Sci-Fi Icon Saw Plague Heist Coming 60 Yrs Ago

Philip K Dick on the psychology behind government selling 'protection'

Along the production line trundles oncoming surveillance and cybernetics.
Philip K Dick saw that consumer society held the seeds of tyranny.
Planned obsolescence had a head lock on the minds of citizens.
His story Foster, You’re Dead could have scripted Event Covid.
Using children as the lever to break society.
(2,500 words or 10 minutes in your company).

Tom Verdoot from Pexels

Feb 3, 2022

You don’t need it and it won’t work. They’re just pushing it for profit: corporations using the government to scare people into acceptance…

The father is a committed “anti-P” (Preparedness) and has stuck firmly to his views — about the doubtful efficacy of these measures in the face of minimal threat.

His son is embarrassed at school. He’s the only one in class who hasn’t got one. The teacher ridicules him in front of his mates.

He goes home and tries to persuade his father: "There's the new models."

They’ll soon be obsolete, father says: “They keep putting out new ones as fast as they can.”

Eventually the father gives in. At last, all the family is protected. The very next day the government reveals a new variant has overwhelmed the preventive measures. It’s no longer effective without an update.

"Goddamn it, it's a plot!"

Premonition

Philip K Dick’s 1955 short story, Foster You’re Dead, describes a society manipulated by fear of nuclear holocaust and plague.

The protagonist, a boy named Mike Foster, has taken vaccinations “up and down his arms, on his thighs and buttocks” yet knows all these jabs will be in vain unless he also gets... a bomb shelter.

These are marketed in “the great, gleaming showrooms of General Electronics Corporation, two blocks long, illuminated on all sides, a vast square of pure color and radiation… that always drew him to a hypnotized stop whenever he passed.”

Government and media push the message relentlessly, along with manufacturers, that all people must get a personal shelter. Buying one comes with social prestige, privileges and obligations — membership of Civic Defense, which the father has shunned.

And then there’s social pressure. Foster's mother complains the townsfolk flaunt Preparedness Flags outside their homes, and stuck an Anti-P in their yard. "I can't stand the way they talk about us... everybody paying for them but us."

In the centre of the showroom the huge bomb shelter was “an elaborate pulsing blob of machinery and support struts, beams and walls and sealed locks.”

Fear is local

When the pandemic broke, many readers reached for their copies of Albert Camus’ The Plague (1947). Then someone spotted a reference to Wuhan in Dean Koontz’s, The Eyes of Darkness (1981). Academics, with a nous that aligns with the jargon of grant-fundees, saw in a pandemic the wages of interconnectedness, and “perception of globality.” [1]

This ignores the epidemiological history of localized outbreaks, the literary canon of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and the aforementioned Camus. It also ignores the behavioural studies of biological psychology, which place the frontline of connectedness and its corrolary, fear, very much locally when people are wary of infection.

Fear is local not global! But the beneficent Rockefeller Brothers Foundation uses the word interconnected in its marketing blurb and that’s probably why it is cut ‘n pasted into academic grant applications.

Sons and fathers

Although the story was set in the future, PKD was describing his era and ours, in which consumerism contains the seeds of tyranny. Planned obsolescence gains an absolute hold on the behavior of citizens.

Advertisers long ago discovered that human decision making is irrational and strongly influenced by herd instinct — even while schools continue to teach the economist Adam Smith’s dictum that we act rationally in material self-interest.

Politicians know better. Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels held Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays in high regard. And psychiatrists have long used “psyche clinics” for those who struggle to adjust to the narrative.

Constant be

This family wavers, and its once-independent spirit and unity is undermined by social pressure and a government campaign of programmed fear.

Facing adversity arm-in-arm should bind father and son — “We always used to say ‘It’s me and you against the world’,” in the words of Ernesto Ramirez Sr, a single dad who lost his 15 year-old, only son to myocarditis, an inflammatory heart swelling in 2021, five days after receiving the Pfizer vaccine. [2]

Ernesto Sr. says they took the decision together but based on false information about the real threat and efficacy. The outcome was tragic.

The fictional Mike Foster persuades his father, whom he admires, to buy the bunker. But his father, Bob, suspects the threat is exaggerated. The efficacy again turns out to be overstated.

“They've easy time-payment plans.”

“Sure. You pay for it the rest of your life. Interest, carrying charges, and how long is it guaranteed for?”

“Three months.” [No better than the vaxx!]

“They're scaring us to keep the wheels going,” he yelled desperately at his wife and son. “They don't want another depression.”

His suspicions are confirmed when, the very day after the purchase, the government declares that the bunker no longer offers full protection without a booster — a special grill to stop supposedly new, heat-seeking Soviet pellets.

Bob’s anger at the sudden lack of efficacy of the brand-new bunker leads him to send it back. The boy is marooned, traumatized, his attention captured by the corporate state, overwhelmed by the pressure of the herd, unable to cope with his alien conscience, unexplored, like a partially-assembled unit on a production line.

It is always the child that pays the price. Mike feels betrayed, twice. By his father’s lack of constancy: his failure to stand firm and, having changed his mind, to be consistent. The parents bow to pressure from the community in the name of their son but have second thoughts. They sacrifice him to their own contentment in society.

We can see at least two related types of manipulation at work upon the herd: mass formation of people's behavior, and the mechanism of repeated consumption.

As Prof Matthias Desmet of Ghent University has observed, vague fear and atomization is used by government psychologists to open a people to suggestion, willing to project their discomfort on a scapegoat, and to cling to a saviour or solution.

See Moneycircus, Jan 18, 2022 — Mass Formation And Psycho-Drama: How ancient political technologies see the light of day

PKD has little need to identify a cabal of Dr Evils. Bernays' manufacturing of demand puts in motion the mechanism of consumption and planned obsolescence, which in turn prompts consumption anew. The driver is competition between the people, not between corporations who act in combination as a cartel.

Threat and efficacy

"A mechanical news-machine shouted at him excitedly as he passed. War, death, amazing new weapons..."

The uniformity of the mechanical news is familiar to us. The impaired perception of threat and disproportionate response is apparent in the boy's recurring nightmare that the H-bomb will come when he's lacking 50 cents for the turnstile into the public air raid shelter.

This vague threat to the community is channeled into the individual, through calls to set aside your reservations, submit to the generalized fear, “do your part” — and pay $20,000 for a private bomb shelter.

The advertising makes the bunkers sound luxurious though they are produced for the gardens of the “little concrete shells that served as houses.” The community contributes 30 per cent of its income to a "constant-defense system" — a money-spinning revenue stream for governments and corporations in which bomb shelters are upgraded every few years.

Rather like the health system, the government has transferred the cost of defence to the people but without allowing them individual choice.

Meanwhile in school, everything is geared to survival: digging, making watertight baskets and animal traps and sharpening knives. Students are taught to exist so that they may purchase protection to continue existing. It is a protection racket.

Ponzi scheme

The monopoly GEC sells an upgraded line of ever-obsolescent bunkers. The GEC might equally be a giant Ponzi scheme.

Governments admit that during the first weeks after injection, the vaccinated are actually at greater risk of becoming sick. Young people would get injected, go out and party, and fall ill: it’s called in Holland, dansen met Jansen. It turned out in Alberta, Canada, that 55 per cent of “deaths with Covid” were happening to people in their 14-day, post-jab window.

The blogger Radagast points out on RINTRAN site how governments try to minimize this uncomfortable outcome by massaging the numbers. They count you as dosed only two weeks after your second injection. Those first two weeks after the shot are dumped in with first shot (ie partially vaccinated) or “unvaccinated”:

• Three weeks of first-shot infections go to the “unvaccinated” category.

• Two weeks of second-shot infections go into the first shot category.

• Another two weeks of third-shot infections are added to the second shot category.

“This leads to the ugly numbers... where the second shot now doubles your chance of being hospitalized compared to no shots — to clean up the third shot numbers.”

“When you start running out of a steady supply of unvaccinated people who can be made to receive these injections, that’s when your numbers become embarrassing again.” [3]

That's a great bit of writing. The author describes what happens when adverse effects are blamed on the unvaccinated — you need an unending supply of unvaccinated people to step up to the plate. It’s a Ponzi scheme!

Amazons and minnows

The president visited towns to launch the first defense equipment available for home purchase. "The General Electronics Corporation was just beginning to put up its big showrooms and displays — everything bright and glittering and expensive."

Bob complains the big box stores [just like Amazon, today] will drive his small furniture shop to the wall. “These goddamn taxes. It isn't possible for a little store to keep open, not with the big chains. There ought to be a law.”

He says a person needs only so many cars, TVs and washing machines. But defence equipment sells on fear. The ever-changing threat is used to justify endless upgrades. The consumer is "never going to stop buying shelters to protect his children."

This is Communitarianism... but abused to profit bureaucrats and corporations. PKD’s message is to look behind the appeal of “all in this together” and follow the money.

The nation or state was replaced with towns, all competing in defence, so they could display their Preparedness Flag.

“We should have been a country, a whole nation, one hundred and seventy million people working together to defend ourselves. And instead, we're a lot of separate little towns, little walled forts. Sliding and slipping back to the Middle Ages. Raising our separate armies.”

There, just over halfway through PKD’s story could be the “secure, sustainable smart cities” programme of the United Nations Agenda 2030. By some interpretations, these will take over from nation states as the primary units of governance, while countries lose their importance to a one world government.

The youth

We should be alert to the suffering of children. For they are the most delicate in society, the point at which the bough breaks.

Children should experience life one bright day at a time, bursting with colours, tastes and sounds. It is an experience so complete that they only have time for the present.

Yet talking to children during the pandemic I see their time accelerates. They are already falling into remembrance. They ask questions that only adults should ask, and later in life: “Do you remember when… such and such? What was that place where…?”

This means they are experiencing life at one remove.

This is cruelty beyond measure. This, not some carbon gas phantom, merits the declaration of outrage: not, how dare you — but DON'T YOU DARE!

The adults

Did PKD influenced the minds of policy makers or did he see more clearly? A wine taster does not have a better nose. It is by using and training our senses that we refine them.

Did he see more clearly because he was bold enough to criticise the society around him. By speaking out (or writing), he honed his perceptive skills.

Generations of yore were more outspoken and direct. Being oppositional was thus compared to those "angry young men" of the theatre that you see represented in some older writers — like “Old Man in a Chair" Dr Vernon Coleman. [4]

They are not simply crotchety but date from a time when people were not afraid to use the pronoun “I” and position themselves not simply “opposite” an idea but to dismantle it.

Oppositional today is more tentative, for we are presented with the tyranny of choice: an expanding diversity of sameness. You may not mount a platform with a pennant and perspective of your choosing: your place and time are allotted, you are located — and soon to be constrained by Online Safety Bills and maybe even a requirement to verify your digital identity before you open your mouth. The magical rainbow, with its infinite spectrum of colours, is blended by conformity to a drab grey. It is the technics of control.

Only the new media has offered varied perspective on Event Covid but even they fail to recognise that Covid is not a conventional psyop. We are not an audience being propagandized. The enemy is not over there — bayoneting babies — it is everywhere. There is no home and away, no frontline. The military have been telling us this for a decade. They have read MindWar (1980) by Lt Col Michael Aquino, in which we are played against each other.

Everybody is hunter and hunted, protagonist and perpetrator — by chosing to act or do nothing we change the script. Even the most supine is doing more than watching events on TV as the story is playing out in his own living room.

Society projects upon all honest people the price of its own failure: only a small cohort accepts responsibility for its action. This is the creative class of crafts, engineers and philosophers. For them no act, or its absence, is neutral — to create they must learn from mistakes. Thus they are bred to embrace failure, to learn from mistakes and try again. They cannot lie nor fail to question.

The needle is offered as pharmakeia against all ills. While he who fills the vial and wields the syringe claims to be immune from the consequences of his actions, what of the possessor of that wobbling target on an arm? Does he bear any responsibility for the mating of prick and flesh?

Call to action

The years of 2020 and 2021 will go down in infamy. That a sci-fi story could match so closely our experience, a warning on every page: we had no excuse not to read and take heed. Its words are brief and powerful.

There was no need for a mock firing squad: people matched out of the office and lined up for their experimental jab, comfortable in their humble place within the system.

The day before Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was arrested, Feb, 12, 1974, he released the text of Live Not by Lies. [5]

“And as for him who lacks the courage to defend even his own soul: Let him not brag of his progressive views, boast of his status as an academician or a recognized artist, a distinguished citizen or general. Let him say to himself plainly: I am cattle, I am a coward, I seek only warmth and to eat my fill.”

[1] Mayurika Chakravorty, Jul 2020 — Science fiction explores the interconnectedness revealed by the coronavirus pandemic

[2] Justus Hope, MD, Desert Review, Jan 24, 2022 — Sudden death by 'Hot Lot' - Dr. Michael Yeadon sounds the Alarm

[3] Radegast, Jan 21, 2022 — Alberta’s new data reveals: The vaccines are causing you to get infected

[4] Dr Vernon Coleman — Brand New Tube

[5] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn , 1974 — Live Not by Lies