine power that was not evil but benign intervened to restore my mind and heal my body and give me a sense of the beauty, the joy, the sanity of the world. And out of this I forged a concept that is relatively simple and possibly unique in theology, and that is: the irrational is the primordial stratum of the universe, it comes first in time and is primary in ontology—in levels of essence. And it evolves into rationality.
The history of the universe is a movement from irrationality—chaos, cruelty, blindness, pointlessness—to a rational structure that is harmonious, interlinked in a way that is orderly and beautiful.
The primordial creative deity was essentially deranged, from our standpoint; we are, as humans, an evolution above the primordial deity, we are pygmies, but we stand on the shoulders of giants and therefore we see more than they see. We human beings are created and yet we are more rational than the creator himself who spawned us.
The Divine Invasion
PLATT: That’s a wonderful idea.
DICK: My outlook is based not on faith but on an actual encounter that I had in 1974, when I experienced an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind, as if I had been insane all my life and suddenly I had become sane. Now, I have actually thought of that as a possibility, that I had been psychotic from 1928, when I was born, until March of 1974. But I don’t think that’s the case. I may have been somewhat whacked-out and eccentric for years and years, but I know I wasn’t all that crazy, because I’d been given Rorschach tests and so on.
This rational mind was not human. It was more like an artificial intelligence. On Thursdays and Saturdays I would think it was God, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays I would think it was extraterrestrial, sometimes I would think it was the Soviet Union Academy of Sciences trying out their psychotronic microwave telepathic transmitter. I tried every theory. I thought of the Rosicrucians. I thought of Christ.
PLATT: What kind of experience was it?
DICK: It invaded my mind and assumed control of my motor centers and did my acting and thinking for me. I was a spectator to it. It set about healing me physically and my four-year-old boy, who had an undiagnosed life-threatening birth defect that no one had been aware of. This mind, whose identity was totally obscure to me, was equipped with tremendous technical knowledge—engineering, medical, cosmological, philosophical knowledge. It had memories dating back over two thousand years, it spoke Greek, Hebrew, Sanskrit, there wasn’t anything that it didn’t seem to know.
It immediately set about putting my affairs in order. It fired my agent and my publisher. It was very practical. It remargined my typewriter. It was very practical; it decided that the apartment had not been vacuumed recently enough; it decided that I should stop drinking wine because of the sediment—it turned out I had an abundance of uric acid in my system—and it switched me to beer
PLATT: How did your wife perceive all this? Did you tell her what was going on?
DICK: Oh, yes. She was impressed by the fact that, because of the tremendous pressure this mind put on people in my business, I made quite a lot of money very rapidly. We began to get checks for thousands of dollars—money that was owed me, which this mind was conscious existed in New York but had never been coughed up. It was very busy and active. Does this interest you?
PLATT: How could it not?
DICK: It had one overwhelming concern. It informed me that a group of conspirators had murdered the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, and Bishop Pike. The mind represented itself as the Cumaean Sibyl, the Roman equivalent of the Delphic Sibyl. Now I’ve let it out of the bag, haven’t I? It was female. She said the Republic was in danger, the American Republic. She said that once again the empire threatened to take over. She was there to see that the empire was destroyed. I shouldn’t be saying this. This is really stupid of me. She said the oscillation between the republic and empire was a constant in history.
She then dictated a series of letters to Charles Wiggins, who was on the House Judiciary Committee deciding whether to impeach President Nixon. The letters dealt with constitutional law. I didn’t understand the letter. Later I found out that Congressman Wiggins was such an authority on constitutional law he was considered for the Supreme Court.
The final letter said the Nixon transcripts were forgeries. That letter she sent to The Wall Street Journal, which had published an editorial that said the transcripts showed that Nixon was innocent.
By that time, she had gotten me to the doctor, who confirmed its diagnoses of various ailments that I had. She did everything but paper the walls of the apartment. It also said it would stay on as my tutelary spirit. I had to look up “tutelary” to find out what it meant. She had the unfortunate habit of lapsing into Greek.
Then, having healed me, calmed me, she showed me a garden of such beauty I could not believe it existed. I walked around in it. She transformed the landscape for me. Indescribable beauty. She said, When you get old and are dying, I will come back and take you there. But I will not come back until then. At one time I said, Who are you. Tell me who you are, for God’s sake. She said, Think of me as Diana. She said for me everything is permitted.
PLATT: If people heard this, they would think you were putting me on.
DICK: I have almost 500,000 words of notes on all this. At one point I was convinced I was dealing with a computer. I had to write a book about this.
PLATT: Do you recognize the possibility, however remote, that you could have in some way been talking to yourself?
DICK: Yes, it could have been a dialogue between the two hemispheres of my brain, like in A Scanner Darkly.
PLATT: Do you prefer not to believe that?
DICK: This was suggested to me by at least one person. I think it’s a good possibility. The only thing that was odd was her ferocious knowledge. She was always very cryptic. She forced me to go to reference books.
I’m quite reticent about this, normally. I’ve talked to my [Episcopalian] priest about it, and a couple of close friends and of course my ex-wife. I tried to discuss it with Ursula Le Guin, and she just wrote and said, “I think you’re crazy.” She returned the material I had sent her. Of course, when [my new novel] Valis comes out, a lot of this will be in the book. Valis is an attempt to formulate my vision in some rational structure that can be conveyed to other people.
When I was twenty-one, I was reading Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed. And it was real funny, because my wife Kleo was going to Cal at the time, and she came home one day and she said, “Did you tell me you were reading Moses Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed?” and I said, “Yep, I’m reading it.” She says, “I talked to one of my professors and he says there’s probably not another human being in the United States who’s reading Moses Maimonides at this moment.” That’s a very obscure book, you know.
But I just went to the library and tracked these things down. Where I met my downfall was when I tried to read Plotinus. And I couldn’t fathom what he was saying at all. Plotinus was not in print. There were no books then of his actual writing. There was a syllabus published by the University of Chicago—or Columbia, some goddamned university—and I couldn’t make any sense of it. So I dropped philosophy at that point, and got interested in Jung, psychology, and veered off into that. So philosophy doesn’t show up as much in my early writing as psychology does. Then philosophy starts coming back later on.
DICK: Hey, man, listen. I was used to announce the fact that the Savior is here. Now I was not the only person. In 1974, Benjamin Creme† made his announcement for the first time. That means that Benjamin Creme and I in 1974 were told by this telepathic voice information that has never been stated before—and that is that all the Saviors are in fact one Savior. Krishna, the Maitreya, Gautama, Christ, they’re all one person.
RICKMAN
It’s not a new doctrine that Christ, Buddha, etc., are all holy men.
PHILIP K. DICK (1928–1982) is generally considered the most influential modern science fiction writer. Much of his work has been adapted to film, notably Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (which became Blade Runner), Total Recall, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly. Dick was the recipient of a Hugo Award in 1963 for his novel The Man in the High Castle. In 2007, he became the first science fiction writer to be included in the Library of America. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages.