The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick

  Perhaps, really, what we are seeing is a gradual merging of the general nature of human activity and function into the activity and function of what we humans have built and surround[ed] ourselves with. A hundred years ago such a thought would have been absurd, rather than merely anthropomorphic. What could a man living in 1750 have learned about himself by observing the behavior of a donkey steam engine? Could he have watched it huffing and puffing and then extrapolated from its labor an insight into why he himself continually fell in love with one certain type of pretty young girl? This would not have been primitive thinking on his part; it would have been pathological. But now we find ourselves immersed in a world of our own making so intricate, so mysterious, that as Stanislaw Lem the eminent Polish science fiction writer theorizes, the time may come when, for example, a man may have to be restrained from attempting to rape a sewing machine. Let us hope, if that time comes, that it is a female sewing machine he fastens his intentions on. And one over the age of seventeen—hopefully, a very old treddle-operated Singer, although possibly, regrettably, past menopause.

  I have, in some of my stories and novels, written about androids or robots or simulacra—the name doesn’t matter; what is meant is artificial constructs masquerading as humans. Usually with a sinister purpose in mind. I suppose I took it for granted that if such a construct, a robot, for example, had a benign or anyhow decent purpose in mind, it would not need to so disguise itself. Now, to me, that then seems obsolete. The constructs do not mimic humans; they are, in many deep ways, actually human already. They are not trying to fool us, for a purpose of any sort; they merely follow lines we follow, in order that they, too, may overcome such common problems as the breakdown of vital parts, loss of power source, attack by such foes as storms, short-circuits—and I’m sure any one of us here can testify that a short-circuit, especially in our power supply, can ruin our entire day and make us utterly unable to get to our daily job, or, once at the office, useless as far as doing the work set forth on our desk.

  What would occur to me now as a recasting of the robot-appearing-as-human theme would be a gleaming robot with a telescan lens and a helium-battery power pack, who, when jostled, bleeds. Underneath the metal hull is a heart such as we ourselves have. Perhaps I will write that. Or, as in stories already in print, a computer, when asked some ultimate question such as “Why is there water?” prints out 1 Corinthians. One story I wrote, which I’m afraid I failed to take seriously enough, dealt with a computer that, when able to answer a question put to it, ate the questioner. Presumably—I failed to go into this—had the computer been unable to answer a question, the human questioner would have eaten it. Anyhow, inadvertently I blended the human and the construct and didn’t notice that such a blend might, in time, actually begin to become part of our reality. Like Lem, I think this will be so, more and more. But to project past Lem’s idea: A time may come when, if a man tries to rape a sewing machine, the sewing machine will have him arrested and testify, perhaps even a little hysterically, against him in court. This leads to all sorts of spin-off ideas: false testimony by suborned sewing machines who accuse innocent men unfairly; paternity tests; and, of course, abortions for sewing machines that have become pregnant against their will. And would there be birth control pills for sewing machines? Probably, like one of my previous wives, certain sewing machines would complain that the pills made them overweight—or rather, in their case, that it made them sew irregular stitches. And there would be unreliable sewing machines that would forget to take their birth control pills. And, last but not least, there would have to be Planned Parenthood clinics at which sewing machines just off the assembly lines would be counseled as to the dangers of promiscuity, with severe warnings of venereal diseases visited on such immoral machines by an outraged God—Himself, no doubt, able to sew buttonholes and fancy needlework at a rate that would dazzle the credulous merely metal and plastic sewing machines, always ready, like ourselves, to kowtow before divine miracles.

  I am being facetious about this, I suppose, but—the point is not merely a humorous one. Our electronic constructs are becoming so complex that to comprehend them we must now reverse the analogizing of cybernetics and try to reason from our own mentation and behavior to theirs—although I suppose to assign motive or purpose to them would be to enter the realm of paranoia; what machines do may resemble what we do, but certainly they do not have intent in the sense that we have; they have tropisms, they have purpose in the sense that we build them to accomplish certain ends and to react to certain stimuli. A pistol, for example, is built with the purpose of firing a metal slug that will damage, incapacitate, or kill someone, but this does not mean that the pistol wants to do this. And yet there we are entering the philosophical realm of Spinoza when he saw, and I think with great profundity, that if a falling stone could reason, it would think, “I want to fall at the rate of thirty-two feet per second per second.” Free will for us—that is, when we feel desire, when we are conscious of wanting to do what we do—may be even for us an illusion; and depth psychology seems to substantiate this: Many of our drives in life originate from an unconscious that is beyond our control. We are as driven as are insects, although the term “instinct” is perhaps not applicable for us. Whatever the term, much of our behavior that we feel is the result of our will, may control us to the extent that for all practical purposes we are falling stones, doomed to drop at a rate prescribed by nature, as rigid and predictable as the force that creates a crystal. Each of us may feel himself unique, with an intrinsic destiny never before seen in the universe… and yet to God we may be millions of crystals, identical in the eyes of the Cosmic Scientist.

  And—here is a thought not too pleasing—as the external world becomes more animate, we may find that we—the so-called humans—are becoming, and may to a great extent always have been, inanimate in the sense that we are led, directed by built-in tropisms, rather than leading. So we and our elaborately evolving computers may meet each other halfway. Someday a human being, named perhaps Fred White, may shoot a robot named Pete Something-or-Other, which has come out of a General Electric factory, and to his surprise see it weep and bleed. And the dying robot may shoot back and, to its surprise, see a wisp of gray smoke arise from the electric pump that it supposed was Mr. White’s beating heart. It would be rather a great moment of truth for both of them.

  I would like, then, to ask this: What is it, in our behavior, that we can call specifically human? That is special to us as a living species? And what is it that, at least up to now, we can consign as merely machine behavior, or, by extension, insect behavior, or reflex behavior? And I would include in this the kind of pseudohuman behavior exhibited by what were once living men—creatures who have, in ways I wish to discuss next, become instruments, means, rather than ends, and hence to me analogues of machines in the bad sense, in the sense that although biological life continues, metabolism goes on, the soul—for lack of a better term—is no longer there or is at least no longer active. And such does exist in our world—it always did, but the production of such inauthentic human activity has become a science of government and suchlike agencies now. The reduction of humans to mere use—men made into machines, serving a purpose that although “good” in the abstract sense has, for its accomplishment, employed what I regard as the greatest evil imaginable: the placing on what was a free man who laughed and cried and made mistakes and wandered off into foolishness and play a restriction that limits him, despite what he may imagine or think, to the fulfilling of an aim outside of his own personal—however puny—destiny. As if, so to speak, history has made him into its instrument. History, and men skilled in—and trained in—the use of manipulative techniques, equipped with devices, ideologically oriented themselves, in such a way that the use of these devices strikes them as a necessary, or at least desirable, method of bringing about some ultimately desired goal.

  I think, at this point, of Tom Paine’s comment about one or another party of the Europe of his time, “They
admired the feathers and forgot the dying bird.” And it is the “dying bird” that I am concerned with. The dying—and yet, I think, beginning once again to revive in the hearts of the new generation of kids coming into maturity—the dying bird of authentic humanness.

  That is what I wish to say to you here, today. I wish to disclose my hope, my faith, in the kids who are emerging now. Their world, their values. And, simultaneously, their imperviousness to the false values, the false idols, the false hates of the previous generations. The fact that they, these fine, good kids, cannot be reached or moved or even touched by the “gravity”—to refer back to my previous metaphor—that has made us older persons fall, against our knowledge or will, at thirty-two feet per second throughout our lives… while believing that we desired it.

  It is as if these kids, or at least many of them, some of them, are falling at a different rate, or, really, not falling at all. Walt Whitman’s “Marching to the sound of other drummers” [this phrase, inexactly quoted, in fact belongs to Henry David Thoreau] might be rephrased this way: falling, not in response to unexamined, unchallenged, alleged “verities,” but in response to a new and inner—and genuinely authentic—human desire.

  Youth, of course, has always tended toward this; in fact, this is really a definition of youth. But right now it is so urgent, if, as I think, we are merging by degrees into homogeneity with our mechanical constructs, step by step, month by month, until a time will perhaps come when a writer, for example, will not stop writing because someone unplugged his electric typewriter but because someone unplugged him. But there are kids now who cannot be unplugged because no electric cord links them to any external power sources. Their hearts beat with an interior, private meaning. Their energy doesn’t come from a pacemaker; it comes from a stubborn, almost absurdly perverse refusal to be “shucked”; that is, to be taken in by the slogans, the ideology—in fact, by any and all ideology itself, of whatever sort—that would reduce them to instruments of abstract causes, however “good.” Back in California, where I came from, I have been living with such kids, participating, to the extent I can, in their emerging world. I would like to tell you about their world because—if we are lucky—something of that world, those values, that way of life, will shape the future of our total society, our utopia or anti-utopia of the future. As a science fiction writer, I must, of course, look continually ahead, always at the future. It is my hope—and I’d like to communicate it to you in the tremendous spirit of optimism that I feel so urgently and strongly—that our collective tomorrow exists in embryonic form in the heads, or rather in the hearts, of these kids who right now, at their young ages, are politically and sociologically powerless, unable even, by our California laws, to buy a bottle of beer or cigarette, to vote, to in any way shape, be consulted about, or bring into existence the official laws that govern them and our society. I think, really, I am saying this: If you are interested in the world of tomorrow you may learn something about it, or at least read about possibilities that may emerge to fashion it, in the pages of Analog and F&SF and Amazing, but actually, to find it in its authentic form, you will discover it as you observe a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old kid as he goes about his natural peregrinations, his normal day. Or, as we say in the San Francisco Bay Area, as you observe him “cruising around town to check out the action.” This is what I have found. These kids that I have known, lived with, still know, in California, are my science fiction stories of tomorrow, my summation, at this point of my life as a person and a writer; they are what I look ahead to—and so keenly desire to see prevail. What, more than anything else I have ever encountered, I believe in. And would give my life for. My full measure of devotion, in this war we are fighting, to maintain, and augment, what is human about us, what is the core of ourselves and the source of our destiny. Our flight must be not only to the stars but into the nature of our own beings. Because it is not merely where we go, to Alpha Centauri or Betelgeuse, but what we are as we make our pilgrimages there. Our natures will be going there, too. Ad astra—but per hominum. [To the stars—but as men.] And we must never lose sight of that.

  It would, after all, be rather dismaying, if the first two-legged entity to emerge on the surface of Mars from a Terran spacecraft were to declare, “Thanks be to God for letting me, letting me, click, letting, click, click… this is a recording.” And then catch fire and explode as a couple of wires got crossed somewhere within its plastic chest. And probably even more dismaying to this construct would be the discovery when it returned to Earth that its “children” had been recycled along with the aluminum beer cans and Coca-Cola bottles as fragments of the urban pollution problem. And, finally, when this astronaut made of plastic and wiring and relays went down to the City Hall officials to complain, it would discover that its three-year guarantee had run out, and, since parts were no longer available to keep it functioning, its birth certificate had been canceled.

  Of course, literally, we should not take this seriously. But as a metaphor—in some broad sense maybe we should scrutinize more closely the two-legged entities we plan to send up, for example, to man the orbiting space station. We do not want to learn three years from now that the alleged human crew had all married portions of the space station and had settled down to whirr happily forever after in connubial bliss. As in Ray Bradbury’s superb story in which a fear-haunted citizen of Los Angeles discovers that the police car trailing him has no driver, that it is tailing him on its own, we should be sure that one of us sits in the driver’s seat: In Mr. Bradbury’s story the real horror, at least to me, is not that the police car has its own tropism as it hounds the protagonist but that, within the car, there is a vacuum. A place unfilled. The absence of something vital—that is the horrific part, the apocalyptic vision of a nightmare future. But I, myself, foresee something more optimistic: Had I written that story I would have had a teenager behind the wheel of the police car—he has stolen it while the policeman is in a coffee shop on his lunch break, and the kid is going to resell it by tearing it down into parts. This may sound a little cynical on my part, but wouldn’t this be preferable? As we say in California, where I live, when the police come to investigate a burglary of your house, they find, when they are leaving, that someone has stripped the tires and motor and transmission from their car, and the officers must hitchhike back to headquarters. This thought may strike fear in the hearts of the establishment people, but frankly it makes me feel cheerful. Even the most base schemes of human beings are preferable to the most exalted tropisms of machines. I think this, right here, is one of the valid insights possessed by some of the new youth: Cars, even police cars, are expendable; can be replaced. They are really all alike. It is the person inside who, when gone, cannot be duplicated at any price. Even if we do not like him we cannot do without him. And once gone, he will never come back.

  And then, too, if he is made into an android, he will never come back, never be again human. Or anyhow most likely will not.

  As the children of our world fight to develop their new individuality, their almost surly disrespect for the verities we worship, they become for us—and by “us” I mean the establishment—a source of trouble. I do not necessarily mean politically active youth, those who organize into distinct societies with banners and slogans—to me that is a reduction into the past, however revolutionary these slogans may be. I refer to the intrinsic entities, the kids each of whom is on his own, doing what we call “his thing.” He may, for example, not break the law by seating himself on the tracks before troop trains; his flouting of the law may consist of taking his car to a drive-in movie with four kids in the trunk to avoid having to pay. Still, a law is being broken. The first transgression has political, theoretical overtones; the second, a mere lack of agreement that one must always do what one is ordered to do—especially when the order comes from a posted, printed sign. In both cases there is disobedience. We might applaud the first as meaningful. The second, merely irresponsible. And yet it is in the second that I see a
happier future. After all, there has always been in history movements of people organized in opposition to the governing powers. This is merely one group using force against another, the outs versus the ins. It has failed to produce a Utopia so far. And I think always will.

  Becoming what I call, for lack of a better term, an android, means, as I said, to allow oneself to become a means, or to be pounded down, manipulated, made into a means without one’s knowledge or consent—the results are the same. But you cannot turn a human into an android if that human is going to break laws every chance he gets. Androidization requires obedience. And, most of all, predictability. It is precisely when a given person’s response to any given situation can be predicted with scientific accuracy that the gates are open for the wholesale production of the android life form. What good is a flashlight if the bulb lights up only now and then when you press the button? Any machine must always work to be reliable. The android, like any other machine, must perform on cue. But our youth cannot be counted on to do this; it is unreliable. Either through laziness, short attention span, perversity, criminal tendencies—whatever label you wish to pin on the kid to explain his unreliability is fine. Each merely means: We can tell him and tell him what to do, but when the time comes for him to perform, all the subliminal instruction, all the ideological briefing, all the tranquilizing drugs, all the psychotherapy are a waste. He just plain will not jump when the whip is cracked.

  And so he is of no use to us, the calcified, entrenched powers. He will not see to it that he acts as an instrument by which we both keep and augment those powers and the rewards—for ourselves—that go with them.

  What has happened is that there has been too much persuasion. The television set, the newspapers—all the so-called mass media—have overdone it. Words have ceased to mean much to these kids; they have had to listen to too many. They cannot be taught because there has been too great an eagerness, too conspicuous a motive, to make them learn. The anti-utopia science fiction writers of fifteen years ago, and I was one of them, foresaw the mass communications propaganda machinery grinding everyone down into mediocrity and uniformity. But it is not coming out this way. While the car radio dins out the official view on the war in Vietnam, the young boy is disconnecting the speaker so that he can replace it with a tweeter and a woofer; in the middle of the government’s harangue the speaker is unattached. And, as he expertly hooks up better audio components in his car, the boy fails even to notice that the voice on the radio is trying to tell him something. This skilled craftsman of a kid listens only to see whether there is any distortion, interference, or a frequency curve that isn’t fully compensated. His head is turned toward immediate realities—the speaker itself—not the flatuus voci dinning from it.