Martian Time-Slip

by Philip K. Dick

Better to succumb to the schizophrenic process, join the rest of the world.

Strange, he thought, how character shows itself. The old man was in touch with some level of knowledge which told him how to behave, not in the social sense, but in a deeper, more permanent way.

“They’re smart when it comes to what concerns them. And maybe that helps us see what true smartness is; it isn’t having read a lot of books, or knowing long words . . . it’s being able to spot what’s to our advantage. It’s got to be useful to be real smartness.”

Its advantage over a human teacher lay in its capacity to deal with each child individually. It tutored, rather than merely teaching. A teaching machine could handle up to a thousand pupils and yet never confuse one with the next; with each child its responses altered so that it became a subtly different entity. Mechanical, yes—but almost infinitely complex. The teaching machines demonstrated a fact that Jack Bohlen was well aware of: there was an astonishing depth to the so-called “artificial.”

Perhaps, he had once conjectured, it was because there really was such a condition as autism. It was a childhood form of schizophrenia, which a lot of people had; schizophrenia was a major illness which touched sooner or later almost every family. It meant, simply, a person who could not live out the drives implanted in him by his society. The reality which the schizophrenic fell away from—or never incorporated in the first place—was the reality of interpersonal living, of life in a given culture with given values; it was not biological life, or any form of inherited life, but life which was learned. It had to be picked up bit by bit from those around one, parents and teachers, authority figures in general . . . from everyone a person came in contact with during his formative years.

True autism, Jack had decided, was in the last analysis an apathy toward public endeavor; it was a private existence carried on as if the individual person were the creator of all value, rather than merely the repository of inherited values.

And Jack Bohlen, for the life of him, could not accept the Public School with its teaching machines as the sole arbiter of what was and what wasn’t of value. For the values of a society were in ceaseless flux, and the Public School was an attempt to stabilize those values, to jell them at a fixed point—to embalm them. The Public School, he had long ago decided, was neurotic. It wanted a world in which nothing new came about, in which there were no surprises. And that was the world of the compulsive-obsessive neurotic; it was not a healthy world at all.

It made the fixed, rigid, compulsive-neurotic Public School seem a reference point by which one could gratefully steer one’s course back to mankind and shared reality. It made him comprehend why a neurosis was a deliberate artifact, deliberately constructed by the ailing individual or by a society in crisis. It was an invention arising from necessity.

That’s what they mean when they say the term schizophrenia isn’t a diagnosis; it’s a prognosis—it doesn’t say anything about what you have, only about how you’ll wind up.”

Insanity—to have to construct a picture of one’s life, by making inquiries of others.