Impermanent Press

Sample Selection from the Philip K. Dick Interview

in Philip K. Dick: The Dream Connection

Edited by D. Scott Apel

Key:
PKD: Philip K. Dick
DSA: D. Scott Apel
KCB: Kevin C. Briggs

DSA: We’ve spent quite a bit of time talking about one of your main themes, which is "What is reality?" I thought we might go into some of the other major themes that run like threads weaving through the fabric of your work. Since we’ve been talking about We Can Build You, this might be a good time to go into the one you yourself refer to as your "Grand Theme," the question "Who is really human, and who is merely masquerading as human?"

You seem to have established that the dividing line between the two categories is kindness: an act of kindness separates real humans from android humans. When we put this together with the results of your search for reality with the conclusion that love is the true reality, it seems to me almost as if you are echoing or perhaps rediscovering the early Christian concepts of karitas, or kindness, and agape, or love. Do you want to comment on this?

PKD: The way you put it, it certainly sounds as if we’re talking about the same thing. I had never really thought of it that way before. You’ve articulated it very concisely, and the articulation appeals to me. It sounds consistent and coherent...which for me is a big relief, when something of mine sounds consistent and coherent.

There was another quality that I felt distinguished the human being, that being the tendency to balk at things which were wrong. I developed quite a strong inner image of this happening.

Taking the worst possible social situation imaginable, which would be Nazi Germany, you can imagine, say, in those days, the ordinary police–not the SS police, the Gestapo, but the civil police–were given lists of Jewish people in their precincts to pick up, and they weren’t told what would be done with these Jewish people; they were just told to go get them and bring them to a central point. It’s very important to understand that these were not the Gestapo, who had a very good idea of what they were doing; these were the municipal police.

A Quaker, Milton Meyer, wrote a book in which he interviewed five different Germans who had either been Nazis or had lived under them–there was no clear distinction; it was a way of life during those years, and party membership was more of a technicality than anything else, because nothing else was permitted. Meyer talked to a man who had been a civil policeman, and the man described how he had been given a list of names of Jews to go and bring downtown... "downtown," like in all the old detective movies you see...that’s where the police always threaten to bring you: "downtown." And Meyer asked him, "Did you know what would be done to the Jews when they were brought there?" And he said, "No." And Meyer said, "Did you have any idea that they were to be taken to extermination camps and killed?" The policeman said, "It never entered my mind that there was anything more than relocation involved."

That made a big impression on me, and I got to thinking about this. Suppose you have a job as a civil servant and somebody hands you a list and says, "Go get these people and bring them downtown." Now the mechanical, the android, element takes place when the person simply takes the list, goes to the door of these people, and says, "Come with me." And then this same android quality shows up tragically–and incredibly–among the very victims, who come along docilely, who don’t say, "Well, what are they going to do downtown?"

Meyer said it was quite different than what we had been told in most cases, where the Gestapo supposedly bashes down the door in the middle of the night and grabs them and flings them in the backs of trucks, and kicks and beats and humiliates them. It was more a procedural thing where the local constabulary would knock politely and would say, "Would you get your possessions and come with me."

The idea occurred to me that the human element would come in where the policeman would say, "Wait a minute. I want to know what you’re going to do with these people." I got this idea of balking; this very vivid picture of a human being suddenly stopping in his tracks, just literally physically stopping, and turning around, and then I had a vivid image of this person saying, "No, I won’t do this. I won’t go get these people. I don’t really know why I won’t get them, because I don’t know what’s going to happen to them...maybe that’s why I won’t go get them." Or the victim saying, "No, I won’t come with you." This is exactly what did not happen. Except for the uprising of the Warsaw ghetto, the Jewish people came along. Meyer discovered this, too: everybody just simply did what they were told.

So I got this vivid picture of the human element...somebody, anywhere along the line, balking. Some secretary, for instance, who has to type up the list. All of a sudden she could say to herself, "No, I’m going to leave a name out...or I’m going to leave two names out...or I’m going to give the addresses wrong," or something like that. I got to thinking about this as one of the fundamental constituents of the human being. W. H. Auden put it this way: "There is some shit up with which I will not put." But that requires that you know it’s shit you’re putting up with, whether it’s some humiliating thing or some hostile thing, or some degrading or unjust thing. If you know that these people are going to be murdered and you perform your duty, you round them up, then you are a clear collaborator and conspirator in murder. A court would agree. And you are as guilty as anybody else along the line.

The point is that all five of the people that Meyer talked to really didn’t know, and all that really would have been required would have been some balking along the line by people here and there, and the structure would have begun to become unglued.

DSA: This balking, then, is more than just a sense of guilt, correct? It would involve taking action on that moral decision that something is wrong.

PKD: Right. Actually, I got the idea clearly from a book written by Martin Buber’s wife, who was in an extermination camp. There were Jehovah’s Witnesses there; they’re taught to "obey Caesar," but not salute the flag, and so on, and that’s how they wound up in the camps: they would not accept the national political authority. Since allegiance is directly to God, they wound up in the camps with the Jews, the Gypsies and the Communists, marked for extermination. At the same time, they were taught to "obey Caesar" whenever Caesar’s edict did not conflict directly with God’s. And typing up lists of people who were to be gassed that day did not directly conflict with the Bible. So Buber’s wife would see these Jehovah’s Witnesses carrying lists of people who were to be taken from their bunkers and exterminated, and she’d say, "Why don’t you just lose the list?" And they’d answer, "Oh, no, we couldn’t lose the list–we were told to take it to Officer So-and-so." She’d say, "All right; I agree that Officer So-and-so is expecting a list, and if you don’t show up with a list you’ll be immediately killed. But you know those people are going to be killed. Couldn’t you leave a name off?" And they’d say, "No, we were told to type up twenty names today, so we put on twenty names."

And I got to thinking that this is the essence of the unhuman. That is it, right there. Frau Buber had put her finger on the core of what is not human. These Jehovah’s Witnesses knew the situation; they knew that they and other people were going to be gassed. And yet they were typing lists, and emptying wastebaskets, whatever, as long as it didn’t break some damn ordinance in the Bible like "Thou shalt not salute the flag." They’d go to their deaths rather than salute the flag, and yet they’d type up and carry lists of people who were to be exterminated!

DSA: Do you think they would have left their own names off the list?

PKD: No. I really don’t. I think we’re talking about the android which has passed over into complete insanity.

This raises the other issue of the relationship between being human and being sane, and requires us to define sanity. There is really something insane about this behavior. The android–and of course, we’re not really speaking about "androids" in the strict scientific sense of "a human being created in a laboratory"; we’re talking about a form of unhuman behavior, with an element of pathology.

DSA: We’re using "android" specifically as you use the term in your novels: a parable of a human; a pseudo-human, or a "Xerox copy"; a person that has all the outward appearances of a human being, but is lacking some or all of the psychic components that distinguish humankind from animals or machines.

PKD: Right. Exactly.

KCB: Gurdjieff would call them "sleepwalkers."

PKD: Yes. One of the things I’ve noticed is that many people equate insanity with extravagant behavior–shouting, impassioned violence, and so on. But if something is done very calmly and dispassionately, this is rational. "Rational" and "dispassionate" are somehow synonymous, and a person who speaks in a calm, modulated voice is, ipso facto, a rational person. This is a typical Anglo-Saxon fallacy; you won’t find this confusion in Greece or Italy or Spain.

This is beautifully illustrated by the Gestapo. Himmler once delivered a very important speech, a major policy speech, to the Gestapo and SS, cautioning them that they must never enjoy the death of the Jews in the camps. They must never get emotionally excited by it, but must view it all calmly and without feeling. What Himmler was really saying was this all must be done as if it were rational: scientifically, not as the result of hate or passion. Therefore, I’m sure that to the people who did it, it seemed a rational thing they were doing. But they were making the same error. It’s not sane at all. If you remember the film Zorba the Greek, there was a great deal of behavior which, from the conventional standpoint, would be called pathological: people dancing around crazily, swilling wine, breaking things. The book was even more that way: he cut the widow’s head off, for instance. It was all extravagant, grotesque, hysterical, bombastic–it was not crazy. Being crazy very commonly can be typing up a list of names and turning them over to the officer at the end of the hall. And this can be even more crazy because it is done in such a dispassionate way. This is what first led me to the thought of the machine-like quality of pathology and of the "inhuman." What’s lacking is a sense of perspective, a sense of proportion. If you pick up your instructions that morning when you go to work and it says "Twenty people will be gassed today," and this is typed out, and it’s all spelled right, and it’s on the right order form, and this seems fine to you, then what we have here is not just an insidious pathology, but almost, in a way, the very heart of true pathology. What we have here is a lack of an emotional grasping of a situation. We have here a purely mechanical mind; a metal sphere rotating without any contact with the earth or other humans.

I remember one time I went down to the Department of Motor Vehicles to renew my license. This is always very traumatic for me, because I don’t want to take the driving test. I know what I’ll do when I take the driving test. I know how many people I’ll run over. So I must pass the written test so I don’t have to take the driving test, and I get very frightened by the written test. You can make five errors and still pass. So I went up to the girl with my answers, and I handed the sheet to her, and she was grading it, and I said to her, "If I do not pass this test, I am going to kill myself." And she turned absolutely ashen, and she said, "Oh, no, you’ve passed; I swear to God you’ve passed. Look, look here–two mistakes–you’ve passed." And I thought: Here’s a real human being.

Another time I went into the bank carrying the largest sum of money that I’d ever had in my possession at one time: $7,800. I said to the clerk, "Every cent of this money has to go to the IRS. What do you think of that?" And she didn’t say a goddamn thing. I thought to myself, I see a correlation between insanity, lack of a sense of proportion, and something that we encounter very often in the bureaucratic mind, which processes people as things.

Copyright © 1977, 1999, by D. Scott Apel. All rights reserved. No part of this document, in any part or in whole, may be reproduced, transmitted or utilized, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without express permission in writing from the publisher, except for brief quotations in critical articles, books or reviews.