There was a very strange book written sometime in the late seventies by the science fiction writer Philip K Dick. It's called Valis, and it really is the oddest, most exasperating book I've ever read. On the one hand it is clearly autobiographical, containing details about Dick‘s own life, his failed marriage and his nervous breakdown, on the other there are fantastical elements in it which might be describing something that had actually happened, but might just as easily be science fiction conceits. I won't go into the plot here, except to say that there is a single line he repeats over and over again throughout the book, always in bold, always in capital letters. THE EMPIRE NEVER ENDED - he says, like that - THE EMPIRE NEVER ENDED.

He's talking about the Roman Empire.

In some form or another, the Roman Empire has continued to flourish, long after its apparent demise, taking on various disguises. In fact, he says, the time between the era of the early Christians in their on-going spiritual war with the Roman Empire and now - the time he was writing in, the late seventies - is false time. That era and this era are beginning to coalesce. These are - the times we are living in now - literally apostolic times.

This of course may be just a science fiction conceit, a plot device to keep the novel going. Or Dick may have believed that it was true. Who knows?

I suspect the latter.

However you want to view it, there may be some truth in this assertion. It may not be literally true, but psychologically, spiritually, economically, militarily, you might say, THE EMPIRE really has NEVER ENDED. Or if it ever went away for a time, it has certainly returned with a vengeance.

In fact, you only have to look at a bunch of riot police in full combat mode, with their shields and their batons, with their close formations, their phalanxes and their armour to know that Roman military techniques are still very much in evidence.

The Empire is a psychological as well as a military state. It exists as a mental construct, as a psychopathic state of mind, as a system of control. It exists in all of us. All of us are infected with this thought-form virus. It's no use hating George W Bush, as the world‘s most prominent psychopath. In his position we would do exactly the same. It's not a question of right versus left. It's not even a question of right versus wrong. It's a question of survival now. It's a question of finding out what we have to do to survive.

War is not just like peace but with bombs. It is a wholly different state of being. In war the psychopaths are in control. Everyone is a psychopath to some degree. A psychopath is someone who thinks of everyone else as an object, a mere source of gratification. Not every psychopath is a killer. Most psychopathologies are controlled in a state of peace, since the first concern of the psychopath is to blend in. But in the state of war the psychopath is unleashed on the world. The psychopath as ruler, as state, as war-profiteer, as war-monger, as war-addict, and in every single individual.

War is the psychopath's playground. Now all the rules are dispensed with. Now every human is an object of sensory gratification. Now power rules. Now I can take pot shots at the little objects around me pretending to be human. Nothing matters any more but my own self, my own self-gratification. Other people's bodies become playthings in the hands of the torturers in all of us. This has always been the case in a state of war. It's either self-gratification or self-sacrifice. The worst and the best. And there is a whole historical power psychology dedicated to this cause, the retention of war as a means of gratification and control. This is the true meaning of "The Empire." It's what Philip K Dick means when he says, "THE EMPIRE NEVER ENDED."