Philip K. Dick on the Need to Confront Reality
Climate Change and Nuclear War Aren't Going Away
A friend sent along an article on Philip K. Dick, the science fiction author whose works have been turned into Hollywood films like “Blade Runner” and “Minority Report.” Dick had this to say about societal trends toward narrative construction and information control:
We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations. 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.
Dick wrote this in the 1970s. If he were writing today, I’m guessing he’d add that he distrusted their motives as well as their power.
False narratives and pseudo-realities are everywhere. Today at TomDispatch, Noam Chomsky highlights the false narrative that global warming simply doesn’t exist, or that it does exist but that it’s a completely natural process that humans can do nothing about. This is perhaps the most dangerous false narrative we face today. That we can simply ignore humanity’s impact on nature—which is convenient for those profiting from the exploitation of the earth’s resources, such as fossil fuels.
Another pseudo-reality we face is that America’s national security is constantly threatened by “near-peer” rivals bent on our destruction. This “reality” drives colossal military spending as next year’s Pentagon budget soars toward $900 billion. A related “reality” is that the world is made safer by more thermonuclear warheads and weapons, a false narrative that the Pentagon is betting on to the tune of $2 trillion over the next thirty years.
Why generate this pseudo-reality? Because the Pentagon gains power and corporations profit greatly. Meanwhile, regular working folk, whose lives could be improved and empowered by a $2 trillion investment in their health and well-being, are left to struggle and suffer. They are, in a word, disempowered.
I remain at a loss how Joe Sixpack’s life is made better by B-21 stealth bombers, Sentinel ICBMs, and Columbia-class nuclear-missile-firing submarines.
With Donald Trump’s peccadilloes once again dominating the news cycle, essential stories about climate change and Armageddon-enabling nuclear weapons are mostly ignored. We are encouraged to take sides, for or against, an aging con man and his payola to a porn star and a Playboy bunny; we are told this is a matter of grave national concern requiring wall-to-wall media coverage, even as natural disasters exacerbated by climate change surge around us and even as nuclear war grows ever more possible.
Time to face reality, America. As Dick also wrote, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Those nuclear weapons aren’t going away, nor is the threat of climate change.
The Realities that America needs to face ~ and that Americans need to confront, acknowledge, accept, and either act upon or simply meekly accept ~ are:
That the American Empire has entered the “Decline” phase that all empires eventually reach on their way to the “Fall” phase.
That as that Decline unravels into Fall, America is transitioning from being merely a Flailing Nation-State to a Failing Nation-State.
That as that transition from Flailer to Failure unfolds, America’s system of government and governance is becoming increasingly authoritarian enroute to eventually totalitarian as the Ruling Political Class seeks to shield itself from the effects of the Decline and Fall of their empire.
The general problem is that so much of government is about, 1) more power to the government, and 2) more money to the special interest supporters of the government. I would say a lot of opposition to green energy items stems from this viewpoint of government actions. Of course the promoters of green new deal type stuff (like Chomsky) won't see it that way. They will explain that the political opposition (the Republicans) want to see the earth doomed. In the same way the promoters of the military state will accuse the opposition of wanting to see Putin win. It's the same dynamic.