the timboucher experience

I just read yet another really awesome essay by Philip K Dick, this one entitled “The Android and the Human“. This opening paragraph I especially like, because he talks about introjection and projection.

It is the tendency of the so-called primitive mind to animate its environment. Modern depth psychology has requested us for years to withdraw these anthropomorphic projections from what is actually inanimate reality, to introject — that is, to bring back into our own heads — the living quality which we, in ignorance, cast out onto the inert things surrounding us. Such introjection is said to be the mark of true maturity in the individual, and the authentic mark of civilization in contrast to mere social culture, such as one find in a tribe. A native of Africa is said to view his surroundings as pulsing with a purpose, a life, which is actually within himself; once these childish projections are withdrawn, he sees that the world is dead, and that life resides solely within himself. When he reaches this sophisticated point he is said to be either mature or sane. Or scientific. But one wonders: has he not also, in this process, reifed — that is, made into a thing — other people? Stones and rocks and trees may now be inanimate for him, but what about his friends? Has he not now made them into stones, too?

There was some other excellent passages in this also. Lemme see… Ah here we go, its about the values which will become necessary in order to survive as an authentic human in a totalitarian state:

If, as it seems, we are in the process of becoming a totalitarian society in which the state apparatus is all-powerful, the ethics most important for the survival of the true, free, human individual would be: cheat, lie, evade, fake it, be elsewhere, forge documents, build improved electronic gadgets in your garage that’ll outwit the gadgets used by the authorities. If the television screen is going to watch you, rewire it late at night when you’re permitted to turn it off — rewire it in such a way that the police flunky monitoring the transmission from your living room mirrors back his living room at his house. When you sign a confession under duress, forge the name of one of the political spies who’s infiltrated your model airplane club. Pay your fines in counterfeit money or rubber checks or stolen credit cards. Give a false address. Arrive at the courthouse in a stolen car. Tell the judge that if he sentences you, you will substitute aspirin tablets for his daughter’s birth control pills. Or put His Honor on a mailing list for pornographic magazines. Or, if all else fails, threaten him with your using his telephone credit card number to make unnecessary long distance calls to cities on other planets. It will not be necessary to blow up the courthouse any more. Simply find some way to defame the judge…

Yeah, he covers all kinds of territory in that essay. It was written in 1972, and is both a concise summary of all the things he wrote about before that, and an exclusive peek into all the writing he did after that. Fucking great.

Oh, I actually found this essay because I saw somebody quote him as saying something the phrase “A story told by the characters to one another,” and thought that was especially important. I want to ruminate on it some more, but it seems not only an excellent insight into writing novels, but also into life itself.

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