Philip K Dick
& Homeland Security
by Paul Illich
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"...we now dwelt in a very large prison system, without walls, bounded by Canada, Mexico, and two oceans. There were the jailors, the turkeys, the informers, and somewhere in the Midwest the solitary confinement of the special internment camps. Most people did not appear to notice. Since there were no literal bars or barbed wire, since they had committed no crimes, had not been arrested or taken to court, they did not grasp the change, the dread transformation, of their situation. It was the classic case of a man kidnapped while standing still. Since they had been taken nowhere, and since they themselves had voted the new tyranny into power, they could see nothing wrong. Anyhow, a good third of them, had they known, would have thought it was a good idea. [...] Their freedom to do as they were told had been preserved."
"It was an ancient fight I was in, not a new one: it had been fought without cease for two thousand years. Names had changed, faces had changed, but the adversaries remained a permanent constant. The slave Empire against those who struggled for justice and truth [...] And its value system was the concept of the supremacy of the state. The individual counted in its scales as nothing, and individuals who turned against the state and generated their own values were the enemy."
- Radio Free Albemuth, by Philip K Dick
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Published posthumously, Radio Free Albemuth [RFA] continues a sequence of semi-autobiographical, and unhinged, paranoid theosophical disputations, dressed up as fiction. The first signs that fiction and reality were blurring together in PKD’s art are hard to pin down. In part this is because one of the major themes of his work was exactly that blurred zone.
The themes explored here, however, did seem to gel [or was that, go into freefall?] in the novel VALIS. The story presented in RFA is a different take on the plot of a film seen by the protagonists of VALIS, aspects of which also emanate from the main body of the text. The follow-up novels to VALIS, often seen as completing a trilogy, were The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. The ideas seem most clearly expressed in The Divine Invasion and RFA, the fourth book in the sequence if you like.
The relevance of the theological ideas presented in this sequence to Blue are minimal [aren't they?], but the paranoid political scene presented is of great interest. The theme of a universe, a planet, an Amerika/USA run by fascists was recurrent in PKD’s work - this is true right back to his nineteen-fifties Men-In-Black shorts, and appears in various formulations across his novels [see for example The Man in the High Castle and Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said].
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"'I know it was the authorities who broke into my house...'
'They'll get you again, Phil,' Nicholas said. 'Probably they wanted to see what your next book is about. What is you next book about, anyhow? […] Did they find the MS?'
'The MS of my new book,' I told him, 'was in my attorney's safe. I transferred it there a month before the hit on my house.'
'What's the book about?'
After a pause I said, 'a police state in America modeled on the Soviet Gulag prison system. A police slave-labor state here. It's called Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.'
'Why'd you put the manuscript in our lawyer's safe?'
I said, reluctantly, 'Well, I - shit, Nick. To tell you the truth, I had a dream.'
Silence for a while."
The Great Dictator was the result of the conflation of fifties "red-scarology" and Tricky Dicky's authoritarian rule of America. This latter was of especial importance to Phil, because of course Nixon was overthrown. The President had appeared as a force of darkness, representative of a universe that had somehow become separated from God or justice. His overthrow, in PKD’s mind at least, was inexplicable. From a rationalist standpoint, it couldn't be so! The cynicism of the post-sixties scene, and especially PKD’s own cynicism, meant people simply could not see how the forces of darkness could have been overthrown. Only some external influence could help - literally from outer space, or perhaps from the return of God to our world.
Dick, as a Science fiction novelist, and at the same time as a theologically inclined obsessive, conflated both sources in his books. He had more religious detritus piling up in his mind than is normal, and he used it to create a world-view that, however clunkily, worked for him [or which turned him into a loon - your choice]. While some of us may not relate to that part too directly, our Twenty-First Century cynicism is as deep as his had been. Despite the fall of the Berlin Wall and the release of Nelson Mandela, we can see no miracle epiphany, no divine intervention/invasion about to release us from our bonds.
We are where Phil Dick was in the mid-Seventies, only our Tricky Dicky has only just ascended the throne. Like Nixon, Bush Jr may be overthrown: but if he is, we already know that it will not really be The People that do it. Those that run the USA today have an eminently expendable clown in power. It seems obvious that the President is NOT in charge of Amerika - more obvious than is the case for any other President since Reagan, certainly. "We" all accept that the reins of real power were relinquished at least a early as Truman, if not earlier. "We" all believe that any truly and individually influential president will be removed, even unto death, as will any truly unpopular one. Presidents are merely puppets and tools of the True Authorities, and all of "us" will have our own ideas about who They are...
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"I asked the name of the opaque antagonist. The answer: it had no name."
Today's paranoids want to cut out the middle man and fantasize about overpowering the True Authorities. They also know it can't be done. At least, not without "divine intervention". So, how was it that we differed from Philip K Dick’s perception again?
The President in RFA is one Ferris F Freemont [Freemount in previous excursions]. Earlier works expose the name to be a lightly coded reference to Beelzebub - F is the sixth letter of the alphabet, and there are here, in the President's initials, three F's, hence 666 [in RFA this is not made explicit].
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"There is a Latin motto, when one is seeking to know who has committed a crime, that goes, Look to see who gains. When John Kennedy was murdered, and Dr King, and Bobby Kennedy, and the others, when George Wallace was crippled, we should have asked, Who gains? All men in America lost by these senseless murders except one second-rate man whose way was now clear to the White House: clear to get in and clear to remain. Who otherwise would have had no chance."
In the novel a man who was bankrolled by both the extreme American Right and the Soviet Communists came to tyrannical power in Nixon's stead [in The Divine Invasion an alternate present/future has an analog of this US/USSR coalition, in the Christian-Islamic Church/Scientific Legate].
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"It was an ancient fight I was in, not a new one: it had been fought without cease for two thousand years. Names had changed, faces had changed, but the adversaries remained a permanent constant. The slave Empire against those who struggled for justice and truth [...] buried under the bulk of an Empire that embraced both the United States and the Soviet Union as twin, equal manifestations. The US and the USSR, I understood, were the two portions of the Empire as divided up by the Emperor Diocletian for purely administrative purposes; at heart it was a single entity, with a single value system. And its value system was the concept of the supremacy of the state. The individual counted in its scales as nothing, and individuals who turned against the state and generated their own values were the enemy."
That Freemont is an analog of Nixon is clear. The world is seen to have diverged along two paths in 1968. In ours Nixon, a common or garden force of darkness, came to power. This Meta-Nixon finalized the transformation of America into Amerika - the Black Iron Prison.
This is a prison from which man cannot escape. For Dick, this is a Sisyphean conception. The world has been our prison since the crucifixion of Christ, and God has been occluded from our world since then. Indeed, time itself exists only subjectively - although we here experience the "present", these are in fact still Roman times. Something is projecting our modern "reality" over the Empire, so that we do not see it.
As is so often the case in Christian religious works, the forces of goodness manifest to really ordinary individuals, who become part of secretive cellular groups, a la the early Christian Church. Indeed, here the sign of the Fish is one of the few things that can break through the time illusion...
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"'But when I saw the girl standing there, and the golden fish sign - you know, Phil, the Greek Orphic religion, around 600BC, they used to show the initiate a golden sign and they’d tell him, 'You are a son of earth and of starry heaven. Remember your birth.' It's interesting: 'Of starry heaven.' '
'And the person would remember?'
'He was supposed to. I don't know if it really worked. He was supposed to lose his amnesia and then start to recall his sacred origins. That was the purpose of the whole mystery ceremonies, as I understand it.
Anamnesis it was called: abolishment of amnesia, the block that keeps us from remembering. We all have that block."
Only some powerful force working through a small selection of sometimes unwilling and grudging human individuals can create the right circumstances for change. And over and over, in PKD’s work, this is not always enough to actualize said change.
For President Freemont, the American people, who can never know that he is a communist agent, are easily brainwashed into accepting an all-American cheer-leading secret police that arrests all small "communist cells", and exposes them as agents of the all-encompassing commie movement - "Aramchek".
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"Nobody in Berkeley, including the Communist Party members living and working there, had ever heard of Aramchek. It mystified them. What was Aramchek? Senator Freemont claimed in his speech that a Communist Party member, an agent of the Politburo, had under pressure given him a document in which the CP-USA discussed the nature of Aramchek, and that from this document it was evident that the CP-USA, the Communist Party of America, was itself a front, one among many, cannon fodder as it were, to mask the real enemy, the real agency of treason, Aramchek. There was no membership roll in Aramchek; it did not function in any normal way. Its members espoused no particular philosophy, either publicly of privately. Yet it was Aramchek that was stealthily taking over these United States. You'd have thought someone in the pinko capital would have heard of it."
That no such organization exists has no bearing on the matter. One of the protagonists, it transpires, is the only living human soul left who knows where Freemont really got the name "Aramchek" from - it was her immigrant family surname, that she and her dead brother used to write in wet concrete around the newly built neighborhood both they and Freemont were bought up in. She is the only link that could expose the ruse.
The parallels with today are very striking on reading PKD’s books, but rarely as blatant as in RFA. The idea that democracy has been long made a sham is the air we breath. Presidents, or rather their advisors, are seen as holding vast powers, powers which have nothing to do with The People. No matter which Party wins an election, the same NSA/NSC advisors seem to advise, the same TNC's seem to have contributed to party funds, etc... A conflation of Gore Vidal and Amitai Etzioni's description of the nature of the problem [though certainly not the latter's prescriptions] seem to be on the money. The idea, further, that those powers, whoever They are, are not beyond creating a fictional entity to designate Enemy is no surprise either. The more fictional the better, as then any attributes at all can be assigned to the Enemy, as is convenient. The War on Terrorism needs to be able to mark out absolutely anyone it wishes as Enemy, and here's the tool to do it [don't say, But that's Terrorism!].
The communists only partially fitted the bill, as the countries identified as Communist were real countries. The only country now, if there is one at all, is Nihilon. The Enemy can be anyone, at home or abroad, as is convenient to those that rule. If even the members themselves need not know that they are members, [vis " Its members espoused no particular philosophy, either publicly of privately"], then surely anyone at all can be outed as Enemy.
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"In his inaugural statement, Ferris Freemont discussed the Vietnam War, in which the United States had been actively involved for a number of years, and declared it a two-front war: one front six thousand miles away and the other front here at home. [...] and the more important battlefield, Freemont declared, consisted if the one here..."
"'Ferris Freemont hasn't just taken over the country,' I said. 'He's also taken over human minds, and debased them.'"
and,
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"The authorities had done their assigned job: they had driven another wedge between two men who had always trusted each other completely.
"The destruction of our relationship was a mini-cosmos mirroring what was going on at all levels of American society under F.F.F. On the basis of what had happened to us I could infer that terrible tragedies were taking place everywhere."
The overt Enemy today is The Foundation - al-Quaeda. Once a small charity wing of Bin Ladens's organization, merely there to gather funds, al-Quaeda is now whatever They wish project upon it. It, in essence, really doesn't [need to] exist. Any actions that actually emanate from Bin Laden's organization are merely a small part of a, yes, conspiracy to defraud the American People and indeed the World of a just and fruitful living. The Enemy is anyone that They say is the Enemy. The small window of opportunity Man has forged in which to become Stewards of the Earth is slamming shut, and They are accelerating that process as fast They can. Yes, folks, the powers-that-be are destroying the only chance in history for The People to create the Garden here on this planet.
Does any of this sound a tad like Homeland Security? Radio Free Albemuth has much resonance in this context:
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"...we now dwelt in a very large prison system, without walls, bounded by Canada, Mexico, and two oceans. There were the jailors, the turkeys, the informers, and somewhere in the Midwest the solitary confinement of the special internment camps. Most people did not appear to notice. Since there were no literal bars or barbed wire, since they had committed no crimes, had not been arrested or taken to court, they did not grasp the change, the dread transformation, of their situation. It was the classic case of a man kidnapped while standing still. Since they had been taken nowhere, and since they themselves had voted the new tyranny into power, they could see nothing wrong. Anyhow, a good third of them, had they known, would have thought it was a good idea. [...] Their freedom to do as they were told had been preserved."
PKD’s way out is, as noted, quasi-religious. The God beyond the fallen Earth manifests as VALIS, the Vast Active Living Intelligence System [Big Noodle, as it is called in The Divine Invasion], pierces the veil and tries to gain a foothold by stealth, through ordinary good people. This has failed before, and seems likely to fail again.
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"'[...] They value the effort, the attempt, as equal to the achievement. They judge by the heart. By intention. They know we can only do so much, that if we fail we fail. We can only try.'
'You think we're going to fail too,' I said.
Sadassa said nothing. She sipped her drink."
Religious trappings aside, Philip K Dick has a great humanist message for these times. We cannot allow the thousands that died in the calamity in New York in September 2001 to force us to sign off a thousand years of progressive ideals. We must fight the True Authorities wherever they be, on whatever side. We must not allow them to enslave us for their own ends, and, to the extent that we have always been prone to that enslavement in the past, we must fight to rollback those previous advances too. It has always been a convenient idea that "Whosoever fights Monsters Becomes a Monster", serving to help suffocate rebellion through quietism. However, it has a kernel of truth, and Phil recognizes this core truth in extract 42 of his Exegesis:
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"42. To fight the empire is to be infected by its derangement. This is the paradox; whoever defeats a segment of the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus, imposing its form on its enemies. Thereby it becomes its enemies."
This is another way of noting the way that so many organizations, as they reach critical size, appear to become corrupt. Another, possibly more productive, way of putting this is to say that organizations, as they reach critical size, deform according to an inevitable internal logic of their organizational structure. This overrides the beliefs and values of those who form the constituent [human] parts of the group. Anarchist values, when not enslaved by Nihilism and hyper-Individualism, can prevent this failure, by pitting the individual who has a concept of sane social consociation with others against both the selfish and those who would worship the state. In fighting hierarchy and domination, Phil was truly an anarchist thinker - whatever other madness drove him. We can learn much from this great writer of "science fiction", who never shrank from the truths he found in his search for answers to the questions "What is real?" and "What is it to be human?"
- – Paul Illich
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