In the height of his confusion, drowning in dissonance, but refusing to be fooled to fall into a cognitively biased assessment of his actions, Tagomi becomes the only character in The Man in the High Castle to be transported to a parallel universe—one in which his murderous actions never occurred because they never had to. Pushing through this cognitive agony allows Tagomi to experience a side of reality only otherwise accessed by The Man in the High Castle’s characters indirectly through spiritual practice (via the Oracle known as the I Ching). His experience might be Dick’s dramatic example of transcending the self to better understand our place in the world. This is the case even if that understanding means a farewell to his peace of mind and a warm welcome to cognitive and moral anguish.
While Tagomi is the character closest to experiencing a cognitive revolution and achieving any degree of true clarity, other characters tread through calamity into new modes of thinking as well. Juliana also goes through murderous and near-death experiences which propel her toward evidence revealing alternate realities.
Karl Jaspers, a German-Swiss philosopher and psychiatrist, called circumstances that elicit such illuminating responses limit situations. Like cognitive dissonance, limit situations are deeply confusing and bring extreme discomfort. These uncomfortable situations force us to go beyond our usual boundaries where we happily stew in cognitive limitations.
What happens when you see your sister gunned down by the Kempeitai or you fall in love with a woman you’ve pledged to kill? According to Jaspers, events like these are opportunities to mutiny against our cognitive misers and acquire a new mode of thinking—one that goes past simply changing our minds. Unfortunately, limit situations often push people beyond language, so their experiences can’t easily be written down or relayed to someone else.
To show the unnamable is an artistic goal of many, including Philip K. Dick. He weaves elaborate narratives of confusion, ambiguity, and deprivation. Both his characters and readers are purposefully perplexed and overwhelmed by the worlds that Dick describes, to a point where they often succumb to radical skepticism themselves and question the very foundations of their realities.
Dick often provides only a single, relief-like product to his readers by guiding his characters through confusion to perceptual epiphany. In The Man in the High Castle, the Oracle guides some characters through crisis with no personal growth, while others are brought spiritual and cognitive revelations—and mortal danger. Radical skeptics likely wouldn’t be surprised by the paradoxical nature of these outcomes. To them, it’s only logical that paradoxical challenges are best explained by the absurd.
Morality Is Easy Hard
In Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, challenging our perceptions is the role of spirituality and its scripture. The I Ching is revered as a window to collective wisdom. But, it doesn’t really give the characters the clarity they seek. At best, it offers a blurry glimpse of what might be happening behind the scenes.
Unlike in the TV show, readers of the novel, The Man in the High Castle, will find most major characters seeking the I Ching’s guidance to help cope with their confusion. Dick’s Tagomi, Juliana, and Frank all use it to justify their decisions. In the book, Juliana is so familiar with the I Ching that she alone is able to uncover the secret of the Man in the High Castle. After numerous consultations with the I Ching, Frank is able to create art that inspires Tagomi’s cognitive revolution. Even the book’s characters who don’t directly appeal to the I Ching are influenced by its direction. Robert Childan is finally able to make a non-conformist, deeply moral decision against his own material interest because he is given a lecture on the spiritual importance of Wu (and Frank’s I Ching-inspired jewelry is chock full of Wu).
The I Ching is supposedly able to offer insight far greater than any single brain could manage to produce. Like his characters, Dick sought direction out of the fog of his confusion in spirituality that relies on collective wisdom. It feels natural that his characters glimpse realities beyond their personal biases after they delve into ancient philosophies written millennia ago by countless people—it’s what their author did. As he was writing the novel, Dick consulted the I Ching to resolve major plotlines and conflicts in the story, making it an integral creative part of the work. In turn, the book’s Man in the High Castle writes his book (The Grasshopper Lies Heavy) by consulting the I Ching, making it an integral part of the characters’ story. In contrast, the only person using the I Ching in the show is Tagomi.
Such as We Would Like
Did Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle deprive the rest of its characters of the paradoxical revelations that the I Ching delivers in the book? Not necessarily. The subversive magic of the I Ching is brought to life through a battery of scattered newsreels, forming a videographic version of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. Through these films, the power to confuse characters and audiences remains firmly intact. Both versions of The Man in the High Castle drown everyone involved in limit situations and dissonance-inducing moral dilemmas, making both versions of The Man in the High Castle gloriously confusing alternate histories of each other.
The Man in the High Castle is full of signs that elicit meaningfulness—but rarely any immediate clarity. It’s a challenging stream of consciousness that by design can’t be bothered to be a standard cohesive whole with a satisfying conclusion. So the next time you sit down to read or watch The Man in the High Castle, let yourself confront your own perception of reality. And do what many of Dick’s characters do.
When confronted with confusion, force your brain out from its warm blanket of consistency and into the turbulent limits of cognitive dissonance and radical skepticism. Turn on Radio Free Albemuth. Tune in to the frequencies of the Vast Active Living Intelligence System. And drop out of the rut of your own reality with some Chew-Z.
19
What if Evil Had Won?
VERENA EHRNBERGER
What if things had played out differently during World War II? What if some crucial battles had been lost? What if evil had won? This question lies at the heart of The Man in the High Castle. The alternate universe Joe and Juliana live in, shows us a world where evil is such a common phenomenon that the people living with it on a daily basis tend not to question it anymore.
Juliana’s long-time boyfriend Frank says that he’s happy in their basement apartment; as Americans that’s the best housing he and Juliana can get, and he doesn’t know any different. Discrimination against people because of their race or religious beliefs is such a common thing for them that it is deeply ingrained in the culture they live in. And, although nobody talks about the concentration camps and killings, everybody knows that those killings take place.
When Joe is on his way through the country, he wonders about the weather and about something that looks like falling snow, until a policeman tells him that the “snow” is coming from the hospital: “Tuesdays they burn cripples, the terminally ill—drag on the state.” In this alternate universe, taking the lives of innocent people is just another order that people execute to a large extent without questioning it. Doing evil is a simple job that needs to get done.
This is what philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt calls the “the banality of evil” that she observed during the Eichmann trial (Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem) that followed World War II. Arendt was one of the most influential and most controversial political philosophers of her time. Like many others, she tried to make sense out of the horrible experiences of World War II. Her reporting of the trial of Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker won her fame and contempt (from some) at the same time.
In a world where everybody is doing the wrong thing, doing the right thing suddenly seems wrong. And, as Arendt realized, the problem doesn’t lie in the fact that those people are evil beings, but rather in the fact that they choose to look the other way.
No One Has the Right to Obey
Wickedness may be caused by absence of thought.
—HANNAH ARENDT
; SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann gained notorious fame after World War II for having organized the Holocaust. It was Eichmann’s task to execute SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich’s plan to solve “the Jewish question.” He was responsible for the mass deportations into concentration camps. During his trial in 1961 Eichmann stated again and again that he had just obeyed the orders of his superiors and that everything that he did was in accordance with the law of that time.
The universe of The Man in the High Castle shows a similar point of view. Asked about the concentration camps, Obergruppenführer Smith states: “It was necessary work. We did it.” Smith uses the same justifications for his deeds as Eichmann did. In a system, where everybody gets assigned his small part nobody really feels responsible for those big decisions about life and death anymore—especially not when those grave decisions are totally within the realms of the current legal order.
The society and the legal system of the Third Reich were organized in such a way that “the Führer’s words had the force of law” (as Eichmann explained, during his trial). It is a common legal principle that orders, to be disobeyed, must be evidently unlawful. Shockingly, this was really not the case with the orders Eichmann obeyed. The orders he received, the orders to take part in the system which killed millions of innocent people, were in total harmony with the laws of his time, and with the philosophy of the society he lived in. So, why should he have ever considered disobedience?
Obedience is also the concept the society in The Man in the High Castle is based on. “Those weren’t your orders,” Obergruppenführer Smith has to remind Joe, time and time again. “The law is the law,” says Chief Inspector Kido to Frank, when he captures him. “We are all subject to rules, and if we fail to live by them, the consequences are severe,” says Chief Inspector Kido to Juliana during her questioning.
Obedience has its advantages, at least at first sight. Living by strict rules that don’t allow any individual thinking can give a certain level of security. Life’s a lot easier if you don’t have to think for yourself. If you don’t have to decide according to your own moral judgement, you don’t have to bear the responsibility for the difficult decisions life demands of us, because all those decisions already have been made. It appears to make the world a much simpler and more predictable place. It makes the world more secure. And we all love security.
Obedience is the easy way out of the human dilemmas we all have to face. It’s easy because we don’t have to think (which requires intelligence), we don’t have to make judgments (which requires a moral code), we don’t have to make decisions (which requires self-confidence), we don’t have to stand by those decisions (which requires a strong will), we don’t have to defend our opinions against the will of a group (which requires courage) and we don’t have to bear the responsibility for our doings (which requires strength). Obedience is easy.
And, obedience is also convenient. It spares us all of the hard work we, as humans, have to do. Being human is complicated. And obedience conveniently scratches some difficult tasks from our lives’ to-do lists. This is what Arendt means when she says: “No one has the right to obey.” She calls it a “right” because obedience has lots of advantages for people who don’t want to put in the hard work to become an intellectually and emotionally fully developed human being. And it has just one big disadvantage that those people don’t really care about (especially when they are the ones profiting from the rules): the surrendering of personal freedom.
Obedience can give a lot of security. It just takes away our freedom. So, the concept of obedience is at the very core of the human condition. Because isn’t that what all our human struggles are ultimately about? In the end, our existence within any system we are born into—be it family, a social caste, or a whole society—takes place between those two poles, security and freedom. And every system comes with its own set of rules. Each and every one of us has to decide which rules to follow and which rules to break.
The Man in the High Castle depicts a system in which we can perfectly see those human needs for security and freedom play out. Although it is, of course, easier to trade security for freedom, if you belong to the ruling class of a society (like Kido and Smith), this trade is not always merely based on the merits of privilege alone; it is rather a trade that is based on the individual person’s need for security. After all, there are people who trade security for freedom in the inferior classes too (like Frank and Mr. Childan). The characters in The Man in the High Castle can’t, as we soon realize, be divided into categories like “ruling class” or “inferior class.” Rather they can be divided into people who value security more than freedom, and people who don’t.
There are people who dare to think on their own—irrespective of their social status: Trade Minister Tagomi, Nazi Rudolph Wegener and Juliana Crain. For those people freedom is a good worth losing their life over. And then there are people like Frank and Mr. Childan. They don’t mind living a limited life, as long as the oppressors leave them alone for the most part. That’s not because they believe in their oppressors’ ideologies, but because they prefer the security of obedience to the insecurity of freedom. For people who are so prone to want security, it takes a lot of injustice to drive them to the point where they finally react. For Frank, it takes the murder of his sister, nephew, and niece.
Freedom is definitely a good worth fighting for. But there are also those characters where we can’t really figure out what they are fighting for. Some might not so much be fighting for freedom, but rather against their status as an inferior class. And some might not be fighting for security, but rather for their privileged position. Mr. Childan, who needs security just as much as Frank, makes no secret of his fight against his inferior status. And Oberst-Gruppenführer Heydrich, who is risking a war, might be rather fighting for his privileged position (in contrast to Chief Inspector Kido who is risking his life to prevent one); neither freedom nor security seems to matter to Heydrich. Chief Inspector Kido seems to be fighting for security and is even willing to kill himself to prevent a war. Obergruppenführer Smith strongly believes in the Nazi ideology, and he values the security the system provides for him and his family, but is he fighting for his personal and professional security or is he rather fighting to stay a member of the ruling class?
Even if obedience might sometimes seem the easiest way out of trouble, there’s always a cost to obedience: We might just not notice it at first. “Don’t let them take your soul!” Frank’s cell mate shouts while being taken away. The soul, in this context, is a metaphor for our humanity. As humans we think and we feel. If we stop thinking and feeling in order to obey, we lose everything which makes us human. As Frank finds out when his family (who always obeyed) gets murdered, the security obedience provides, is only an illusion. And the cost of obedience might even be higher than the cost of fighting for freedom.
Is the world of The Man in the High Castle so much different from our own? We too have to follow the rules (go to work, spend money on consumer goods), or we have to live with the insecurities that the absence of a regular job and luxurious consumer goods lead to. In the much smaller context of family life we oftentimes find this conflict between security and freedom (if we’re unlucky enough to be born into a family that doesn’t respect personal freedom to a certain degree). In this case, we either live by our family’s rules, and are not able to decide our fate on our own, and thus risk a certain degree of obedience (that we’re more or less comfortable with, depending on the level of security we need); or we’re free but without the security of the system with whose rules we refuse to conform. The idea of obedience is deeply ingrained into our societies, too. Every system has its rules. The rules may vary. But the existence of certain rules is a given. And humankind is too varied, in its ways of being and thinking, to ever find rules all of us can agree upon.
What The Man in the High Castle is showing us mercilessly is that obeying the rules no matter what without ever thinking for ourselves is the on
e fatal error we as human beings can make. Because obedience takes away what makes us human: our ability to think, and our ability to feel—our rational and emotional intelligence—and, last but not least, our freedom. We, as humans, are thinking and feeling beings. If we let somebody take away our right to think and if we learn to dismiss our feelings in favour of a ruling system—how much humanity is there left in us, then?
The Banality of Evil
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
—HANNAH ARENDT
When Eichmann referred to his orders during his trial, the judges first believed that he was trying to talk himself out of his culpability, that he was trying to hide his true motives by using empty words and phrases to fool the judges, that he (like so many criminals before him) was pointing fingers to avoid responsibility. Hannah Arendt noticed that that was not the case. “Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all.” Her following realization forever changed the way we think about evil: “He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing.”
One of the most unsettling moments in The Man in the High Castle is when we get to know the family Smith on a deeper level. As a Nazi family, we expect them to be evil. But what we see is a loving mother, well-behaved children struggling with ordinary problems, and a genuinely caring husband and father—Obergruppenführer Smith; whom we took for an utterly heartless and cruel being, right up to that moment.
When Obergruppenführer Smith and his son Thomas talk about one of Thomas’s classmates, a boy who is a “proud non-conformist” who dares to challenge teachers in class, we learn a lot about the paradigms on which the Smith family’s life is based. Conformity, for them, is a greater good than freedom. Thomas has been taught to conform to society’s rules, to bring honor to his family and to his school, and to serve his country by being a high-performance citizen. For Obergruppenführer Smith individuality is synonymous with egoism, which is “the path to moral decay,” as he explains to his son Thomas. For him, the success of the group is more important than the fate of the individual. And who’s to say his take on society is worse than the next one?
The Man in the High Castle and Philosophy Page 20