- Chapter 16






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Editor's Introduction To:The Turning Wheel
Philip K. Dick
 
I was, I think, the first science fiction author to write a novel using a microcomputer as a word processor. Now, of course, few are written any other way. One wonders whether the late Philip K. Dick would have used a computer, and if so, would he have used it for more than writing?
There are those who argue that Phil Dick was the best writer science fiction ever produced. Certainly he was one of the most unusual.
His stories include a number of Utopian and dystopian themes. Often the two are combined in strange ways. The Man in the High Castle, which won the Hugo in 1962, describes a world in which the Axis won World War II. The I Ching, that curiously fascinating book of Chinese meditations which many use as an oracle, figures heavily in the story, and according to Dick was used to direct the plot. Now that the I Ching is available on microcomputers—Jim Baen, the publisher of this series, not only publishes an electronic version, but was instrumental in creating it—one wonders what else Dick might have done with it.
I only met Phil twice. The most important meeting was at an academic affair in Fullerton, California. I was president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, and was there to help bless some award or other. It wasn't a good time for SF writers. I was barely making a living, but I was doing better than Phil Dick. According to his autobiography, that was the year he and his wife were eating dog food to stay alive.
In later years Phil experienced considerable success. His Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was made into the film Blade Runner, with considerable profit to Dick, and his other works began to sell. Then Phil died suddenly, of a cerebral hemorrhage. From what I knew of him, he wouldn't have been much surprised.
 
The economist Joseph A. Schumpeter thought capitalism was doomed. He didn't much enjoy the prospect, and his analysis was quite different from Marx's, but he was certain that capitalist society would "progress" to the point of collapse.
The key element of his analysis was that he believed, in total contrast to Aristotle, that the bourgeoisie couldn't rule. The destruction of feudalism "meant for the bourgeoisie the breaking of so many fetters and the removal of so many barriers. Politically it meant the replacement of an order in which the bourgeois was a humble subject by another that was more congenial to his rationalist mind and to his immediate interests. But, surveying that process from the standpoint of today, the observer might well wonder whether in the end such complete emancipation was good for the bourgeois and his world. For those fetters not only hampered, they also sheltered." (Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy 3rd ed. Harper, 1950)
What Schumpeter foresaw was a breakdown in the ability to rule, and a focusing of the rationalism of the bourgeoisie not only on the older institutions, but also on the basis of capitalism itself. The problem is that humans are not rational; there needs to be an element of mysticism in government; and there is none of that about the bourgeois. Schumpeter notes, "the stock exchange is a poor substitute for the Holy Grail. We have seen that the industrialist and merchant, as far as they are entrepreneurs, also fill a function of leadership. But economic leadership of this type does not readily expand, like the medieval lord's military leadership, into the leadership of nations. On the contrary, the ledger and the cost calculation absorb and confine."
C. Northcote Parkinson, like Schumpeter, sees that democratic capitalism will probably lead inevitably to socialism. Democracies survive until the citizens discover they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. Then they begin the inexorable process of transferring wealth from the productive to the numerous. What happens next depends in large part on how much wealth there is. Given enough money, the situation can last for a long time, provided there are no powerful external enemies. Eventually, though, the need for economic production, coupled with the disincentive of the productive to do any more work than they have to, often leads to an authoritarian society.
There could be another form of social collapse: religion is often more powerful than economics.
At the time Phil Dick wrote this, California's political economy was greatly influenced by a man who put naturalism and environmentalism ahead of everything else, and who boasted that "the only physics I ever took was Ex Lax." At the same time another former Californian, then resident in the Mediterranean, had started what was first billed as a major advance in scientific psychology, then a secular movement, and finally a mystical church that taught an extreme form of reincarnation. That church looked very much like it would grow exponentially.
Mix hatred of technology, environmentalism, and naturalism; add the notion that science is a bore, while poets and bards are the most important creatures ever born; and you get a religion that certainly will make the world a place different from what it is now.
 
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