The Man In the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

The Man in the High Castle is at times meandering and doesn’t properly integrate the ideas it raises into the story, but it shows the impotence of mysticism and irrationality of racism and fascism.

The purpose of this Substack is to reflect on the ways fiction authors express their philosophical ideas in their works. Where possible, I will integrate those themes with other ideas and evaluate them. Though I may occasionally comment on various aspects of the writing, these articles are not reviews. For those who are unfamiliar with the works discussed, I will include the relevant details from the story in the “context” section, so if you are familiar with the work, I recommend you skip that section. I will try to avoid the most important spoilers, but there will be some, as it is often impossible to properly analyze the meaning of a story without accounting for how it ends.

Context

What if the Axis Powers had won World War II? This alternate history is the setting for The Man in the High Castle, in which Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan have occupied the east and west coasts (respectively) of the former United States, leaving an unoccupied zone between them. The societies each regime creates are harshly racist. The Japanese, whom we spend the most time with, institute a society in which they, of course, are on top, only slightly ahead of the Aryans; Americans are tolerated, but rarely trusted with important positions; Chinese people are discriminated against; Jews are arbitrarily imprisoned; and black people are enslaved.

The novel follows a few different characters, including Nazi and Japanese officials in San Francisco, an American who owns a shop selling American antiquities to Japanese collectors (Robert Childan), and the recently separated Juliana and Frank Frink (the latter being a Jew who’s changed his appearance and name to hide that fact). These characters rarely interact.

Several of the storylines reference a mysterious fictional novel: The Grasshopper Lies Heavy by Hawthorn Abendsen. It depicts another alternate history, one in which an aggressive Great Britain is primarily responsible for defeating the Axis Powers, but then turns its military might to the United States. Unsurprisingly, the Nazis have banned the novel—which makes it even more intriguing to some characters.

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Major Ideas:

• Mysticism is an ineffective guide to action

• Racism leads to dehumanization and alienation

• Fascism is an irrational philosophy

Mysticism is an ineffective guide to action

In Dick’s alternate history, the Japanese have adopted the I Ching—an ancient Chinese text that claims to enable one to see the future—as a way of guiding their actions, and so have many of the American characters. Frank Frink, for example, consulted it when deciding whether to start a new business, and Hawthorn Abendsen used it to help him write his famous book.

Using the I Ching consists of dividing yarrow sticks into different groups randomly, manipulating them, and counting the results, which correspond to a “hexagram” that purports to give guidance or answer a question. In other words, chance and ancient, vague words are endowed with a mystic power to reveal truth. The book gives no indication that there is actually any kind of force in the fictional world that would make such a method likelier to provide useful or true information than in the real world. Many of the characters remain just as lost and purposeless as they were before consulting the book.

Despite this lack of evidence for its efficacy, mysticism (the idea that a supernatural power is the source of truth) is rife among most of the characters we encounter, regardless of background. Frank is especially motivated by this idea. Despite evidence to the contrary, Frank views the world as one in which neither he nor the others around him have genuine agency; they’re merely pushed around by mysterious forces outside their control. He is motivated primarily by wanting to win Juliana back; she, he thinks, is “a literal invention of God’s, dropped into his life for reasons he would never know” (12). 

If this is the way one approaches the world, then it’s hardly surprising that he would be willing to trust the I Ching—regardless of how little it helps him. And Frank isn’t the only one; Juliana and Hawthorn are both purposeless and unhappy, and following the advice they get from the I Ching or from mystical insights doesn’t relieve that. In short, the misery and senseless violence fascism has encouraged people to appeal to supernatural sources of truth, but because these have no basis in reality, they’re completely powerless to improve people’s lives. 

Racism leads to dehumanization and alienation

Robert Childan, perhaps the most interesting character in the book, learns to free himself from the racism that pervades his society. In the beginning, he totally buys into the hierarchized view that the Japanese occupiers present. He’s completely obsessed with how others view him—not only potential customers, but also slaves and Chinese manual laborers who could never dream of affording his expensive wares (19).

Many have pointed out that racism involves a kind of “othering”; racists view those of other races as less human than people of their own race.¹ When you treat morally insignificant characteristics, such as skin color, as determining or heavily influencing people’s worth, the natural conclusion is that those who are sufficiently different from you in that way are less human than you are. This, of course, is nonsense, and highlights the irrationality of racism. Childan, interestingly, has accepted not only that those of “lesser” races are inferior to him, but also the idea that the Japanese are somehow better than white people—which also leads to him thinking that even his Japanese friends are somehow not human (100).

Stories that show someone overcoming racism often depict a genuine connection forming between two people of “opposing” races. This is not the route Dick takes. Rather, Childan learns to stand by his own judgment (rather than giving in to his Japanese customers’ views) by defying their evaluation of some American artwork he’s attempting to sell. This act of integrity is the beginning of his learning to throw off the idea that the Japanese are inherently superior to Americans, and therefore to have a healthier self-esteem and a more rational way of dealing with others.

Fascism is an irrational philosophy

In other works, Nazis are often portrayed as emotionless soldiers and manufacturers, intent upon remaking the world in their soulless vision, and Hitler is portrayed as a cold being who wanted to force everyone to behave in accordance with strict fascist discipline. In actuality, though, National Socialism was riddled with emotionalism, mysticism, and anti-intellectualism. “We must distrust the intelligence and the conscience, and must place our trust in our instincts,” declared Hitler. And, he said, “People set us down as enemies of the intelligence. We are.”²

Dick highlights this fact with two different commentaries on the Nazis. In the first, a German character reflects that, 

[The Nazis’] view; it is cosmic. Not a man here, a child there, but an abstraction: race, land. Volk. Land. Blut. Ehre. [People. Country. Blood. Honour.] Not of honourable men but of Ehre itself, honour; the abstract is real, the actual is invisible to them. Die Güte [the good] but not good men, this good man….and that is fatal to life (34-35).

This formulation, although somewhat unintegrated with the rest of the plot, is nevertheless an admirably precise statement of one of the most fundamental and underappreciated problems with Nazi ideology: disconnection with reality. The way it views abstractions as though they were more real than actual human beings, is reminiscent of Plato’s idea that there’s another world—the World of Forms—that contains the essences of everything, and what we see on Earth is only a pale imitation of that more real world. So you can never fully understand reality, because your mind doesn’t interact with that world. Of course, history speaks to the horrendous results of the Nazis’ implementation of this metaphysical view.

Later, in what at first might seem to be a contradiction to the idea that, according to fascist ideology, abstractions precede reality, an Italian character comments that he’s “not an intellectual—Fascism has no need of that. What is wanted is the deed. Theory derives from action” (141). But in fact, this is perfectly aligned with the idea that you can’t ever fully understand this world—so you must act, act without thinking to fulfill a desire. “A violently active, dominating, intrepid, brutal youth—that is what I am after,” Hitler explained. “I will have no intellectual training. Knowledge is ruin to my young men.”³ Or, as one Nazi intellectual put it, “The deed is all, the thought nothing!”⁴ On the fascist view, strength of will is the thing that really moves the world.

Fascism is decidedly irrational; it is an ideology that is untethered from reality and relies on emotionalism, mysticism, and blind action. Several characters in The Man in the High Castle seem to understand this, and one of the virtues of the book is its exploration of that truth.

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Side Note

There is an Amazon Prime show inspired by this book. Though it takes the same basic premise and uses many of the same characters, it has a very different (and in my view, much more interesting and better integrated) plot. The show focuses less on the mystic side of things, and it glosses over the socialist side of the Nazis (which the book briefly discusses), but it does do a nice job of showing the horrors of fascism on individuals in a gripping way—with a sci-fi twist that’s only hinted at in the book.

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In Conclusion

Although the plot in The Man in the High Castle is meandering and doesn’t properly integrate the ideas it raises into the story, it shows the impotence of mysticism and the irrationality of racism and fascism, making it largely true to life (if somewhat depressing). This, along with its pessimistic tone and purposeless characters, make it a rather uninspiring, and occasionally confusing read, despite its fascinating premise.

1. Racism is central to this story, and is an irrational and destructive form of collectivism. But I wish to point out that “race” is not a sound biological concept; genetically, there is as much variation within a “race” as there is outside of it, and the groupings people make are loose ones based largely on characteristics that often exist on a spectrum—most notably, skin color.

2. Hermann Rauschning, The Voice of Destruction (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1940), accessed via Archive.org, https://archive.org/details/voiceofdestructi027169mbp/page/n5/mode/2up, 224.

3. Adolf Hitler, quoted in Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America, (New York: Meridian, 1982), 48.

4. L.G. Tirala, originally published in Rasse, Geist und Seele (Munich, 1935), 220; quoted in The Ominous Parallels, 57.