Dick, Dec, Matthews, and Jünger: On Mutant Epistemology (Odd Columns #6)
The man, himself, as drawn by R. Crumb.
In 1974, the science fiction author Phillip K. Dick had a vision that told him that his infant son’s life was in danger. They rushed the child to a hospital, and it was discovered that the apparently healthy child had a potentially deadly inguinal hernia, and he was rushed into surgery. Without intervention, the child would have died within days.
The cover of the first edition of VALIS.
When he recounted the story, Dick attributed his knowledge to a pink laser beam fired into his brain by god in the form of an ancient satellite called VALIS, an episode recounted in a novel of the same name.
Questions arise: was Dick a schizophrenic? Was he simply riding the tail end of a lifetime of substance abuse? And how did he know that his son was in danger?
Dick’s behavior indicated knowledge, but his explanation for it was, frankly, not something one would expect from a sane person, and there were other delusional beliefs, amounting to the continuation of the Roman Empire and a fabricated world history. For all people talk about, the content of his delusions was not new.
Let’s consider another person who suffered from this sort of delusion: the lawyer and famous crank Francis E. Dec, Esq. Dec was a lawyer who suffered from a number of complicated delusions and responded to them with a campaign of pamphleteering and letter-writing. A sample of the things he wrote are as follows:
To All Judges:
First and Second Appellate Division, Superior Court, New York City
Court of Appeals, Albany, New York
U.S. SUPREME COURT , Washington DC
I write DEMANDING a re-hearing of my worse-than-lowest Deadly Gangster police state Criminal Conviction which appeal case was in your farce Deadly Gangster ghetto-Communist Gangster Computer God-manipulated Gangster Court! Below, I state some of the many REASONS for said re-hearing, plus all of my evidence the Attorney General chicanerously forwarded to the Bar Association Grievance Committee for prosecution of felon Gangster mafionic negroidic the BLACK Frank Gulotta - a Gangster Judge, therefore un-prosecutable!
It’s a very particular sort of delusion, though it was also picked up as a running joke by a certain segment of the alternative culture in the nineties and aughts.
Dec’s delusions – featuring motifs of computer technology, organized crime, racism, and a fear of communism – produced no profound actionable insights like Dick’s did. But reading them, one can see elements of a kind of Phildickian narrative unfolding.
A sketch of the Air Loom, based on Matthews’s description, as drawn by John Haslam (1810).
Both of these men showed signs of something called the “influencing machine” delusion – though in Dec’s case it was paranoiac and in Dick’s it was pronoiac (alongside other, more traditionally paranoiac, beliefs.) The first recorded case of this was in the case of James Tilly Matthews, a man who lived near the end of the eighteenth century who was institutionalized and claimed that his thoughts and behaviors were manipulated by a machine called an “air loom” that was controlled by a group he referred to as “the air loom gang”. This was the first and, frankly, the archetypal version of the delusion: there is a machine being operated that manipulates thought and behavior from a distance, and the target of this manipulation is aware of it but helpless to stop themselves.
Photograph of Judge Schreber.
This delusion forms a sort of cultural myth, being referred to by Ken Kesey in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, featuring heavily in the corpus of material related by Judge Daniel Paul Schreber (whose case was interpreted by Freud and whose delusions were heavily dealt with by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,) and forming the background for the work of Richard Sharp Shaver (whose work was heavily influential to later fantasists, even being imported nearly wholesale into Dungeons and Dragons.) While the figure of the Influencing Machine is one that bears examination (including its oddly gendered component, since all those recorded as having suffered from it that I found were men, a bit of an oddity in psychological literature,) that is not the purpose of this piece.
My intention here is to examine a question that has bugged me for several days, since after writing but before posting my essay “Black Pill Bacillus.” That question is deceptively simple: what makes some people (Dick, Dec, and Matthews) insane, while those who believe equally fanciful things – say, that the Covid-19 vaccine is going to insert a microchip into their body that will allow Bill Gates or a similar figure to track them?
You can’t divide them based on the contents of their delusion, because when you look at some of the things said, they are fundamentally the same belief. The only division I can think of is that some of them concoct this belief sui geneiris while others are convinced of it by other people.
Fundamentally, this is a question of the “mutant epistemologies” that I mentioned in that former piece.
Psychological Maladaptation
In college, I minored in psychology. This doesn’t give me any especial insight into psychology, because it was ten years ago and it was only a minor. What it does do is give me a loose familiarity with it and the beginnings of a vocabulary to talk about it with.
As such, while I may use “insane” or similar as a short hand, it’s fundamentally not a useful word to use. One of my favorite professors referred to distortions in thought and behavior as “maladaptations”. That is, the mind can adapt to fit a new situation, much like a species of animal, and some of these adaptations are good and helpful and others are not. It is the job of therapists and psychological professionals to help blunt the negative effects of these maladaptations and help people to suffer less from this.
The definitions at work are not perfect. A psychological disorder is only considered to be present when it causes distress or harm to the person suffering from it and/or the people around them. I think this is a useful thing to keep in mind.
However, there is also the category of “eccentric”, which refers to people who think differently but who do not experience or necessarily cause distress or harm through their different beliefs.
Mutant Epistemologies
By discussing “Mutant Epistemologies” I intend to create a super-category for purposes of my own discussion to group together psychological maladaptation, eccentricity, the socially-transmitted maladaptive breaks from reality found in conspiracy thinking, and the possibility of an unspoken fourth category suggested by this grouping: that of a kind of socially-transmitted, or socially-shared, eccentricity, possibly even one that has beneficial characteristics.
(Note: there’s been a lot of black and white images in this piece, so here’s Albert Hoffman’s bicycle from Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol.)
Something that’s necessary to note here is that many of the things that make so-called psychological disorders maladaptive is a matter of what the psychonauts call “Set and Setting” – the mindset brought in and the social and material reality around the person. While evolutionary psychology seems largely to be bullshit, there is some reason to assume that the more common disorders – Tourette Syndrome, Attention Deficit Disorder, Antisocial Personality Disorder, Schizophrenia, Autism-spectrum disorders – are carried inchoate in the human population because they helped people survive in our paleolithic past. If I understand things correctly, this is an idea that comes up in discussions of neurodiversity – a movement I broadly support, given that I am an overeducated TBI survivor from a family with a history of schizophrenia – and it seems important to me.
From my perspective, the thing to pay attention to is the epistemology at work. By this, I do not mean systematic theories of human knowledge, but the unspoken organizing principles that are at work in each individual’s mind. For the purposes of this discussion, I have on epistemology, you have another, Edgar has another, that man walking the dog outside your window has another, so on and so forth. Some of these resemble one another more and some resemble them less.
We each have an epistemology. It is the way that our mind categorizes the things we know, suspect, feel, and believe. They govern what is thinkable or unthinkable, and what thinkable things are speakable and unspeakable. I am not going to suggest that we categorize or make a specific typology of this, because I do not find such things to be useful or interesting. I am going to admit only one division.
Okay, so, yeah, I got that read of the song from a meme. What of it?
Mutant Epistemologies – differentiated from “Baseline” Epistemologies – are those epistemologies that sharply deviate from the “standard” epistemology that is enshrined in the dominant culture. This is not a matter of natural or good (though, I would like to stress, it is not necessarily a bad thing, either) though it often presents itself as such. Remember the lesson of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” – difference will be punished unless it can be exploited.
Delusion-as-Test-Case
What Mark Dick, Dec, and Matthews as different is that their minds permit the thought that they are being controlled by an exterior force, or that an exterior force is manipulating them, and then the paranoid delusion of the influencing machine is created to explain this. The important thing to note here is that they were only mad in appearances and explanation: they each were being influenced by outside forces, they simply explained it in a way that made them seem a danger to themselves or others.
To my mind, the story about Dick is a story about an incredible intuition: he knew, but could not explain, that something was wrong. He invented an explanation that worked, but it was thankfully an explanation that still permitted him to take the necessary action of taking his child to the hospital.
Dec and Matthews never had the call to perform such an act, though. They acted out in a socially unacceptable fashion based on their delusions.
What you need to remember, though, is that Matthews lived near the start of the industrial revolution: his body was being invaded by something from the outside in the form of industrial runoff, and it perhaps was changing his behavior. Dec came of age in the earliest days of the cold war, and grew up in a deeply racist nation during a moral panic about organized crime. His experience in the law put him in the middle management of a system designed specifically to alter and constrain other’s behavior, to turn them into compliant, robot-like subjects of a functioning capitalist democracy. I’m not going to say that Dec was a failed leftist, but I will say that it’s not impossible to read his delusions as being because he was unable to fully process what was going on in the world around him and it broke him.
Every second of every day, we are bombarded with information. It’s a miracle that we make sense of it even to the limited degree that we do. Sometimes, though, a piece of information that we didn’t consciously register occurs to us, and we call this intuition. Or perhaps a “vibe”. I’m somewhat unclear on what “vibes” are.
The Truman show was the gentlest of the movies in the late 1990s that reproduced the allegory of the cave — other examples include The Thirteenth Floor, eXistenZ, The Matrix and Dark City. Someone has doubtless written on this.
This is not limited solely to the Influencing Machine delusion. One that particularly interests me is the so-called “Truman Show” delusion, which manifests as the belief that one is the unwitting star of a reality television show, and that the people around them are actors, and the events that they see are often “plot twists” in the narrative of their show. It is similar, in some ways, to the Influencing Machine delusion, insofar as it positions the subject experiencing the delusion as in some way important or notable, and the world around them as manipulated for one reason or another.
Of course, we have managed to create a world where this is, in some ways, true: we have largely eliminated this delusion not by curing the distorted thoughts of its sufferers, but by making the delusion true. Social media makes us each equivalent to Jim Carrey’s character, simply an equivalent with poor syndication.
I could run through more examples – the Capgras, Cotard, and Fregoli delusions are all interesting things to examine – but I think the same general thing is at work in each of them: there is a real stimulus or constellation of stimuli that are ignored and then constitute a myth, which then is used as grounds for a narrative that the subject lives within.
Please note: I have no way of testing this, and I could be very wrong. But I don’t see much difference between a paranoid delusion and a conspiratorial belief, and my belief is that some people are more vulnerable to this sort of thing than others. This is not to say that there is a population of people who are “weak minded” or something like that, it’s simply that I think that some people are primed to accept this sort of thing, and sometimes it can lead to a moment of revelation, as with Phillip K. Dick, and sometimes it can lead to a life of ignominy and marginalization, as with Francis E. Dec.
This diagram is being passed around in the right-wing internet as the schematic for the microchip being implanted. It’s just the schematic for a guitar pedal.
It’s entirely possible that there’s something like sublimation going on here: the crowd worried about getting microchipped by the vaccine injection must know that they’re being monitored through their mobile phone, but if the real bugbear is a subdermal monitoring device, then they can ignore the fact that they’re surrendering their anonymity every time they swipe open their screen. They reject the commonsense, and this deformation of their worldview leaves them vulnerable to nonsensical beliefs.
This deformation of the baseline epistemology is perhaps how the titular black pill of that prior piece works: to borrow a phrase from one of my favorite podcasts, The Daily Zeitgeist, a lot of people in the online fascist crowd were born on Third Base thinking that they’d hit a triple, and default to fascism and white supremacy when forced to compete on a more level playing field. Like an immune system overreaction, they are exposed to despair and adopt the fascistic epistemology – a violent, hierarchic epistemology that seeks to supplant the baseline – when they are exposed to despair.
To recap: I define the black pill as the co-occurrence of despair and a mutant epistemology, but it’s a particular one, and I largely wrote this piece to defend the validity of other mutant epistemologies. It’s at the moment when the shock occurs that someone is vulnerable to this sort of quick and easy explanation, and it’s necessary to point out due to the artificially paranoiac character of most fascist movements (see: the antisemitic obsession that characterize traditional Nazism. It’s not that you’ve lost unearned privilege, you actually are exceptional, it’s just that they are holding you back.)
This doesn’t mean that having a mutant epistemology is bad. It means that there’s a point of danger when you’re changing epistemologies and you have to be careful. Trying to return everyone to a baseline epistemology is not only difficult to the point of impossibility, it’s frankly undesirable: without differences in perspective, society would not only stagnate, but those returned to the baseline – almost all harmless bystanders – would suffer. If the problem is cruelty, it can’t be fixed with cruelty.
What is needed, instead, is greater care practiced by people who are intentionally changing their epistemologies and of those who have suffered the shock of having their basic beliefs disproved, lest they fall to the mutant epistemology that characterized fascism. This care doesn’t necessarily mean those original beliefs are allowed to reassert themselves, but it does mean acknowledging the humanity of the people in question.
Let’s introduce our final character: Jünger (left) and Hofmann.
I wish to consider another character in this discussion, just to head something else off: one of the earlier experimenters with LSD was Enst Junger, a german writer and philosopher who served in the German Imperial Army, the Weimar army before its demobilization, and in the army of the Third Reich – he was at times critical of the Nazis, but he was a nationalist who gloried in the idea of war and destruction. This was not something that changed upon his encounter with psychedelics.
That fact is notable, because there is definitely a cadre on the left that seems to think of mind-expansion and psychedelics as an unalloyed good, that giving war criminals DMT and LSD would result in repentance for their crimes. This isn’t founded in anything true. While these drugs might be a shortcut to an epistemic shift, to adopting a different epistemology, we can’t view that as necessarily a good thing or a bad thing.
Our epistemologies are not good or bad. They are important. They are things to which we need to pay attention, but examining an epistemology is only part of the work, not the whole task.
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