It's the Dicks Who Are Infected and Deranged
In this essay, I develop and compare two diametric
views. One says that staying silent in
the face of an empire’s evil infects and deranges you, while the other claims the
opposite, namely, that if you speak up, you will be infected. Plenty of polemics to follow!
Launchpad quote
To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement--Philip K. Dick
The above quote could mean various things. A common interpretation is that lust for
power is seductive and leads to debauchery.
In any case, the quote could be said to have a deeper meaning, one that calls
for complacency. Why fight the Empire, if
you will become “infected?” Infection implies
an unpleasant state or worse, such as being crippled or disfigured. Who wants that? When you add the hard-hitting “derangement”--a
disturbed, broken state of mind--the message becomes unequivocal.
The Dick View
By taking the quote out of whatever original context was provided
by the writer, I express how most of us confront and interact with it. Among the scattery, chattery blizzards of
social media, Dick’s meme-worthy statement has been left to wander; and from that
drifting perch of isolated prominence, it boldly proclaims: Avoid a fight with the empire on price
of your soul!
I will call this the Dick View. The people who follow it, then, are eponymous
Dicks.
Einstein isn’t a Dick, chooses to fight instead
Let’s compare the Dick view to something said by Albert
Einstein. When the great thinker left
Europe to escape fascism, he found himself appalled by a similar abomination in
the United States; namely, the undeniable, entrenched, intergenerational
scourge of vast, violent social and economic denigration, subjugation and
containment of Black people. That’s an
unwieldly sentence, for sure, and yet it hardly touches on the magnitude of
racism in the USA, a scourge whose history includes centuries of slavery going back
to 1619 [1].
In Einstein’s time, for instance, segregation was legal and ‘Jim
Crow’ laws effectively negated Black people’s fundamental rights. Lynchings occurred with impunity. Bullying was the norm, such as common, public use
of the N-word. The fact that White
people shouldn’t even say the word today indicates the ongoing, unspoken sickness which festers in my country.
Liberated from Nazism in 1933, but then increasingly
fraught, Einstein wrote: “The more I feel an America, the more this situation pains
me. I can escape the feelings of
complicity in it only by speaking out.”
Einstein, then, isn’t a Dick. He joined the NAACP and in other various ways
engaged in candid, vocal criticism. During
a commencement speech at Lincoln University, he orated:
The separation of the races is not a disease of the colored people, but a disease of the white people. I do not intend to be quiet about it [2].
The Einstein View
We can extract from the above an obverse to the Dicks. I’ll call it the Einstein view: If you don’t fight imperial evil, your
silence infects and deranges you.
By “silence” I reference someone in Einstein’s position who,
instead of speaking out to alleviate the “pain” from their “feelings of
complicity,” chooses to say and do nothing. To just go along.
This sort of silence is itself a form of complicity. Moreover, as I argue below, it is the first
step in a gravitational pull of darkness, which works to suck the slipping person, the ‘go-along,’ deeper into the support of imperial evil.
An example is “the separation of the races,” which
Einstein calls “a disease of the white people.”
I argue, as well, that the Einstein view aligns with a
viable theory of societal dynamics, which I call complicitous gravitation. In the summary section, I conclude what all
of us should already know: it is ethical
to speak out. To 'speak out' in this context means to find some way to effectively protest even if, due to perilous circumstance,
it has to be more subtle than vocal.
The institutionalized racism in the USA is the central case
study. It is not, however, the only grave
iniquity at the judgement table. The
arguments below apply more generally, mutatis mutandis, to various
scenarios of silence and protest in regard to Big Lies and police-state
enforcement.
The Theory of Complicitous Gravitation (TCG)
Silence, as well as being a state of complicity, exerts a steady,
magnetic effect, which tends to suck a person into a deceitful state that fractures the psyche. I call this phenomenon complicitous gravitation.
People who choose silence are prone to slip deeper into an empire’s
grip, impelled by dual inducements. In the final stage, worship and obedience are
maximal. As a result, the mind becomes infected and deranged. Hail, Caesar!
Dual inducements of TCG
Temptation and pain-avoidance combine to pull people deeper into partnership
with evil. In short, the carrot and the
stick.
1. The carrot is two-pronged: (a) a sense of relief that the system won’t
punish you for speaking out and (b) an admission ticket, namely, entry into the
bazaar of in-group opportunism.
The opportunity gained could be something relatively small,
such as a neighborhood summer job. Or it could be much more: a chance at government work, business deals or
power at the community, state or national level. For a woman, in-group status in the empire could
mean staying at home and being a housewife, joining the PTA, auxiliary social clubs,
etc.
(Sexism is an invariable trait of imperialism. The original Big Lie, which every ‘good
citizen’ most accept as a loyalty test, is that the freedom and potential of over
half the human species must be muzzled and hobbled for servitude toward the
other half).
In short, by selling out and staying quiet, you get a chance
to find a place in the empire’s hierarchal ladder of power and wealth. There is also a sense of relief, because you
have chosen to conform and obey, and so the police state and the social attack
dogs won’t bear down on you.
2. The stick,
ironically, comes from your own mind. Staying
silent creates a certain kind of psychological pain, which I call core tension. It is originates from the conscience, but also other intrapsychic inputs.
The pain, this core tension, can increase to become unbearable. We humans tend to do what we can to get away
from pain, including the mental sort, such as guilt. But if you stay silent--if you don’t make the
choice that Einstein made, which is the honest route--you
have to deal with the pain coming from inside another way: by suppressing it.
As the pain increases, due to your ongoing silence, suppression
gets harder and harder. In the end, to shut
down your own inner urgings--your heart, your conscience, your empathy, your
reason--drastic measures become necessary.
When this happens, suppression turns into repression: the construction of impassable psychic
walls in the mind. Your cognitive
filters fortify twisted modes of perception.
This dark transformation, in which evil is then embraced as good,
is akin to selling your soul to Mephistopheles--or his proxy, the empire.
Core Tension
When you stay silent in the face of evil, you begin to
experience a certain kind of pain. It is
combination of negative valanced emotions--guilt, confusion, stress,
uneasiness, revulsion and so on--but not all of them need be present.
Core tension is similar to what psychologists call cognitive
dissonance, but it specifically involves major issues in morality, that is, the ethical
standards and principles taught to us as children. An example is the Golden Rule, treat others
as you would be treated yourself. The
Golden Rule is a common sense expression of decency, dignity, equality, fairness
and balance.
Even if a person’s conscience is weak or nonexistent, they
can still feel core tension. To live as
if something is true when it is blatantly false--to embrace illogic as
logic--is jarring and disorienting. It
unleashes an awful, compelling counter-reaction. Your own mind tries to pull you back from the abyss.
Living in such fundamental contradiction can lead to chaos and anxiety. After all, if you let
go of reason as a standard for one critical component of reality, where and
when is it not expendable?
A Malevolent Metamorphosis
Imagine someone in Einstein’s situation, who enters America and witnesses the country's inveterate racism for the first time.
If such a person chooses silence, they are now within the outer
perimeter of a perilous psychological pull, one that attempts to draw them
through four stages of complicity and disintegration:
1. Initial silence. Compartmentalize
and suppress core tension to deal with it later
2. Enduring silence. Turn
‘deal with it later’ into ‘deal with it much later.’ Long-term compartmentalization to continuously suppress core tension.
3. Semipermeable silence.
Initiate the process of turning
suppression into repression. Bury your
core tension down in a place where you can never feel it. Mud becoming rock.
4. Orwellian silence.
Complete the tragedy of the fractured the mind. Look at reality 'through a glass darkly' in
which evil is good and good is evil. Your silence
takes the form of vocal support. The empire
was right all along!
Suppression, compartmentalization and repression. They can be part
of a healthy emotional management--or not.
It depends on how these mental tools are used and what structures
(cognitive filters or schemata) they help to sculpt.
Nonetheless, a terrible self-inflicted horror manifests when someone demands that
their own mind, through sheer stubborn force of will, twists itself into an ontological pretzel.
What is ‘Speaking up’?
As insinuated above, there are many ways to
speak up, that is, to protest or fight back [3]. Someone of Einstein’s stature, assured a job
at a prestigious university, is relatively free to be vocal. Moreover, his
voice will generally be heard.
Many immigrants have no such cachet. They very often need a job to support their
family. It might be very difficult for
them to directly protest without risk of expatriation, vagrancy or jail.
All of us, though, have access to some means of protest. Some are subtle or clandestine, but they add to a social momentum that roils the ‘peaceful’ surface. On Courage, A recent book by Angwin and Fields-Meyer
explores the idea of “collective stubbornness.” [4]
An example of subtle ‘speaking out” is the Black porters who,
while maintaining their job, sent encouraging messages through their body
language. And of course many people,
Black and others, joined informal or secret social groups to fight segregation
(and before that, slavery). Church
membership is often a conduit to ‘good trouble,’ to employ the concept of John Lewis.
We aren’t all Einstein.
We won’t be invited to give a speech.
That doesn’t mean we must be silent.
We each have a choice: whether to
do something that is plausibly effective, something that honestly addresses the
concerns from both heart and mind, or to do nothing and become complicit, entering the gauntlet of the four stages.
A terrible price
The rest of this essay, at the risk of prolix, paints a
grotesque picture. I want to hammer home
the point that someone who twists their mind to the point where evil is seen as good is broken. They become both infected and
deranged. This 'invasion of the body snatchers' cements in the last phase of TCG, when the mind flips to accept illogic as logic and
vice as virtue. To reach this point of malevolent metamorphosis is
to go from loathing what you see in front of your very eyes to embracing it
with ardor and obedience.
The essence of the flip is on par with that classic, sardonic tale, The Emperor’s New Clothes:
The emperor is clearly wearing no clothes. But, wait! Of course he is wearing clothes, the finest ones in the land! Long live the Emperor!
In terms of racism:
Black people are clearly being targeted by vicious, brutal, wicked racism. But, wait! Of course they are not. It’s White people who are the victims here! Long live the Empire! Black people need to be kept in their place, by whatever means!
To accept evil as good is to situate yourself within a wonderland of contradictions, a bizarre landscape of lies whose
purpose is absurd--to stymie and befuddle your own ability to
think.
I am going to frame this tragic disfigurement from a
number of angles to limn the various tricks and traps that a person inflicts on their very being when they accept the devil's bargain.
Fracture
Suppose someone comes to America as Einstein did, new to the scene. Day after day, event after event, evidence of racism mounts. Suppose this person, contra Einstein, chooses to stay silent. How do they deal with guilt and eventually twist their conception of the world around in reverse, to see brazen
wickedness as good, despite the outpour of daily cruelty, on and on ...
To perform such a ‘180’ requires setting up a triage system
for every bit of social information that flows into the mind. Bit by bit (double entendre intended), a person binds themself in a harness of internal censors.
Maybe these censors are accessible at first, but after a while they trend liminal and
finally submerge to become distant shadows. They become alien to the ego, that is, the center of conscious awareness. Even so, the internal censors go about the task of managing data and suppressing pain. And yet, the pain continues to mounts. Conscience, empathy, intuition and
reason demand that the situation be addressed. The sins of silence, however, continue to accumulate. The reactive increase in core tension prompts the need for more subconscious control--more warrens of deceit, more machinery of suppression.
To function under so much pressure, arising from the protest of their own heart, a person who chooses silence eventually becomes an
actor all the time, weighed down by a duplicitous role. The duplicity becomes more automatic, evolving new ways to compartmentalize
and suppress--until, as far as the surface level knows, nothing is going
on . All is just fine, both inside the mind and out in the world.
In terms more scientific, repetitive behavior digs ruts in the neural network, the learning mechanism of the brain.. The more you hide, the deeper the dendritic ruts. This leads not only to entrenchment but deformation: cognitive filters twist into convolutions so that they register illogic as logic.
The person who has fled so thoroughly from truth
and justice represses a huge chunk of who they are. Containment of such magnitude inflicts a state of psychological
fracture, an enforced degradation into total ignorance.
The ugly process is not like flipping a switch. To alter yourself so monstrously requires a
campaign of ceaseless and enormous self-attack, tectonic forces so mighty they compress mud into rock, a surface
where nothing gets through. Suppression becomes
ignorance-based repression. An impermeable
mental wall locks aspects of the psyche so far down they are no longer able to trouble the surface with assessments of what is good, honest and true.
Joy-dampening
Along with fracture, the transition to Orwellian silence
deadens the ability to feel a special sort of joy. This occurs because those parts of the mind
responsible for causing core tension can also elicit positive feelings, moods and passions--if they
are not beaten down and chained away in a psychic dungeon.
It is special to know and feel that you are challenging darkness and embracing the light; that you are speaking out for justice. It can be exhilarating, or simply manifest as deep-seated content.
Imagine such a feeling of self-worth, one that has nothing to do with how much money you
have, what kind of car you have, or what you look like in comparison to standards set by the beauty industry. It is a kind of contentment that fights back against a corporate advertising, which actively works to create neurotic, insecure people who need to buy products to feel good, hawking a shallow lifestyle of sugary consumerism and petty vanities [5].
A harmonious mind is an exultant accomplishment
An honest relationship with yourself. Imagine. It ushers in a wellspring of creativity and profundity. It honors the many foyers, parlors and mezzanines of the mind. To treat yourself with such introspective, full-throated respect is utterly compassionate. In a way, you become your own soulmate [6].
Power loss: a bias
against knowledge
To ‘know thyself’ brings knowledge--and knowledge is power. However, if you deny yourself such joy and related wisdom, you deny yourself the ability to choose wisely; and you suffer a corresponding power loss.
In much wisdom is much grief, and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow.
Anti-intellectualism serves Ignorance (short for ‘ignorance-based
government’). No dictator benefits from
a person who seeks an accord of reason, conscience, empathy and justice. Donald
Trump infamously said, “I love the poorly educated.”
Ignorance needs Big Lies.
It needs citizens who are driven by passions that they themselves do no know how to work with in a healthy way by using the skills of emotional competence. There is an underlying dark reason, related to power, that professional therapy--a healing, honest journey--is looked down on and seen as a stigma.
Fear and hate are not necessarily bad. Their expression is part of being human [7]. But when a dictator cultivates them to manipulate others, the goal is not liberation and flourishing for the target audience members, but rather mind control and corresponding loss of freedom.
Those who accept such demagoguery into their heart assimilate into a mobilized
mass. They become a unit in the orchestrated march of a swarm behavior, in which the conductor's baton is insidious propaganda
and sophistic rhetoric.
Disrespect and hate
The triad of self-inflicted curses--fracture, joy-dampening,
and power loss--conjoin into a searing accusation, which is the following: the choice of silence is a choice to hate
yourself.
These three curses are the result of a person basically telling their own heart to shut up, turning a blind ear to reason, and choking out the light. Not
as an accident or aberration, but with seamless persistence until,
crushed by the incessant effect, a fire within them withers to a candleflame and then snuffs out.
The goal is not only to annihilate the truth, but replace it with an impostor the speeches of the dictator and propaganda's specious rationales. Conscience protests against such absurdity, so the person begins to hate their own conscience--and all the other parts of the mind that bring core tension.
They get away because they have the raw mental power to do so. To suppress and repress. In other words, they gets away with it 'because they can.'
A person spiraling downward this way could stop the descent. They could speak up, like Einstein did. Some people do arrest their disintegration and begin to speak up. Others, however, go deeper into the fog of silence, seeking that ‘comfortably numb' place.
As I explain below, however, the silence of complicitous gravitation is not at all serene.
Tyrannizing yourself
To create and condemn your own truth assessments is a
violent act of stubborn will. You chop away
at your own daily awareness. It is a
brutal decree of might-makes-right. (If ego is thought of as
the conscious part of a person as they move through the world, then 'ego-makes-right').
Fracture. Joy
dampening. Power loss. Self-hate.
These add up to yet another frightful
status: self-tyranny. It is analogous, in its blunt cruel force, to
how a dictator beats down opposition, and hammers a dark, unforgiving message into
the minds of worshipful masses. A
silenced person fractures their own mind, putting up walls, while a dictator
puts up walls in society to establish an apartheid. Frighteningly, the internal mirrors the external.
In the final stages of complicitous gravitation (TCG), a fallen person commits something like an act of self-murder. They kill parts of themself, or try their best.
As well, they forget that by gong through the four stages, they erected something
fake, a façade of justice.
The situation calls to mind a quote from Macbeth:
Stars, hide your fires,
Let not light see my black and deep desires.
The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be
Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.
Macbeth intends to murder the king and take his place, but he doesn’t want his intentions revealed. However, There is a deeper symbolism. The separation of the eye and the hand could be seen to represent parts of mind. The eye, pretending to be the conscience, sees that the hand has dark intent, but pretends all is good (‘nothing to see here’) and so “winks” in sly arrangement.
Neither of the two parts of the mind--the eye or the hand--are a person’s legitimate conscience. That honest voice, the ‘better angel,’ has been buried. The fake conscience, however-- the ‘eye’--is part of the pretense that everything is okay and good. The intent of the hand is fine! Nothing evil to see here, even when the hand takes up the knife and stabs away.
Stage 4 of TCG, though, differs from Macbeth. Macbeth is still aware of his evil behavior
and intent. His mental trick--setting up
a false conscience to give the go ahead to evil deeds--might be more like stage
3 (initial phase of repression). Someone who has
fully undergone malevolent metamorphosis really believes, at the level of awareness,
that their evil deeds are good. They don't request that the stars hide their fires. The stars are already gone and forgotten. The transition has been made, beyond Macbeth's mindset, into an Orwellian state.
An Inner Dracula
There is another aspect of silence that I want to touch on
briefly, a sort of internal Dracula. The
fracturing of the mind, in addition to jailing away conscience and reason,
demands new and prejudiced ways to process information. Some part of the subconscious has to
make this work ; and for its laborious effort it demands a price. The illusion of peace on the surface, the
‘comfortably numb,' exacts its pound of cerebral flesh.
Running a shadow machinery of continuous deceit sucks up a lot of brain fuel, fuel that could have gone instead to noble pursuits and healthy flourishing. Such shadow machinery puts a vampiric warden in charge of how a silent person processes information. An inner vampire who sucks up mental fuel, to regulate how the person perceives, thinks and feels.
In Sum
A person who chooses silence when confronted with an evil
empire, despite the urgings of their heart, becomes infected and deranged.
The push to avoid guilt, confusion, shame, and illogic
(core tension) leads to a devil’s bargain. The result is grotesque changes to the psyche: fracture, joy-dampening, power loss, self-hate
and internal tyranny.
This shadow violence includes a kind of self-murder
or attempted murder, for the ego attempts to squeeze down and choke out a significant
part of what defines the whole of the person, aka their personality. As a result, aspects of the self wither. The way the brain processes information gets perversely
twisted, which requires an parasitic subconscious schemata centered on maintaining Big-Lie deceits. Conscious
awareness of what's going on gets shut own, something the ego not only condoned but facilitated. It lives afterward for the empire, bowing down, paying tribute, while seeking approval, opportunity and status.
Our understanding of the human brain, in the early 21st century, is
young. But we have learned that our brain
has different centers and, furthermore, that it coordinates across them. Our brain has such vast plasticity that it
can, if called, create two or more personalities, ‘alters,’
as with multiple personality disorder. We also know that if neurobiological links between
parts of the brain are physically cut, such as the corpus callosum, the parts can act
independently. As well, dreams show that
our brain will create worlds and people around the ‘I’ that we see as
who we are.
It is not an unfounded leap, then, to assert that when we
choose silence, as defined above, we initiate a gigantic disruptive process, one that is not only disordered but has malevolent effects in the mind. Silence attempts to kill core tension and in so
doing strangles crucial aspects of personality, diminishing a person perhaps forever.
On the other hand, we can seek an honest relationship with the mansions of our own mind. We can channel forth the ‘dark’ energies in healthy ways for ethical purposes, the result being great fonts meaning and catharsis [ff O.H.]
Speaking out against evil does not usher in a monolith of ‘woe and grief.’ Speaking out, rather, elicits and enlivens joy and contentment, a sort that is immeasurable. You cannot attain such lovely ways-of-being from money or social status. Honesty and justice, while 'looking in the mirror' result in a relationship with yourself that is priceless.
Finally, I want to reiterate and underscore that 'speaking out' does not require a person to get on a podium like Einstein. You can ‘speak out’ in many ways [4 Sus]. I’ll end with a koan-ish quote:
In art and dream, may you proceed with abandon. In life, may your proceed with balance and stealth -- Patti Smith
===========================
Footnotes
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1619_Project
2. Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, p.379
3. "Sustenance and Darkness," section III
https://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2026/05/essay-sustenance-and-darkness.html
4. On Courage: how to be a dissident in an age of fear
https://www.acappellabooks.com/pages/books/393158/ami-fields-meyer-julia-angwin-ami-fields-meyer-julia-angwin/on-courage-how-to-be-a-dissident-in-an-age-of-fear
5. The 100 Simple Secrets of Happy People
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/100-simple-secrets-of-happy-people-the-david-niven?variant=32116414185506
6. "Sustenance and Darkness," section III
7. "On Hate."
https://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2025/10/essay-on-hate.html
Born in '63, made it to 63. Never would have thought. I am grateful to the forces of fate.
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