escape from the black iron prison
Philip K Dick coined the phrase “black iron prison” to describe the illusory world that we are trapped in, forever living and reliving the first century anno domini. It is an instrument of the tyrannical Empire, initially identified with Rome but also identified with any wielder of imperialist power descended from Rome, culminating with the tyrannical elements that rule the United States. Dick identified Richard Nixon as the apex of this tyranny. (God only knows what Dick would’ve thought of George W Bush and Dick Cheney.)
The Black Iron Prison was one of the revelations that came to Dick in his “pink laser ray” incident, of which he writes a semi-autobiographical account in his book Valis. The incident has been alternately and sometimes simultaneously interpreted as a true vision, the product of a psychotic breakdown, or an extraordinarily skillfully, subtly wrought allegory a la John of Patmos’ Book of Revelation.
Interestingly, the Black Iron Prison has become a standard trope of science fiction, and has in fact penetrated into popular culture, with the eminence of the movie “The Matrix”, which is essentially a technological implementation of the Black Iron Prison.
Philip K Dick was also well-versed with Christian Gnosticism, and basically identifies the Gospel regarding Jesus Christ as the antidote to imperialistic tyranny, and as the way out of the Black Iron Prison. Indeed, his recurring image of salvation from the Prison is that of early Christians from the first century A.D. destroying the prison from the outside. Dick weaves Christianity in with cryptic tales describing an ancient extraterrestrial culture that has been watching over humanity and a life force made entirely of information, which he dubbed “plasmates”, which again seems to anticipate much of early 21st century science fiction, which in turn anticipates the so-called Vingean Singularity, in which human beings find a way to “upload” themselves as pure information.
Using this paradigm, the gods of early human culture can be reimagined as extremely distributed, telekinetic Artificial Intelligences. (The most explicit example of such in early 21st century SF is The Eschaton, which is a pan-galactic AI in a series of novels written by Charlie Stross. However, Wintermute/Neuromancer from William Gibson’s writing certainly prefigures this.)
Naturally, many people have reinterpreted the Black Iron Prison more generally. Some have taken it to actually mean the material existence of their body—we are trapped in decaying flesh, and escape from the Black Iron Prison means transcending the Singularity. However, this is fraught with Manichaeistic ideas. While such dualism is pervasive in Gnostic Christianity, it is not clear that Dick subscribed to a simplistic paradigm where good equals spirit and evil equals flesh.
Others interpret it as the socially constructed reality that pervades early 21st century life, woven from the barrage of information assailing us from printed material, the TV, and through the Internet. This interpretation of the Prison is partially rooted in George Orwell’s nightmarish vision in 1984. Whereas Orwell envisioned that the Government would have supreme control of all information flow, our current world finds its information flow in the hands of multinational corporations. Still, it all amounts to the same thing. The media actively creates our reality. (See the definitions for Reality-based Community and Truthiness if you want to understand what I mean.)
Dick writes about this quite a bit. In our rapidly globalizing, capitalistic society, the majority of information is dedicated to the purpose of getting people to buy things they don’t need. The media’s reliance on truthiness is due to the fact that most people are interested in what they believe is true, not what is actually true. And audience interest generates ratings (and page views). And ratings and page views attract advertisers. No wonder actual facts have fallen to the way-side. Facts just don’t sell cars and game consoles.
This, more than anything else, is probably the reason why the American economy of the early 21st century is now collapsing under the weight of truthiness. As one would say it in the obsolete slang of the late 20th century, “Reality bites.”
Another school of thought, however, equates the Prison with individual perception. In other words, the walls of the prison are your qualia. In this scenario, there is no real escape from the Prison.
Well, except Death.
And I got to thinking about how J.R.R. Tolkien saw Death as a Gift from God. Whether or not there is an afterlife, dying is a surefire way to exit the Prison.
And I remember the last scene from Terry Gilliam’s brilliant movie “Brazil” in which, despite being captured and having his brain invaded, the protagonist still manages to escape his torturers.
Mr. Helpmann He’s got away from us, Jack.
Jack Lint ‘Fraid you’re right, Mr. Helpmann. He’s gone.
But even qualia can be circumvented at least temporarily without having to die, if you’re willing to use pharmacologic agents, which I suppose was a major trope of the 1960s era. As we learn more about neurobiology and neurochemistry, it becomes readily apparent that the functioning brain is really a complex filter implemented as a Turing Machine that prioritizes the information flooding your sensory inputs. And, strangely, even early 21st century physics seems to have imbibed from Dick’s well. Renowned scientists such as Gerard ‘t Hooft, Leonard Susskind, and John Wheeler have theorized that perhaps our three-dimensional universe (four-dimensional if you include time) is in fact a holographic projection of the underlying 11-dimensional reality posited by String Theory.
The problem that Dick realized, and the problem that the Wachowski Brothers makes explicit in their “Matrix” Trilogy, is that most people don’t actually want to escape the Black Iron Prison. This is the fundamental conflict of human society. People can be quite happy living in an illusion. The problem is that it’s hard to keep an illusion intact when the people you interact with refuse to believe in this illusion as well. I’m not saying that stripping away illusions is a bad thing, though. You have no right to impose your illusion on others. And like Galileo once said, “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.” This is, I suppose, the fatal flaw of capitalism. At some point, everyone comes to realize that the lifestyle of the consumer is merely a version of the Myth of Sisyphus. While money can buy a good illusion, money still can’t buy happiness, and the realization that everything is ultimately futile makes it exceedingly difficult to fallback on one’s illusions.
So is it actually possible to be happy while accepting the reality that entropy wins in the end? (And even if it doesn’t you and I certainly won’t be around to survive the impending Big Crash, and extremely distributed hyperintelligences probably won’t make it through either.)
I think so. Sure, this is probably yet another illusion. Like the fugitive from the Black Iron Prison who finds himself trapped within an even bigger prison, or the escapee from the Matrix who finds herself in yet another simulated reality, pure unfiltered reality is simply not an option for the mind that has not been doped up with NMDA antagonists (which is a class of drugs that happen to include things like dextromethorphan, ketamine, and PCP, but also prescription drugs like Namenda® for the treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease and ALS. Hmmm. Maybe that’s why Stephen Hawking can see all 11-dimensions.) But some prisons are more luxurious than others. Dick once said that reality is whatever doesn’t go away when he stops believing in it. I guess reality is simply whatever illusions I’m left with when I finally get tired of trying to escape them.
