Living in a Philip K Dick World

Reading about politics makes me fearful for the future of our nation and angry at those who put ideology and personal gain above country. Politics will drive you crazy. It is almost as bad as religion. Combine the two and people can really go off the deep end. As a politically-minded Christian, I am at double risk. I endeavor to be above the fray – to be spiritual but not political - but I do not always succeed.

Faith has been defined (erroneously) by skeptics as “belief without evidence.” These days this definition describes politics as well as religion. People believe any conspiracy theory if it is voiced by a like-minded ideologue. If a lie is repeated often enough and strongly enough, people will believe it, as long as it conforms to their ideological agenda. Damn the evidence.

We live in a post-truth era. As a spiritually minded lover of truth, who values rational thought and science (yes, there are Christians like this!), that puts me at odds with most people in my religion and my political party. I feel like I am living in a dystopian novel where society engages in Orwellian doublespeak. Falsehood is Truth. Wrong is Right. Bondage is Liberty. Heroes are villains. Death is Life.

I am a fan of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. A lot of good movies have been adapted from his stories - films like Blade Runner, Minority Report, Total Recall, Paycheck and others. I am presently reading his posthumous Exegesis, which is a collection of personal correspondence and private musings never meant for publication. It reveals just how delusional PKD really was. Many consider him mentally ill, but he was a great writer.

He lived in an alternative reality of his own making. He believed his own paranoid delusions, which provide the premise for most of his stories. At the same time, there is something about his writings that rings true to my experience. There can be truth at the core of madness. "Twixt truth and madness lies but a sliver of a stream." His fantastical insights are more real than most peoples’ boring realities. He had glimpses beyond the veil of the shared delusion that we call “the real world.”

His stories are typically about a man (nearly always a man!) who is the only one aware of the true reality at the heart of existence. Everyone else is living a lie. Often the authorities are out to get the main character and silence him. That alone does not make him crazy. As the saying goes, “It's not paranoia if they're really out to get you.” 

Sometimes I feel like our political system has gone mad. I am registered Republican. (There, I am finally out of the closet!) I am a Republican because I believe in the GOP’s core values, especially individual liberties and responsibilities, limited federal government, low taxes, and fiscal responsibility. I prefer to vote Republican, but will choose the best candidate (high moral character, intelligence, education and experience) over party affiliation. In other words I am Republican but not partisan.

But ever since 2016 I feel like my fellow Republicans are living in a world divorced from reality. The GOP has forsaken the Republican values I hold dear. That became readily apparent in 2020 when the RNC decided not to adopt a national party platform stating their policies and principles. They chose to be a personality cult rather than a party of principles. Without principles to guide them, they have lost their way. Hence our present madness. The Democrats are not quite as crazy as the Republicans, but they are not exactly sane either. You can see the blood lust in their eyes. Power corrupts any party.

The anti-mask and anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, QAnon, and “the big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen are just crazy talk. They are beliefs without evidence. They have nothing to do with conservative values. There must be some explanation for why people are willing to embrace such outright lies. My theory is that religion has corrupted politics and vice versa. Religious credulity has infiltrated conservative politics and produced a gullible populace that cannot distinguish truth from falsehood.

Religion has a lot of admirable qualities, but it can also be a downright crazy business. Take it from one who was in the business professionally for forty years. Religious people too often accept things on faith without evidence. Just tell Christians the Bible teaches something, and they will believe it. Even when the Bible says no such thing.

Take abortion for example, which has become the preeminent issue for religious conservatives. It trumps all other voting issues. They believe God is against abortion. They believe this without reservation and without evidence. They believe the Bible is pro-life. They believe this because a preacher or pope told them so. It is all about believing religious authorities, not personal investigation of facts.

If Christians took the time to read the Scriptures they would discover that the Bible never mentions abortion. Even when one investigates biblical statements about when life begins, the evidence leans toward birth, not conception. Yet religious conservatives insist that the only viable stance for Christians is to be pro-life. They believe this is so strongly that are willing to legislate this moral stance into law, thereby violating the conservative principle of keeping government out of personal lives. This is only one example.

My party has gone crazy. They are no longer thinking rationally or sanely, in my opinion. Personally I no longer fit in the Republican Party. I also do not fit in the Democratic Party, which trusts much too much in the power and goodness of government, the tyranny of the majority, and the magic of deficit spending. As much as I like the Libertarian Party, “third parties” are practically irrelevant. My religion of Christianity has likewise gone crazy. In recent decades it has morphed into an anti-science, anti-reason, legalistic party of sheep who will believe anything their handlers tell them.

So here I am, a Baptist preacher espousing spirituality over religious authority, reason over tradition, and science over pseudo-science. That is why I feel like I am living in a Philip K Dick story. Maybe I am as crazy as he was.  Then again, as Orwell wrote in 1984: “Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” So maybe I am not so crazy after all.