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We Are All Aliens



I’m reading Philip K. Dick’s biography right now, and this is an awesome quote that comes from a letter written by his mother Dorothy:

[…] The more I learn of other people’s thoughts the more universally true it seems that each person has another world in him and that no one really belonds to the world as it is. In other words, we are all aliens. None of us belong to this world; it does not belong to us. The answer is to fulfill one’s other world through this one.

What a weird family life they must have had… Great stuff though, and very relevant to what we were just talking about (plus some other older stuff too).

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4 Reader Responses

  1. Edd Says:
    May 11th, 2006 at 3:25 pm

    Excellent, this is one of my favourite Philip K Dick quotes:

    Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups…So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. 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.

  2. alistair Says:
    May 11th, 2006 at 8:37 pm

    i think we all do in a personal way. to take the position of creating a universe for everyone has always bothered me. it annihilates free will at the root. in our minds.

  3. skip wiley Says:
    May 12th, 2006 at 2:13 pm

    Your post brings this idea into curious light… how our internal “unique” worlds are increasingly overshadowed and drown out by the “one” reality reinforced by media, et al.

    to take the position of creating one universe for everyone has always bothered me.

    Please permit my change of your wording, alistair…

    …I’m recently watching the Lord of the Rings commentary/appendices on the DVD. One interesting theme they note is that of the one ring and Sauron’s single all-seeing eye. The idea, they say, is in stark contrast to a pluralistic view of things (which is championed by the age-old co-existance of elves, men, dwarves, etc). In Sauron’s ideal world, all difference would be erased and authenticity squashed.

  4. alistair Says:
    May 12th, 2006 at 2:19 pm

    to disagree with a manufactured reality can be stressful at times. one feels persecuted as a free man, one not ready to go into pre-sized boxes.



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