Dick Drugs and (D)truth

    The other day I picked up a book that I hadn't read in a while. I was maybe halfway through when I got distracted and put it down, always meaning to pick it back up after it had fallen to the wayside. It was Phillip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch- Dick being probably my favorite author of all time and a major influence on me and my personal philosophies.

    The part I had left off on was just after Barney Mayerson volunteers for the harsh task of emigrating to Mars to colonize it and work on terraforming it and just prior to the introduction of the new competing hallucinatory drug of Chew-Z and reading it I was struck by Dick's consistent views on the nature of reality and the preferability of the real definable and objective truth of the world as compared to a convenient subjective truth.

    In the following chapters, Barney takes the drug for the first time and is transported into his past before he had divorced his wife and started focusing on his career, leaving her behind. And Barney is enthralled. He sees this as an opportunity to make things right (even though its clear from his narration that he holds his wife in contempt much of the time). And to Barney these things that are happening are absolutely true and its revealed later in the book that everything that happens in the Chew-Z world is in fact real and has real world implications. But to Barney this subjective truth IS absolute and objective truth, no matter what anyone else has to say about it.

    So this had me thinking again on the nature of truth in general and I think in our collective consciousness the concept of the value of objective truth is more common than we think. Movies like The Truman Show and The Matrix ask the question of: Is there more value in living in the real world when we're perfectly happy in a fantasy? Or to put it another way, is living under the knowledge of objective truths more valuable than living our lives under subjective truth?

    There's certainly something to be said about the romanticism of the concept. Living our lives as men and women that are valiantly suffering but facing the harshness of reality instead of simply drifting through a convenient fantasy but surely there's something more to it than that, right?

    Ive mentioned before the value of knowing the actual truth of things rather than some subjective idea, that it gives us even and equal ground with other people because we're able to agree on what reality actually is. We can agree that the bit B in the Blogger logo is white and surrounded by orange and that allows us to create a common ground for discussion about the subject and that's certainly a part of the puzzle of why truth is important to us.

    I think the second major thing to gain is simply to be free of the alternative. When we don't know what the truth really is or when someone presents us with a lie that we believe we are no longer connected to our reality. Or maybe better put, we are at the mercy of the lie. We are no longer free to use our judgement as we see fit, we are living in the world created by this false truth.

    In The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch Dick shows this by presenting us with a worst case scenario: what happens when the false truth we come to believe is presented by a malicious entity? Barney thinks at the time that this fantasy world is great. He's got a second chance to make his life what he wants but then soon comes to realize that the drug and the titular Palmer Eldritch, who acts nearly godlike through the powers of the drug, are nowhere near as benevolent as he initially thinks. Barney comes to realize that the true reality is preferable to him simply because he is not at the mercy of Palmer Eldritch and he is (mostly) free to chose the actions of his life.

     Long story short, I believe this is an allegory everyone should consider. We should be skeptical of things we accept as truth if only because we need to keep our agency in life.