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This is the third in a three-part series.

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Part 3: Adventures in the Dream Factory

In the previous post, we looked at Philip K. Dick’s intellectual and philosophical ties to the early Gnostics. Now, culturally and politically at least, its time to look at the Gnostic in the mirror. Please read on.

Philip K. Dick’s admittedly peculiar but passionately held worldview and the gnosticism it embodies does more than explain what some call the dystopian turn in science fiction from the 1960s onward, it also gives us what has arguably become the dominant mode of understanding of fiction in our time, whether literary, artistic or cinematic. This is the idea that reality is a pernicious illusion, a repressive and authoritarian matrix generated in a dream factory we need to tear down in order to see things aright and have access to the truth. And let’s be honest: it is simply immensely pleasurable to give oneself over to the idea that one has torn aside the veil of illusion and seen the truth — “I am one of the elect, one of the few in the know, in the gnosis.”

Leif Parsons

Dick’s gnosticism also allows us to see in a new light what is the existentially toughest teaching of traditional Christianity: that sin lies within us in the form of original sin. Once we embrace gnosticism, then we can declare that wickedness does not have its source within the human heart but out there, with the corrupt archons of corporate capitalism or whomever. We are not wicked. It is the world that is wicked. This is an insight that first finds its modern voice in Rousseau before influencing a whole Heinz variety of Romanticisms, which turn on the idea of natural human goodness and childhood innocence. We adults idealize childhood because grown-up life seems such a disaster. We forget that being a child — being that powerless — is often its very own disaster.



On the gnostical view, once we see the wicked world for what it is, we can step back and rediscover our essential goodness, the divine spark within us, our purity, our authenticity. It is this very desire for purity and authenticity that drives the whole wretched industry of New Age obscurantism and its multiple techniques of spiritual and material “detox,” its quasi-cultic, multimillion-dollar grossing insistence on the Secret. Against this toxic view of the world, I think we need to emphasize what splendidly impure and inauthentic creatures we are. Whatever spark is within us is not divine, but all-too-human.

Aside from “The Matrix” trilogy and the direct movie adaptations of Dick’s fiction, there are strong gnostical themes in the two most recent movies of the Danish film writer and director Lars von Trier. For our purposes here, they may be embodied in a few brief lines.

Dick’s gnosticism can enable us to understand the paranoid style of American politics.

In “Antichrist” (2009), the character played by Charlotte Gainsbourg says, “Nature is Satan’s church”; whereas in “Melancholia” (2011), the Kirsten Dunst character says to Charlotte Gainsbourg, “All I know is that life on earth is evil.” What is not gnostical in von Trier is the supplementary insistence that if life is evil, then there is no life elsewhere. This is the reason we should welcome the collision of the rogue planet Melancholia with Earth.

Courtesy of Laura Leslie, Christopher Dick and Isa Hackett

A purer version of the gnostical ideology of authenticity can found in the biggest grossing movie of all-time in America, James Cameron’s 2009 epic, “Avatar.” By 2154, earth’s resources have been used up and nature reduced to a filthy, poisoned husk. The corrupt and all-powerful RDA Corporation is mining for the appropriately named Unobtainium on the planet Pandora. This is home to the Na’vi — blue-skinned, beautiful, 10-foot-tall beings — who have an intimate connection with nature and who worship the mother goddess, Eywa. Jake, the broken, disabled ex-Marine eventually becomes his alien Na’vi avatar, melds with his true love Naytiri, and unifies with nature after defeating the Satanic human forces of corporate evil. He loses his human identity and becomes the alien, leaving behind him the dreadful homeland of Earth for the blessed alien land. The point is that authentic harmony with nature can only be achieved by throwing off the garment of earthly nature and becoming alien. Such is the basic fantasy of gnosticism.

Dick’s gnosticism also enables us to understand something of the paranoid style of American politics — and perhaps not just American politics. For example, Dick constantly comes back to the theme of Watergate and the rather odd idea that the removal of President Nixon is the reassertion of the true deity over the false idols of the cave. Namely, that the phenomenal world is a prison governed by corrupt, secretive and malevolent elites. There are too many political analogues to this view to list here. For example, think about the relentless rise of conspiracy theories, which has gone hand in hand with the vast, rhizomatic flourishing of the Internet. Think about the widespread idea — on the right and the left — that the United States is governed by secretive, all-powerful elites. These used to be identified as Ivy League educated WASPS or Freemasons or Jews and are now usually identified as former senior employees of Goldman Sachs.

If you think that there is a secret that can be known that they are hiding from us and that requires the formation of a small, secret sect to work against them, then you have entered into an essentially gnostical way of thinking. Politics here becomes the defense of purity against impure, inauthentic forces and the true leader has to be an authentic hero who can combat the forces of evil with an almost superhuman resolve: Mitt Romney, step this way.

The morality of gnosticism is also oddly relevant to our current situation. As Hans Jonas points out, possessors of gnosis set themselves apart from the great, soiled mass of humankind. The hatred of the world was also a contempt for worldly morality, and this leads to two equal, but opposed, ethical responses: asceticism and libertinage.

The ascetic infers from access to gnosis that the world is a toxic, contaminating machine with which one should have as little contact as possible. This is arguably consistent with the whole contemporary culture and cult of “detox,” which insists on purifying the body and soul against environmental, nutritional and sexual contact in order to find and safeguard the divine spark within. The awful truth of contemporary asceticism is powerfully played out in another film, Todd Haynes’s brilliant “Safe” (1995), in which the character played by Julianne Moore develops a total allergy to life. What is termed “environmental illness” leads her eventually into a self-help cult in the California desert, living alone in a hypoallergenic pod muttering to her image in the mirror, “I love myself,” and other mantras.

The flip side of the ascetic is the libertine: that is, the person whose access to gnosis implies both absolute freedom and absolute protection. One thinks of the “Do what thou wilt!” hermetic charlatanism of Aleister Crowley. But one also thinks — I have heard this story on countless occasions, often late at night — of the New York urban myth of the hugely wealthy finance guy who deliberately wanders drunk or stoned into oncoming traffic. He knows that he will be safe from harm. Because fate is on his side, he is therefore free to do whatever he “wilt.” Once you have access to the Secret, the forces of the universe align with your desires.

In the face of an alienating and poisonous world, one can either withdraw to a safe, allergic distance or plunge headlong into the viral whirlpool of humanity. Either way, I know I will be O.K.

Crazy as it doubtless must sound, I think that Dick’s gnosticism responds to a deep and essential anxiety of our late modern times. The irrepressible rise of a deterministic scientific worldview threatens to invade and overtake all those areas of human activity that we associate with literature, culture, history, religion and the rest.

Ask yourself: what does one do in the face of a monistic all-consuming naturalism? We can embrace it, hoping to wrest whatever shards of wonder and meaning we can from inquiries into the brain or the cosmos sold as brightly colored trade hardbacks, written by reputable, often prize-winning, scientists. Or we can reject scientific determinism by falling back into some version of dualism. That could mean embracing a spiritual or religious metaphysics of whatever confection, or — if one is still nostalgic for the disappointed modernism of, say, Kafka or Beckett — by falling back upon a lonely, alienated self in a heartless world of anomie.

But perhaps another way is open, one that is neither entirely naturalistic nor religious nor some redux of modernist miserabilism. If so, to quote Jonas, then “philosophy must find it out.” But that’s another story for another occasion.

Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. He is the author of many books, most recently, “Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology,” and is the moderator of this series.