by Raffaele Alberto Ventura
From the magazine “Sentieri Selvaggi” — n. 5 (December 2019-February 2020), whom we thank for their availability — we reproduce this interesting contribution by Raffaele Alberto Ventura, author of the bookEveryone's war. Populism, terror and the crisis of liberal society (Ed. minimum fax).
The entire work of the American writer, Philip K. Dick. it is crossed by a "diffidence" towards reality and tells of characters who live in an illusory world. They range from paranoid over-interpretation to the consequent denial of material reality. Somehow Dick anticipated Matrix and the radical conspiracism of the times we live in.
One day in November 2015
One day in November 2015, passengers on the New York subway were thrown into a parallel universe. In the morning stupor, they found their carriages decorated with the symbols of the Third Reich.
They discovered to their amazement that, contrary to what the history books have been telling for over half a century, the United States of America never won World War II; to tell the truth, this illumination lasted for a few tenths of a second, just the time for their brain to finish assimilating the breakfast proteins: at which point the passengers realized that it was simply an advertising campaign.
A great launch for the Amazon series The Man in the High Castle, which tells what would have happened if the Axis forces had won the war.
Political fiction? Of course, unless the proteins evoked above were instead powerful hallucinogens, and that very brief underground vision of a Nazified America was a gash in space-time. Yes, Dick's "ad campaign", "series" and "novel" could be fragments of a removed reality: America has really been defeated, but we don't know it.
The genre of metaphysical paranoia
So here is the truth that re-emerges in hypnagogic form. On the other hand, for years the cultural industry has been sending us clear signals with films such as Matrix, V for Vendetta, Hunger GAMES, Divergent and last but not least Captain America: Winter Soldier, which precisely denounces a Nazi infiltration at the heart of the American system.
The monoculture of paranoia, the first economic sector of a world in an identity crisis. By now any American action blockbuster, from the series Mission: Impossible to the one dedicated to Jason Bourne, presents a conflict between the individual and a corrupt hierarchy that often coincides with some state organ, primarily the CIA.
Well, this is just the kind of metaphysical paranoia found in the novels of Philip K. Dick. The Man in the High Castleis no exception: at the heart of the plot set in a world where the Nazis have won is a mysterious "novel within a novel" (in the TV series it is a film) which recounts the victory of the United States in a similar way, although not always identical, to how things have gone in our world.
The fiction of experience
But this alternative history which in the novel should be fictional is not: what is fictional is the lived experience of the characters, their daily life, their reality, their "official story". The novel within the novel points them to a secret truth — the Nazis didn't really win the war — and becomes a symbol of the Resistance. At this point, Dick's readers can't help but wonder if what is true for the characters in the novel doesn't apply to them, in a specular way: perhaps it is our "official story" that is false...
The "matrix" of the Gnostics
Dick's entire oeuvre, at least since Time out of sixth from 1959 to the trilogy of Outer completed in 1982, it is characterized by a "diffidence" towards reality. The matrix of this worldview, as the American writer himself will make explicit in his Exegesis, is the ancient Gnostic theology: that is, a corpus of contemporary apocalyptic doctrines of primitive Christianity and strongly influenced by Platonism.
According to the Gnostics, the material world is nothing more than an illusion forged by an evil deity, called the Demiurge, who hides the real world. A real prison from which it is possible to escape only through an intellectual and spiritual effort: gnosis.
Men are therefore divided into three categories: the "pneumatics" who know the truth, the "psychics" who intuit it and the "hylics" who are completely bound to matter.
Gnosticism had experienced a real revival between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, witnessed for example by the interest of Carl Gustav Jung (an important influence of Dick) and rekindled in 1945 with the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Codes in Egypt: letters, treatises , apocryphal gospels and apocalypses as if it were raining.
Gnosticism, a key to understanding the present
In recent years, perhaps even since the days of They live of Carpenter, Gnosticism has invaded our cinematic imagination, and for this very reason it seems to be the appropriate paradigm for understanding certain recent forms of political radicalism.
The German philosopher Eric Voegelin was the first to identify in Gnosticism a key to understanding the present, and starting from the Fifties he undertook to find Gnostic echoes in all forms of totalitarian thought, which from his point of view included a ranged from Marxism to fascism.
The operation sometimes appears a bit crude but is nonetheless full of ideas. In the years of the Cold War in which the liberal intellectuals who had fled old Europe - from Hayek to Arendt - were constructing the concept of totalitarianism in the laboratory, Voegelin's contribution was to merge all the political utopias which, according to him, advocated the so-called "immanentization of eschaton”: the new Gnostics would be all those who want to redeem humanity and forcefully impose the realization of their projects of salvation.
Making immanent, historical, what instead should remain transcendent or at least private: the ultimate ends, theeschaton.
Voegelin liked to win easy and in order to put different traditions such as fascism and communism in the same bag, he had built up a rather vague idea of Gnosticism. Instead, reading Dick's work, at least two characteristics stand out that cannot be missing to define modern Gnosticism as it evolved after the XNUMXs and XNUMXs: the paranoid over-interpretation and the denial of material reality.
Carrying Voegelin to the extreme, these two characteristics seem suitable for defining the postmodern ideologies which took the place of fascism and communism after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and of which Dick was the involuntary prophet.
La overinterpretation paranoid
The first characteristic of Dickian Gnosticism is paranoid overinterpretation. Everything we experience could be a sign of a higher truth or a clue to the metaphysical conspiracy within which we live.
His novels are full of these clues and in theExegesis the author formulates the hypothesis of having managed to "intercept" information from the future transmitted backwards by means of tachyons, particles faster than light.
In this way Dick was able to describe in advance, as he himself points out, certain transformations of society and political life - in a similar way to the "Man in the high castle" who let himself be guided by oracles to write his novel within the novel of the I Ching.
Undoubtedly helped by his drug use, the author made an important contribution to the paranoid imagery described by Richard Hofstadter in 1963, which we find again in a new form in the XNUMXs in the series X-Files or in Richard Donner's film Conspiracy Theory.
The theological substratum
Dick was close to the Episcopal Church and this explains the presence in his work of certain "apocalyptic" themes drawn heavily from anti-papist journalism. Valis' trilogy makes explicit the theological subtext already present in the previous works.
The forces of evil are made to coincide with an entity called the Empire, a survival of the ancient Roman Empire which persecuted Christians and then, when it itself became a Christian making Rome the papal city, it persecuted the Gnostics, heretics and Protestants:
Rome was everywhere, in every age, an immeasurable giant that extended over an immense chronological span [...] latent reality of our current world. (Philip K. Dick, Free Radio Albemuth, Fanucci, Rome 1996).
The speech conspiracy theorist
This Empire coincides, in the contemporary conspiracy discourse, with a global shadow government whose power extends sprawlingly and of which it is difficult to identify an outside. Because, as Dick notes at the height of his paranoia:
To fight the Empire is to be infected by its madness. This is a paradox, whoever defeats a segment of the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus, imposing its form on its enemies. (Philip K. Dick, The trilogy of Outer, Fanucci, Rome 2006).
Richard Hofstadter denounced the obsession of the American right - at the time embodied by Senator McCarthy - with conspiracies, an obsession whose origin he identifies in the reaction of the American clergy to the Enlightenment.
Precisely from that ancient controversy of the late eighteenth century, and precisely from the pamphlet Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the religions and governments of Europe carried on in the Secret Meetings of Freemasons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies, we inherit the black legend of the “Bavarian Illuminati” which is still fashionable today.
The paranoid style
And not only on the right, as we have seen: in fact, "the paranoid style" seems to have extended in the meantime to wider segments of the population, in America and throughout the world.
The outcome is disturbing but perfectly Dickian: wanting to reject a "media" reality that appears to them as totally illusory, many withdraw into an even more absurd and contradictory system of beliefs. This leads at best to isolationism and an inability to act politically.
At worst, adherence to pseudo-radical ideologies that constitute a threat to civil peace and therefore a pretext for strengthening bureaucratic and police control over citizens' lives.
The denial of material reality
From paranoia derives a second characteristic of modern Gnosticism, namely the denial of material reality. In the Swastika on the sun, the Resistance against Nazism essentially takes the form of a refutation of the very existence of that regime.
Dick's novels often tell of characters who live in an illusory world: whether it is a staged (Time out of sixth), of a totalitarian system (The world that Jones created), of an underground nation (The penultimate truth), an alteration of perception by means of advanced technologies (total memory) or futuristic drugs (A dark scrutiny), or even a metaphysical veil as in the trilogy of Outer. nell 'Exegesis, Dick notes:
“Now these anomalies are happening to me.”
(Philip K. Dick, L'Esegesi, Fanucci, Rome 2015).
A scheme that has become popular
With the success of the film Matrix in 1999, which describes our world as a virtual reality in which humans live by the will of their alien masters, this narrative scheme has become a shared heritage of popular culture and perhaps even more: a political metaphor.
For example, Beppe Grillo and his followers use it to denounce the propaganda of the political "caste" in power and David Icke uses it (in Children of the Matrix) when it states that:
For thousands of years a race from another dimension [the famous reptilians] has kept humanity subjugated.
Philip K. Dick's fringe Gnosticism, with some considerable variation, has become in the space of a few decades a worldview that seduces the masses. All you need to do is wear magic glasses, as in They Live, to see the truth behind things…
Gnosticism as a political ideology
Paradoxically, Gnosticism is no longer, as in Voegelin, an expression of totalitarianism but a political ideology that feeds on the popular narrative on totalitarianism: the contemporary Gnostic is the one who sees everywhere signs that we live in a totalitarian society, to be fought by any means.
The protagonist of Free Radio Albemuth, Valis's first draft, put it this way:
I was involved in an ancient war, a war that had been waged relentlessly for two thousand years. Names had changed, as had faces, but opponents remained a permanent constant. The slave empire against those who fought for justice and truth.
This radical dualism has consequences that in Matrix they are obvious. If the reality that surrounds us is entirely false, then there is no longer any foothold for negotiation: it becomes legitimate to unleash a total war.
System matrix
Thus Neo, the protagonist of the film, convinced that he lives in a kind of video game populated by virtual beings, makes hundreds of innocent victims without batting an eye. His master Morpheus had indoctrinated him well, denouncing the complicity (and expendability) of the illicit servants of the system:
The Matrix is a system, Neo. And that system is our enemy. But when you're inside you look around and what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters…
the mental projections of the people we want to save. But until we save them, these people will be part of that system, and that makes them our enemies. You have to understand that most of them are not ready to be unplugged. So many of them are so addicted, so desperately dependent on the system, that they would fight to defend it.
The influence of Matrix it can explain the appearance of a new radical conspiracism which consists in absolutely doubting everything, or at least everything that is reported by the media. If once the conspiracy was limited to doubting the "official version" of the facts (sometimes rightly so, think of the not yet clarified history of the strategy of tension) today some radical neo-gnostics have convinced themselves that the great massacres are nothing more than mass on film scene.
I neognostics
The most famous is Alex Jones. From the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, in Connecticut, to the attacks in Paris and Brussels, it happens to read articles on the net (or more often to see videos) which explain that a certain person who mourns the death of his child is a actress already seen in some television series, or that every error or hoax broadcast by less and less competent journalists (and usually denied in a very short time) is actually an attempt to manipulate information and consciences.
The manipulation of public opinion, of course, is a real phenomenon, just like lobbyists, influencers, advertisers, corruptors and corrupt people are real; however, it appears evident that paranoid drifts do not lead to any effective reaction.
At heart Neo is nothing more than a terrorist who has been brainwashed, similar to the bombers who will hit New York two years later.
Even for the followers of Bin Laden, the material world represented by American capitalism is only an inverted image of the truth. Infidels (and equally expendable) are all those who grope in the dark.
In the minds of jidaists
It all adds up: according to Laurent Murawiec, author of The All of Jihad, Islamic terrorists would be heirs of Gnosticism; and all the more Dickian, if it is true that they take Captagon, a stimulant that increases the feeling of power and transforms them into perfect soldiers.
After all, what is their "Islamic State" if not a state that does not exist as a state, an apocalyptic vision to be realized even at the cost of destroying the world as we know it?
And what about all the informers who have escaped the control of the intelligence services, all the sudden radicalisations, the chaos of pseudo-official communiqués?
There is a whole line of studies attempting to apply Voegelinian models to jihadism, but none yet that show the amount of analogies between Dick and Daesh.
We clarify that Dick cannot be held entirely responsible for Matrix, David Icke and the heirs of Bin Laden, also because these different forms of contemporary Gnosticism are based on a rigid hierarchy of levels of reality - the real world and the false world - which simply does not exist in the work of the American writer.
Dick's Singularity
Ultimately the problem with Dick's characters, often toxic or paranoid, is precisely that they fail to distinguish the true from the false. Just like in the Swastika on the sun collectors of artifacts of the American tradition, deceived by counterfeiters.
Contrary to the terrorists who shoot into the crowd because they are stubbornly convinced that they are living inside an illusion, these characters experience the discomfort of not being able to make any definitive choice.
In this sense a layered film like a film is more Dickian eXistenZcompared to Matrix, with its reassuring dualism. Conspiracy theories and political millenarianisms owe their fortune precisely to the ability to provide (in full Gnostic tradition) a way out of the confusion.
The author of Outer, in this worthy heir of Kafka, was the witness of the advent of a new world in which the political-economic reality has become too complex and stratified to be comprehensible to the individual.
Beyond Kafka
A bureaucratized society which in the same years Guy Debord had defined as the "Society of Entertainment", also resorting to a crypto-gnostic metaphor. A society in which everything seems to happen elsewhere, behind, very far from its interfaces…
Over the centuries, science had managed to make nature knowable, freeing it from theological narratives - and in the meantime, it is the State and the Market that have developed to the point of becoming unknowable. Nature had been domesticated, civilization has become indomitable.
It was still enough for Kafka to resort to Jewish theology to represent the unknowability of institutions through the image of a hidden God.
But the world had changed again with the onset of the Cold War, becoming disarticulated in a world governance system based on new esoteric balances: not only is God hidden, but moreover the administration of our world has been abandoned to dark forces.
Philip K. Dick was among the first to understand that a radically new language was needed to talk about that car machinarum: and that language had to come from the ancient cosmologies, from which the productive system had finally become indistinguishable.
Raffaele Alberto Ventura lives in Paris where he collaborates with the Groupe d'études géopolitiques and the magazine Mind. In addition to his page Eschaton edit a column for Wired. His first book, underprivileged class theory (minimum fax 2017), was one of the most acclaimed debuts of recent years.
