Despite these quotes, the political message of The Man in the High Castle and other writings (particularly A Scanner Darkly) is clear: the loss of privacy is a major moral and political problem. Privacy protects how people make moral decisions and how they choose to live, and it’s one of the primary rights in the libertarian’s quiver. The opposite of libertarianism is totalitarianism, and totalitarianism is recognized by the absence of a right to privacy. A person has a right to privacy—in their thoughts, home, or actions—if they have the right to exclude others from those places and if others are under a duty of not to interfere with them. No right to exclude? No duty of noninterference? Then there is no right to privacy, and the results are the terrifying worlds of both The Man in the High Castle and another classic literary dystopia about the loss of privacy, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. So who’s a libertarian and why is privacy so important to them?
Libertarianism is based upon the idea that, as John Locke writes, you have a property in your person, which “nobody has any right to but” yourself. This, of course, is the right of self-ownership. Human beings, by virtue of the fact that they are not an android or a rock, possess certain rights just like they possess DNA or possess an arm or leg. From here, libertarianism splits off into right and left branches.
A conservative libertarian (we’ll call them “right libertarians,” or just the “right”) opposes the state because it’s coming for their God-given rights to their guns, property and their religion, while a liberal (or “left”) libertarian opposes it because they want to use drugs, choose (or not choose) to have an abortion, and not get drafted. They share at least two basic beliefs: first, the basis of liberty is self-ownership, and second, liberty requires privacy. Lockean self-ownership means that everybody owns themselves, and the state acts beyond its authority when it treats people as if it owns them. Because you own yourself, you have rights like the right to privacy that the government may never violate—even if violating your rights leads to the greater good. If the state violates these rights, you have no obligation to obey it. In fact, as Locke makes clear, you have an obligation to resist it.
Although they agree about self-ownership, right and left libertarians have very different ideas about property rights. Right libertarians justify world and resource ownership in terms of “finders, keepers” and voluntary transactions, while the left denies that self-ownership can ever translate into world ownership: either everyone owns the world, or no one does. This permits everyone to have a stake in all the world’s resources, and that means taking property from its current owners, such as large multinational corporations, through either pitchforks-and-torches-type force or legal force through something like eminent domain. So, unlike many right libertarians who fear governmental power but ignore corporate domination, left libertarians fear the government and corporations.
Dick falls into the latter category. In 1982, just two weeks before he died, Dick made this clear when he told biographer Gregg Rickman, “I have no respect for the free enterprise system because it is inequitable. . . . Everything that we left-wingers ever predicted about the free enterprise system has all come true” (Philip K. Dick: The Last Testament, p. 148). The system, Dick says, exists “for the welfare of the rich and the powerful at the expense of the poor and the powerless. If you are a human being and you are in danger of freezing to death, you had damned well better throw out this government [the Reagan Administration] one way or another because it will let you die” (pp. 149–150).
Dick’s Politics of Paranoia
Both right and left libertarians fear control, spying, manipulation, and limitation on choices, all of which are kept in check by a right to privacy. If you feel secure in your “persons, houses, papers, and effects” (that’s the Fourth Amendment speaking), then you probably have strong privacy rights. If you don’t feel secure, then you—like the oppressed groups in The Man in the High Castle—probably have weak or nonexistent privacy rights. Dick’s paranoia about his own privacy seeps into his conceptions of the state and of authority and therefore his characters. Dick was “terrified of Authority Figures like bosses and cops and teachers,” and this explains why he became his own boss as a freelance writer (Olander and Greenberg, p. 216).
Dick had an understandable fear of fascism, but also a potentially irrational fear of his own government. His paranoia is often the result of a belief that obvious authorities (the president and the FBI) and not so obvious authorities (corporations, sinister societies) are operating both in front of and behind the scenes. They jointly spy, exploit the weak, dehumanize the disadvantaged, and suppress dissent through charges of treason. Despite his paranoia, it is unlikely that the police in Dick’s nonfictional California were defending totalitarianism, but, like the Kempeitai and the SD in The Man in the High Castle, when they get too much power they cross the line and violate privacy rights. The Founding Fathers understood that a Constitution ought to prevent the police—and the government that employs and directs them—from crossing that line by establishing the Bill of Rights. From the looks of it, there’s no Bill of Rights protecting anyone in the Reich or the Pacific States.
One of the reasons for Dick’s insecurity about privacy, and a key event in his biography, was the infamous break-in of 1971. On assignment for Rolling Stone, Dick’s literary executor and biographer Paul Williams writes that in November of that year, Dick “unlocked the front door of his house in San Rafael, California, and turned on the living-room lights. His stereo was gone. The floor was covered with water and pieces of asbestos. The fireproof, 1,100-pound asbestos-and-steel file cabinet that protected his precious manuscripts had been blown apart by powerful explosives” (Only Apparently Real, p. 13). In a 1981 interview, Dick attributed the break-in to a privately organized and government sponsored “nation-wide para-military organization” that harasses self-described left-wingers like him as well as anti-nuclear protestors (Philip K. Dick: The Last Testament, p. 86). There’s nothing that makes a paranoid feel more secure than proving their fear of the government with facts, and the break-in did just that for Dick. He wrote about the breakdown of privacy in America in The Man in the High Castle, and then experienced it himself first-hand.
Dick’s paranoia about privacy is a recurring theme in his work. The plot of A Scanner Darkly (both the novel and movie) revolves around privacy and its loss in a technologically advanced culture. (As I type this, I pause to check my iPhone. I have a home security camera which gives me a view of the inside of my home and dog through an app. I’ve often wondered if one day I’ll tune in to my own home from my office and see myself sitting there, reading a book or watching TV, oblivious to the fact I am watching a version of myself. If you’ve read A Scanner Darkly or seen the movie, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Paranoia? Sure.)
How Do We Stop It from Happening Here?
Because they support a strong privacy right—again, the right to exclude the state from your body or home—libertarians (both kinds) are committed to limiting the power of police either through legislation or through the courts. One simple set of laws is already contained in the Bill of Rights. When added to other protections in the Bill, such as protections for speech and religious freedoms as well as private property, the courts have located a general privacy right that protects against state interferences with birth control, abortion, wiretapping, and property (unless that property is taken, pursuant to the Fifth Amendment, “for public use,” and “just compensation” is provided). This right means that you have the right to exclude the state from those protected areas, and that the state has a duty not to interfere with the exercise of your rights in those areas.
The violation of privacy in the Pacific States was made vividly clear in Season One, episode 6 when Juliana, after getting a job in the Trade Ministry, is horrified to find that her stepfather, Arnold, isn’t a bus driver: he heads up the domestic surveillance unit for the Japanese. The usual Phildickian paranoia turns from irrational fear to rational fact: the
police and their lackeys are eavesdropping, bugging phones, and keeping tabs on what appears to be hundreds of telephone conversations. The loss of privacy goes hand in hand with the loss of liberty.
Libertarians are committed to a smaller or minimal state that does not engage in this kind of activity. Such a state requires few rules, and it’s no coincidence that many contemporary libertarians (mostly on the right) believe that the rules and ideas contained in the Constitution are sufficient to guarantee a secure yet free state. But can the libertarian minimal state prevent a takeover by internal fascists? One of the most chilling implications of The Man in the High Castle is that the Nazis won by drawing out the domestic bullyboys (John Smith, for example) from the stained fabric of racist America and sucking them into either being traitors during the war, or ambitious pragmatists afterward. As they say, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Judging from their rapid and uncompromising rise to power after the war’s end, Smith and other American Nazis joined ’em without even trying to beat ’em.
The Pacific States: The Lesser of Evils?
What about the Japanese totalitarians? In the novel, Dick appears to softball Japanese fascism. According to Dick critic Darko Suvin, Dick’s assumption that a victorious Japanese fascism would be radically better than a German one is “the major political blunder” of The Man in the High Castle (Olander and Greenberg, p. 76). Suvin also writes that “Dick repeatedly hints that the atmosphere of the USA is the antithesis of that found in the PSA. This dichotomy is embodied in Mr. Tagomi. In the novel, Tagomi—realizing that there’s no balance between the powerful evil and the saintly weak—exclaims, “There is evil! It’s actual, like cement. Evil is not a view.” Dick frequently has the understanding that political people and their power (be it military, economic, or industrial) are evil in contrast to his heroes, who tend to be ordinary people like Juliana and Frank. Although he stretches the mold a bit because of his political position as Trade Minister, Tagomi is a prime example of this kind of evil-fighting hero.
According to critic Patricia Warrick, “the totalitarian spirit, implemented by techniques and machines, creates this evil. It is evil because it destroys the authentically human spirit” (p. 188). For Dick, Satan acts through the Fascists, and Tagomi refuses to partake in their evil by declining to sign the form that will send Frank to a certain death in Germany. Dick implies that the world would be just if it was ruled by a man like Tagomi. Why does Dick place so much faith in this character? The answer may lie in a traumatic episode from Dick’s biography
In an interview, Dick tells the story of seeing a World War II newsreel as a child which showed American soldiers killing a Japanese soldier with a flamethrower. The audience, Dick said, laughed and cheered. As the soldier was running and burning to death, Dick was “dazed with horror at the sight of the man on the screen and at the audience’s reaction” and thought, “something is terribly wrong” (Dream Makers, p. 154). Coupling this story with Tagomi’s moral compass, Dick takes sides in the novel on behalf of the Japanese. This favoring of the Japanese is thoroughly demolished in the TV show, where the Japanese have an uneasy alliance with the Reich that culminates in the murder of Juliana’s sister, and, even worse, in the Nazi-like execution of Frank’s sister and children. Whatever moral high ground Tagomi might possess as a Phildickian hero is smashed by the actions of his countrymen, and the Pacific States of America is no better than the Reich.
Why wouldn’t oppressed white people flee the PSA for the Neutral Zone, which resembles what John Locke, Thomas Hobbes and other philosophers call the “state of nature”? Maybe, as Hobbes argues, any kind of government—even an oppressive one—is better than the anarchy of the state of nature because at least your fellow citizens are intimidated by the same government you also fear and therefore provides security against one another. This is a scary idea: because the threats to your security by other governments or from your own neighbors are worse than the threats from the government itself, any government—even a really, really bad one—is better than no government at all. In that case, the loss of privacy is outweighed by the gain in security.
F is for Fascist and Fake, but not Fake Fascists
Dick loved to play with the idea of the fake, and The Man in the High Castle is full of fakes including Frank’s gun and the phony Sitting Bull artifact. But although the violence is real, the explanation for it is fake. Thanks to Tagomi’s mystical vision at the end of the story (it’s roughly the same in both novel and the show) and to Juliana’s encounter with Grasshopper novelist Hawthorne Abendsen (he’s the filmmaker in the series), we discover what it must have felt like for Charlton Heston’s character at the end of the original 1968 version of Planet of the Apes: we’re home, and we never left it.
What’s fake in The Man in the High Castle is the claim that the pre-Reich USA lost the war. Grasshopper, both film and book, is true: the United States won the war. Or, more accurately, part of it won: the absolute worst features of American culture—racism, violence, the violation of basic human rights—are the ones that triumph in the Reich government that ‘replaced’ the US government. The leaders themselves, aided by men like John Smith, always wanted a fascist, racially-pure USA, but knew it wouldn’t play in Peoria. So the US won, or could have won, but faked a loss: the important, powerful, and evil people threw the fight and collaborated with the losers to bring the losers’ ideology to the States from within.
The Germans aren’t the victors: the American Nazis are. Recall John Smith’s chilling portrayal of a loving suburban father cheerily wishing his neighbor Harry “Sieg Heil” on VA day—in Nazi America, Victory in America Day has replaced the Fourth of July—and then urging his thugs to torture a helpless prisoner until he dies. He supposedly fought for us, and now he’s running the show against us. He won.
Dick’s subtext is that the United State was already morally evil and capable of implementing political evil, but the takeover by Nazis would need to be pulled off as a trick or a fake because even the Americans wouldn’t have capitulated to the ‘enemy.’ America won—it’s right there in Grasshopper’s novel and newsreels—then fabricated a loss in order to ease the transition to the ideology many Americans, or at least the ones who run the government and the corporations, really believed in. Not only can it happen here, but I’ve got news for you: it already happened here.
In the alternative world of The Man in the High Castle, America fought against racist fascists (and won) but in doing so it fought against its own racism and military aggression—and lost. It fought against a version of itself as many wished it to be: racially pure and highly efficient, with no jazz or rock music and no gender equality. The Man in the High Castle is, according to Suvin, “the high point of Dick’s explicitly political anti-utopianism,” partially because it reveals the “affinities between German and American fascism, born of the same social classes of big speculators and small shopkeepers.” The alternative history depicted in the story is that of a minority view—fascism—that becomes the mainstream.
“Sunrise” and the Triumph of Evil
In “Sunrise,” Frank is in the custody of the Kempeitai and is tortured. He meets Randall—the resistance member Juliana met at the train station—and learns about the revolution. Frank wants no part of it. Randall says “Evil triumphs only when good men do nothing.” Frank screams. Randall’s words are inspired by a quote from the Anglo-Irish political writer, Edmund Burke, whose actual words were, “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” Burke was a conservative who disapproved of the French Revolution’s radical changes because they disrupt established social harmony (though he was more favorable to the American Revolution). Burke would probably have shrugged his shoulders at the Pacific States: revolution would be too costly with little chance of winning, and life’s better there than in the Neutral Zone or the Reich. In fact, that’s Frank’s take on revolution—until he’s tortured and released, of course. Then he becomes a revolutionary and a failed
assassin.
With a slight twist to Burke’s quote, Dick once said that “ethics may far more involve an abstention from evil than a commission of good. We tend to regard ethics and morality as motivations to do good, good works. It may be actually more identifiable authentically with a balking and a refusal . . . to do something, from some kind of innate perception that this is not done” (Philip K. Dick: In His Own Words, p. 144). This was the case with Tagomi, who refuses to do evil by refusing (in the novel) to authorize Frank’s deportation to Germany.
In The Man in the High Castle, too few people refused, too many people acted, and when they acted they violated people’s rights. But there’s little hope for totalitarianism if nobody shows up to the torch-lit midnight rallies. Libertarianism means less law and more liberty. It uses the basic idea of freedom to put constraints on the state when it tries to use law to promote the kind of racism, loss of privacy, and violence saluted by Obergruppenführer Smith’s “Sieg Heil!”
Dick’s fear—and it’s a fear shared by anyone who can grasp the humanitarian message of the story—is that here in the United States, maybe even in our own neighborhoods, someone is watching Obergruppenführer Smith with admiration and thinking the world would be a better place had Dick’s alternative history been the true one.
The alternative to the alternative history is reality. And that’s not science fiction at all.
6
The Self-Willed and Ignorant Law
MARC W. COLE
But we see law bending itself more or less towards this very thing; it resembles some self-willed and ignorant person, who allows no one to do anything contrary to what he orders, not to ask any questions about it, not even if, after all, something new turns out for someone which is better, contrary to the prescription which he himself has laid down.
The Man in the High Castle and Philosophy Page 6