The conflict stems from the opposition between nature and nurture, and it is the successful combination of both that leads to a successful existence. Since the balance between them is hard to attain, desire is presented by those in the position of power as natural, because without it there is no direction for the economy and its subjects to follow. Lefebvre observes that desire is equipped with “motivations that give meaning to the desired object and to desire itself” (p. 302).
Desire is essential in understanding the good life, as it is desirable, but not necessary. This refers to the idea of the good life, not the ideal good life. It is my desire that fuels the other’s desire. By wanting and obtaining, I am instilling the desire to want and obtain in others, who decide to perform these actions if only through mimicry. This creates a social order that is so appealing to individuals like Smith and Frink.
The Case of John Smith
During the VA Day—Victory over America Day—Americans are supposed to celebrate their defeat by the Third Reich on their home soil. The holiday is more important than the Fourth of July. It takes place on the eighteenth of September. Its two main elements are: a traditional dinner of turkey and apple pie, and an address by the Führer, Adolf Hitler himself.
It is also during this holiday that societal aspirations and illusions are most visible. As Joe Blake arrives to the party organized by John Smith’s family, he is welcomed by Smith’s seemingly perfect son, two daughters and wife, Helen. An exemplary citizen of the Third Reich, Smith of course lives in the suburbs. His neighbors are also exemplary, as they can be seen with their whole families, preparing flags and greeting each other with the traditional “Sieg Heil!”, smiling throughout the day. That’s also the way the family greets Joe at the door.
Soon, Joe is in the backyard, playing baseball with Smith’s son. Known as “American pastime,” the activity is referred to as “lazy” by Smith himself, who prefers track or soccer—typically European sports. That could signify that through his rejection of a typically American sport the Obergruppenführer wants to be more German than the Germans themselves, if it were not for the fact that he does not condemn turkey, apple pie, or whiskey, which in fact are quintessentially American. It is therefore impossible to qualify him as anti-American, and he has a typically American vision of the good life.
As Smith already has a perfect house and a perfect family, his main occupation as a family man is sustaining both. In the case of the latter he does so by constantly presenting himself as respectful and righteous to his kids, inspiring in them the desire for similar virtues. In the house there are certain rules that need to be obeyed: children should not run around the house, they must help their mother with the chores, and so on. Since an early age his daughters are preparing for the role of housewives—at one point Smith calls it “the most important job in the Reich”—as they put cutlery at the dinner table. Everything must be in order, even during a simple family breakfast. The family eats all of its meals together and there should be no distractions.
When Thomas wants to prepare for a test at the table, he must get his father’s permission to do so. Everything must be organized and done the right way, which in this case means just how Smith wants it. The problem with the rules is that they are not his, nor of his making, but are his way of mimicking how things are done in the Third Reich. Everyone should act without hesitation, following orders from higher authorities—in this case, the kids should listen to their father, who is an authority figure and simply knows best.
When Thomas talks to Smith about a boy at school that is questioning the current order, the Obergruppenführer teaches his son that the best way to approach such individuals is to simply ignore them, as they will eventually fail. The boy’s name is Randolph and he does not respect the teachers. Thomas wants to prove him wrong not by beating him up, as most boys his age would do, but by getting the highest score in class. While it is doubtful that Randolph will be impressed by someone doing well at school, as he clearly rejects the validity of education, Thomas thinks that this is the only way to show his superiority. When asked by his father why he wants to do well at school, Thomas answers: “To make my family proud. To bring honor to my school. To serve my country.”
Smith is naturally proud of his son and declares that his goals will be fulfilled because he wants to be a “useful member of society,” while Randolph is egotistical, focused solely on himself. He is instilling within Thomas the same cruel optimism that drives him. The boy is studying and playing sports not because he enjoys them, but because both will benefit him in the long run. This is the exact same reason behind his father’s actions. Instead of taking a day off during the national holiday and being the family man he so eagerly wants to be, Smith uses VA Day to capture a conspirator.
Smith’s occupation does not allow him to act otherwise. As the Obergruppenführer, his obligation is to defend and preserve the community in which he lives. This means that he is constantly under pressure to find cracks in the system, and the people responsible for them. Throughout the series he either kills or orders the killing of multiple individuals. His actions are in no way ethical, unlike the image of himself he tries to project on his children. He might soon be oppressed by the same system that he is trying to sustain, as shown by the dilemma regarding his son.
The family doctor reveals to Smith that Thomas has Dejerine-Roussy syndrome and will be paralyzed within a year. It is only thanks to the doctor’s good will that the authorities have not yet learned about Thomas’s disease. Even though his function is to eliminate such behavior as the doctor’s failing to report the case, Smith is glad that the doctor leaves the information to himself. Firm believers in eugenics, Nazis kill all the diseased and crippled. During a conversation with Smith Helen calls it “a blessing,” as the sick do not have to suffer anymore. Smith does not reveal to her that her son, just like his brother, is also sick. He was of the same opinion as Helen until the sickness attacked Thomas.
When the workings of the system turn out to no longer be in his favor, and he is directly under threat from the system he has so eagerly protected, Smith unknowingly experiences the cruelty of his optimism. If he wants to keep his son alive, he must act against the system and expose the idea of eugenics as simply unjust. Furthermore, if one element of the system is wrong, he may soon learn that other parts of it are flawed as well.
Helen, his wife, is already aware of that, as she needs to take pills in order to keep up the façade of a perfect housewife. When she tells Joe Blake that one day he could also have “this”—referring to a house in the suburbs and a family—she does so not because she believes in the good life, nor because she’s truly happy, but because that behavior, as well as the appreciation of what she has, is expected of her. Berlant’s view that “cruel optimism is the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object” (p. 23) applies to the case of John and Helen Smith.
Helen’s need for pills implies that she is not happy, even though she has attained the object of her desire. She is expected to feel accomplished and she attributes her inability to feel this way to herself, not to the artificiality of the ideal that she and her husband are chasing. Their attachment to the good life in the Greater Nazi Reich is a perfect example of cruel optimism.
The Case of Frank Frink
Berlant observes that “in a relation of cruel optimism our activity is revealed as a vehicle for attaining a kind of passivity, as evidence of the desire to find forms in relation to which we sustain a coasting sentience, in response to being too alive” (p. 43). This quote might as well describe Frank Frink’s attitude.
As Juliana exposes Frank to a movie made by the Man in the High Castle, his first reaction is to destroy it. When Juliana wants to take a stand and act, he also tries to convince her to do otherwise. Frink’s vision of the good life is to leave, get married with Juliana and have kids. His actions are actually directed at passivity—his main goal is to settle and stay put. His motivations corre
spond with the idea of cruel optimism, as he is solely concerned with the future. His idea of the good life is connected to the discovery of television, which allows for such (in)action.
While Frink is rarely seen watching television, he is under the direct influence of its “anti-nomadic” effects. Jonathan Crary claims that it is because of television that “individuals are fixed in place, partitioned from one another, and emptied of political effectiveness” (24/7, p. 81). Television promotes idleness, simultaneously creating the impression that something’s happening, while the individual does not even leave his house. Even when Frank becomes the direct subject of politics, he still wants to get away instead of defending himself. His sister is killed, his fiancée is on the run from the Kempeitai (Japanese military police), yet the only solution he can come up with is to hide in the Neutral Zone. When Juliana’s sister dies, Frank coldly underlines the fact that she was actually her half-sister and that they were supposed to stay together and have a family, not get involved in a fight for freedom. His vision of the good life is threatened, so he does everything possible to convince others—and in consequence himself—that happiness under the Japanese regime is still possible. Frank is convinced of his political insignificance, even after he comes very close to making a difference by shooting the Japanese prince.
When describing after-war reality of the 1950s, Crary writes that it was television that “quickly redefined what constituted membership in society. Even the pretense of valuing education and civic participation dwindled, as citizenship was supplanted by viewership” (p. 79). This passivity is exactly what Frank is aspiring to, as whenever Juliana wants to leave, his first action is to stop her rather than join her in a battle for something she so eagerly believes in. It is only when Frank is personally touched by the system—his sister and her two children are killed by the Japanese—that he wants to act. Still, he is stopped by his immediate environment, personified by his friend Ed McCarthy, who tries to convince Frank that: “you take it or you get yourself killed.”
Frank does not listen and goes out, but still finds himself unable to assassinate the Japanese prince. Before, when he is locked in a cell next to a member of the Resistance, at some point during their conversation the man declares: “takes a lot of effort, not being free,” perfectly summing up Frank’s inaction. Instead of motivating Frank, the words have their effect only to a point—Frank does not act and is fixated on the idea of leaving with Juliana for the Neutral Zone.
Juliana’s different: moved by her sister’s courage, she also wants to do something brave. Frank is holding her down, and so is her mother, who’s even more hypocritical that Frank. Anne Crain Walker constantly criticizes the Japanese and their culture, but cannot stop watching Japanese television, and at one moment is actually caught enjoying a sumo bout. Her husband was killed in the war, so obviously she has more than her fair share of reasons to hate the oppressors, yet she’s reluctant to admit that there are certain aspects of Japanese culture that she clearly enjoys. Plus she is still a housewife, stuck in front of the TV, so she is allowed to do the same thing she would do in a country not occupied by the Japanese.
That model of life is something Frank clearly aspires to. He wants to be caught up in the rhythm of work and home, factory and family, not allowing himself the freedom to do something out of the norm. Even when he’s able to make a difference, he’s quick to run away before having an actual impact on reality. That is because the idea of the good life is too appealing to simply let go of and the cruel optimism instilled by this idea ultimately leads to his unhappiness.
The False Promise
Both characters aspire to what they’re supposed to, but while Smith is more like Juliana Crane in his awareness of the significance of the historical moment, Frink constantly looks for a way to avoid it. Even after being exposed to the films made by the Man in the High Castle, regardless of believing them, Frink wants to destroy them and just run away. Juliana wants to act, while her fiancé just wants to hide and lead what he assumes is a normal life, marry her and have children.
This is the life that Smith aspired to and succeeded in reaching, yet he fails to enjoy it, because he constantly needs to defend the current order. While he’s right that it is under threat, Smith fails to allow himself just a moment to enjoy the fruits of his labor. His wife is clearly stressed, while the children do their best in keeping up appearances—something they have learned from both of their parents. Is this what Frink would want? Doubtful, just us it is doubtful that Smith envisioned his life to be that way.
Both of them are perfect case studies of Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism,” as their attachments failed to make good on their promise of the good life.
5
In the Neutral Zone, A Libertarian’s Home Is Their (High) Castle
M. BLAKE WILSON
The greatest menace in the twentieth century is the totalitarian state. It can take many forms: left-wing fascism, psychological movements, religious movements, drug rehabilitation places, powerful people, manipulative people; or it can be in a relationship with someone who is more powerful than you psychologically.
—PHILIP K. DICK in Charles Platt, Dream Makers, p. 150.
Philip K. Dick exorcised many psychological demons through his work—those involving the appearance-reality distinction, the difference between madness and sanity, and the fractioning of the self—but a coherent and clear political stance does not emerge.
However, by combining Dick’s paranoia with the moral positions he takes in The Man in the High Castle and other works, it’s possible to decipher what kind of political mind is at work behind the idea that the United States lost World War II. Throughout these works, Dick takes a strong stance about self-ownership and privacy rights. These rights destabilize the powerful—Nazis, in particular—and strengthen the powerless and humble characters, like Juliana and Frank, who act as Dick’s heroes. Like Juliana, in her staggering journey to the High Castle in order to topple fascism, we are also morally obligated to prevent her fictional world from becoming our reality. Libertarianism—the moral and political philosophy that stands for more rights and less government—is the best way to fulfill that obligation, and the desire for liberty is what motivates these characters as they struggle against totalitarianism.
To the High Castle
Unlike Ayn Rand, whose fiction repeatedly slams readers over the head with its political standpoint (as in Atlas Shrugged and its defense of free-market capitalism), Dick’s political views in High Castle are more subtle. Some of those views, however, are obvious. For starters, it’s evident that High Castle is anti-fascist. Nazis are bad. Don’t be like them. Actually, if you’re a Nazi, life in The High Castle looks pretty good. But for the rest of us, life looks pretty lousy, and that’s because you have few or no rights.
Totalitarianism is bad because it violates rights, and one of the rights it violates more than others is the right to privacy. This right protects many of the other rights that totalitarian governments want to take away: your decisions about self-determination, how you use your property, whether you have children and what kinds of sex you have, and with whom. Dick himself was wary—no, he was downright terrified—of power and authority in general: bosses, teachers, and, most importantly, the police and the governments they defend.
Libertarians share similar fears. Like Dick, they fear the loss of privacy, the punishment of so-called deviant or esoteric lifestyles, and the imposition of state-imposed racism. They also fear the military, particularly when it gains the upper hand over other institutions. These fears, of course, are the realities of those persecuted by the Nazi and Imperial Japanese elites in The Man in the High Castle.
From the 1950s through to his death in 1982—The Man in the High Castle was published in 1962—Dick believed he was living in an increasingly totalitarian United States, an evil empire marked by political corruption (Watergate, the Pentagon Papers), the decimation of civil rights (privacy in particular), and violence
(such as state violence in the form of police brutality and war, and also crime or street violence). So, Dick’s alternative to the fascism of The Man in the High Castle is not “the real world” where Dick lived: that real world was, for Dick, the inspiration for the novel.
During the Eisenhower era Dick feared that there was a “great movement toward a totalitarian state,” where “anybody who is a dissenter is labeled as a traitor” (Philip K. Dick: In His Own Words, p. 121). In this sense, The Man in the High Castle’s world is just a fictionalized version of the world Dick inhabited, where all it takes is selective amnesia about rights—and privacy rights in particular—to turn the world of The Man in the High Castle into political reality.
Give Me Libertarianism or Give Me . . .
As D.E. Wittkower writes in Philip K. Dick and Philosophy, “it is not so surprising that Dick will turn out to be a socialpolitical philosopher rather than an epistemologist or metaphysician. His questions are still about value and how we should live” (p. 107). Questions about value and how we live are ethical questions, while epistemologists deal with questions about truth and knowledge (how can I claim to know something?) and metaphysicians field questions about being and reality (what kinds of things exist? What is real?). The Man in the High Castle is about who has political power, how can that power be used (control, benevolence, violence), and what can be done when the power is abused. It indeed deals with ethics, but also with politics and law which are subsets of ethics.
Dick’s own political thinking—revealed primarily through interviews—tends to be naive and self-contradictory. In an interview shortly before his death, Dick effused that he was “anti-capitalist” yet “not a Marxist,” that “Mussolini was a very, very great man,” and that the “paradigm of evil” is the “totalitarian state.” Although Mao was one of the greatest totalitarian leaders in the modern world, Dick admitted he cried when “that great man” died, while paradoxically considering himself an expert in “opposing authority” (Philip K. Dick: In His Own Words, pp. 119–121, 142, and Philip K. Dick: The Last Testament, p. 89).
The Man in the High Castle and Philosophy Page 5