The Penultimate Truth

"It has taken thousands of generations to achieve," the A-class leady concluded. "Hundreds of centuries of bloodshed and destruction. But each war was a step toward uniting mankind. And now the end is in sight: a world without war. But even that is only the begi

"The conquest of space," breathed Colonel Borodsky.

"The meaning of life," Moss added.

"Eliminating hunger and poverty," said Taylor.

The leady opened the door of the ship. "All that and more. How much more? We ca

The door closed and the ship took off toward their new home.

The second source-story for the novel was published in _If_ (August 1955), and its title, "The Mold of Yancy," was intended, in a slightly emended form, _In the Mold of Yancy_, as the original title of the book. It concerns the conspiracy of the yance-men of Callisto, a satellite of Jupiter, to brainwash the guileless Callistotes into a condition of abject conformity by means of the televised speeches of a (nonexistent) homespun philosopher who is a cross between Arthur Godfrey and George Orwell's Big Brother. The problem is resolved not by revealing the deception to the gullible population but by _using_ the Yancy ma

It is clear, even in that early story, that Dick's interest in the premise is more with the secret power exercised by hidden persuaders, such as advertising copywriters, speechwriters, and filmmakers, than with the moral question of the legitimacy of such persuasion. It's less clear whether, as he wrote "The Mold of Yancy," Dick recognized his personal fascination and identification with the yance-men of Callisto, but surely by the time he had decided to rework that old material into a novel, he knew himself to be a yance-man--albeit one employed in the lower echelons of the power structure--as a hack writer producing sci-fi paperbacks. By way of signaling that fact and of sharing it with the unhappy few who could be counted on to read his hack novels as a phantasmal form of autobiography, Dick gave the Agency that is responsible for this global deception the then-current address of his own literary agent, Scott Meredith, at 580 Fifth Avenue.

What it meant, for Dick--as for his novel's protagonist, Joseph Adams--to be a yance-man was that he knew, as most of his fellow citizens did not, that the real sociopolitical function of the cold war and the arms race was to guarantee comfortable "demesnes" for corporate executives and other officials of the military-industrial establishment. Only as long as there was the menace of an external enemy would a majority of people agree to their own systematic impoverishment. But if one's "enemy" was in the same situation with respect to its captive populations, then a deal could be struck to keep their reciprocal menace ever-threatening--not at all a difficult task with the unthinkable power of the nuclear arsenals both sides possessed.

In another novel, _The Zap Gun_, conceived and written in the same few months of spring 1964 that produced _The Penultimate Truth_, Dick hypothesized a very similar conspiracy between the superpowers. The hero of that novel, Lars Powderdry, is a weapons fashions designer whose imposing but impotent creations are derived, telepathically, from an Italian horror comic, _The Blue Cephalopod Man from Titan_. The moral of both novels is clear: Government is a conspiracy against the people, and it is maintained by the illusion of a permanent crisis that exists, for the most part, as a media event.

Such a view of world affairs was much less common in the early sixties than it has become since Watergate, but it was surely not original to Philip Dick. Its most forceful expression is probably found in George Orwell's _1984_, in which a perpetual state of war and shifting alliances among the three superpowers provide the basis for totalitarian rule, and in which the head of state is, like Talbot Yancy, a chimera. Many critics have pointed out that _1984_ is intended, not as a prediction or a warning against some dire possible future, but rather a nighmarishly hyperbolic picture of the actual state of affairs at the time it was being written, a meaning concealed in the title: 1984 = 1948.

The great difference between Orwell's world-nightmare and Dick's is that the possibility of nuclear holocaust has not yet informed Orwell's vision, while it dominates Dick's-and often obscures it. Never mind that the future Dick has imagined _could not_ come into being, that the radiation released by a nuclear war would have had far more awful and widespread consequences than the singeing represented in _The Penultimate Truth_. The emotional basis of the inability to comprehend nuclear reality has been compellingly discussed by Jonathan Schell in _The Fate of the Earth_, where, after demonstrating the virtual certainty of human extinction as a result of a large-scale nuclear war, he argues:

It thus seems to be in the nature of extinction to repel emotion and starve thought, and if the mind, brought face to face with extinction, descends into a kind of exhaustion and dejection it is surely in large part because we know that mankind ca

Might not the congruent sense of "exhaustion and dejection" pervading the first chapters of _The Penultimate Truth_ be symptomatic of Dick's natural inability to think the unthinkable--that is, to imagine the aftermath of nuclear war in plausibly dire terms?

Of course, Dick never intended to write a plausible, realistic postholocaust novel. Readers who wanted a verismo version of their own future deaths might read _On the Beach_ (novel, 1959; movie, 1959). Dick has another zeitgeist to summon, a new wisdom that is at once happier and blacker, the Spirit of '64.

He simply denies that the cold war is happening.

It is a denial we all learned to make, having passed through the twin crises of 1962 and 1963, the Missile Crisis and the Assassination. Robert Frost died alone, after all, and the rest of us, by and large, survived. If we'd never bothered listening to the news, there'd have been no reason to be fussed. Life went on. The Beach Boys produced new and better songs. Ditto Detroit and cars. That segment of the entertainment industry devoted to politics had an election, Johnson versus Goldwater, and the plot was that Goldwater would lead us into war. So we voted, by and large, for Johnson.

But that's getting ahead of the story, since this ca

Consider our presidents. Up to the age of fifteen, Dick would have known but one, F.D.R., and he would undoubtedly have shared in the idolatry accorded Roosevelt in the war years, Dick being eleven years old in 1941. It can be maintained (and often has been) that two of the next three presidents--Truman, Eisenhower, and Ke

Never was a political myth so consciously and deliberately created or so assiduously promoted, in this case by the very people who had deplored Madison Avenue's participation in President Eisenhower's campaigns. As Norman Mailer wrote in his account of the 1960 Democratic convention, which helped to fix Ke