The Man who Japed by Philip K. Dick
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A Freudian Future

Sigmund Freud published his Civilization and Its Discontents in 1930. 25 years later P. K. Dick wrote The Man Who Japed. Both cover the same ground: the impossible paradox of an independent mind in a society which both promotes it and suppress it. And it looks like Dick liked what Freud had to say. Freud was concerned with the remarkable tendency of people, who ostensibly value their freedom, to band together in order to restrict not only other people’s freedom but also their own. Dick has the same concern but in reverse, namely the non-rational impulse of an individual, who is highly successful in a rigid and moralistic society, to subvert it.

Dick’s protagonist, Allen, lives in a future-world which through technology is insulated from the effects of Nature. The Earth is entirely civilised, that is, covered by one vast city. All its needs are supplied by colonial producers of food and resources spread throughout the galaxy. Its government is a sort of socialist/capitalist/corporatist melange, the policies of which are primarily those of a 1950’s conservative America. Any behaviour outside the norms of strict Calvinism result in censure and possible exile to the colonies at the discretion of the rather Maoist local block committees.

Allen, unaccountably even to himself, has committed clandestinely the highest form of sacrilege, the obscene defacement of a statue of the founding father of this society of Moral Reclamation (Morec). Simultaneously, he is offered the very senior government post as head of all TeleMedia for Morec. He recognises his situation as one of neurotic contradiction, what Freud might diagnose as a battle between the primitive id and the culturally-determined superego for control over his ego.

In his new position of power, Allen is torn between what Freud calls Eros, the drive to form community with others, and Thanatos, the drive to destroy those who are not part of one’s community. For Allen, these latter include his former competitive business rivals. Caught between these two forces, Allen feels just how Freud predicted: guilty.

Allen in fact seeks assistance at the Resort, a psycho-analytical exception to the strict social oeuvre of mutual criticism dominant in the rest of Morec culture. The founder’s wife, a devotee of Jung as it happens, had insisted on making such an island of honest communication available as a sort of cultural safety valve. Employees of the Resort are forbidden from proselytising their psychiatric services but word inevitably leaks out to those who can afford the fees. And Allen of course can.

The employees of the Resort know something that Freud knew but that most of the other residents of Earth do not, namely that societies as well as individuals can become neurotic, pathologically imbalanced in their mechanisms for reconciling Eros and Thanatos, the collective id and super-ego. Societies cannot be aware of their guilt in the same way that individuals can; but they can demonstrate the same kinds of destructive responses to this guilt. Through the Resort, Allen gets to understand the literally cosmic import of his own feelings.

The revival of hyper-conservative Trumpian Republican culture in the US provides at least one good reason for returning to Dick as a prophet of the absurd. He’s probably a better social analyst than any professional sociologist. And he’s certainly more readable than Freud.

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