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How to Build a Universe: Philip K.Dick on Reality, MediaManipulation, and Human Heroismby Maria Popova

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it,

doesn’t go away.”

Philip K. Dick is as well-known today for his

era-defining science fiction as he is for the series

of unusual experiences he had in the spring of

1974, which he dubbed his “exegesis”.

Occupying the intersection of the scientific, the

philosophical, and the mystical, the exegesis

shaped Dick’s work for the remainder of his life

as he contemplated the grandest and most

granular building blocks of existence.

In a 1978 speech titled “How To Build A

Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days

Later,” found in the altogether mind-bending

1995 anthology The Shifting Realities of Philip

K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (public library), Dick turns

his exegesis-driven inquiry to the nature of reality, the mechanisms of media

manipulation, and the most steadfast — the only — defense we have against the

indignities of manufactured pseudo-reality.

He begins at the very beginning, by examining what reality actually is:

It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which

asked the question “What is reality?”, to someday get an

answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too.

Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred

stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One

day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality

for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class.

She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and

finally said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in

it, doesn’t go away.” That’s all I could come up with. That

was back in 1972. Since then I haven’t been able to define

reality any more lucidly.

But the problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game.

Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities

are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big

corporations, by religious groups, political groups. . . . So I

ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are

bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very

sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic