The Dice Man

by Luke Rhinehart

In the beginning was Chance, and Chance was with God and Chance was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Chance and without him not anything made that was made. In Chance was life and the life was the light of men.

“To be great is to be misunderstood,” Elvis Presley

“We still desire not to desire and hope to be without hope and have the illusion we can be without illusions.”

“To experience something for the first time: a first balloon, a visit to a foreign land. A fine fierce fornication with a new woman. The first paycheck, or the surprise of first winning big at the poker table or the racetrack. The exciting isolation of leaning against the wind on the highway hitchhiking, waiting for someone to stop and offer me a lift, perhaps to a town three miles down the road, perhaps to new friendship, perhaps to death. The rich glow I felt when I knew I’d finally written a good paper, made a brilliant analysis or hit a good backhand lob. The excitement of a new philosophy of life. Or a new home. Or my first child. These are what we want from life and now . . . they seem gone, and both Zen and psychoanalysis seem incapable of bringing them back.”

Rape had been possible for years, decades even, but was realized only when I stopped looking at whether it were possible, or prudent, or even desirable, but without premeditation did it, feeling myself a puppet to a force outside me, a creature of the gods—the die—rather than a responsible agent. The cause was chance or fate, not me. The probability of that die being a one was only one in six. The chance of the die’s being there under the card, maybe one in a million. My rape obviously was dictated by fate. Not guilty.

I must always obey the dice. Lead where they will, I must follow. All power to the die!

Two principles I always took care to follow. First: never include an option I might be unwilling to fulfill; second: always begin to fulfill the option without thought and without quibble. The secret of the successful dicelife is to be a puppet on the strings of the die.

“What you need is a more extensive personal experience with cruelty, with suffering, hunger, fear, sex. Once you’ve experienced more fully these basics there might be some hope of a major breakthrough. Until then none.”

The dice had ordered me to “Be as Jesus” and to be constantly filled with a Christian (pronounced “Chr-eye-steean”) love for everybody I met. I voluntarily walked the children to school that morning, holding their little hands and feeling paternal, benevolent and loving. Larry’s asking me “What’s wrong, Daddy, why are you coming with us?” didn’t faze me in the least. Back in my apartment study I reread the Sermon on the Mount and most of the Gospel of Mark, and when I said good-bye to Lil prior to her leaving on a shopping spree, I blessed her and showed her such tenderness that she assumed something was wrong.

Trying minute after minute to be someone not totally natural to the personality, as Jesus was for me, was hard work. Impossible work, as a matter of fact. During that whole day I noticed that after about forty minutes of being a loving Jesus my system would simply break down into apathy and indifference. If I continued the role past the forty-minute point it was purely mechanical rather than felt.

Why did children seem to be so often spontaneous, joy-filled and concentrated while adults seemed controlled, anxiety-filled and diffused?

thought—what if the development of a sense of self is normal and natural, but is neither inevitable nor desirable? What if it represents a psychological appendix: a useless, anachronistic pain in the side?—or

men should be comfortable in flowing from one role to another;—why aren’t we? We develop a sense of a permanent self: ah, how psychologists and parents lust to lock their kids into some definable cage. Consistency, patterns, something we can label—that’s what we want in our boy.

Patterns are prostitution to the patter of parents. Adults rule and they reward patterns. Patterns it is. And eventual misery.

What if we were to bring up our children differently? Reward them for varying their habits, tastes, roles? Reward them for being inconsistent? What then? We could discipline them to be reliably various, to be conscientiously inconsistent, determinedly habit-free—even of “good” habits.

The child, we are informed, needs to see order and consistency in the world or he becomes insecure and afraid, but it seemed to me he might grow equally well with consistent, dependable inconsistency. Life, in fact, is that way; if parents would only admit and praise inconsistency, children wouldn’t be so frightened of their parents’ hypocrisy or ignorance.

patterns to avoid facing new problems and possible failure; after a while men become bored because there are no new problems. Such is life under the fear of failure.

Fail! Lose! Be bad! Play, risk, dare.

“I am he who can play many games.” That is the essence of the happy child of four, and he never feels he loses. “I am he who is x, y and z, and x, y, and z only”: that is the essence of the unhappy adult. I would try to extend in my children their childishness. In the immortal words of J. Edgar Hoover: “Unless ye become as little children, ye shall not see God.”

I finally told him that the dice man game always had to provide risk, that slightly bad choices had to be there too.

Russian roulette: out of every six alternatives at least one had to be decidedly unpleasant.

I started to follow her back to bed but remembered that following nude women into beds was habitual. When Lil had plopped in and pulled

Habit pulled me toward the bed; the dice pulled back. “I have to think about dinosaurs,” I said and, realizing I’d said it in my normal voice, I repeated it shouting. When I saw that I had used my habitual shout I started to emit a third version, but realized that three of anything approached habit and so half-shouted, half-mumbled, “Breakfast with dinosaurs in bed,” and went into the kitchen.

I rose, did six squats, arms extended, and went to the kitchen. For breakfast I had a hot dog, two pieces of uncooked carrot, coffee with lemon and maple syrup, and toast cooked twice until it was blackened, with peanut butter and radish. Lil was furious; primarily because both Larry and Evie wanted desperately to have for breakfast what I was having and ended up crying in frustration. Lil too.

jogged down Fifth Avenue from my apartment to my office, attracting considerable attention since I was (1) jogging; (2) gasping like a fish drowning in air; and (3) dressed in a tuxedo over a red T-shirt with large white letters declaring The Big Red.

“I’m particularly concerned with my next bowel movement,” I went on. “There seem to me definite limits as to what society will stand for. All sorts of eccentricity and nonsensical horrors can be permitted—wars, murder, marriage, slums—but that bowel movements should be made anywhere except in the toilet seems to be pretty universally considered despicable.”

“Conversations too are a problem,” I said. “Our syntax is habitual, our diction, our coherence. I have a habit of logical thought which clearly must be broken. And vocabulary. Why do I accept the limits of our habitual words. I’m a clod! A clod!”

Slowly and steadily, my friends, I was beginning to go insane. I found that my residual self was changing. When I chose to let the sleeping dice lie and to be my “natural self” I discovered that I liked absurd comments, anecdotes, actions. I climbed trees in Central Park, assumed the yoga position of meditation during a cocktail party and oozed esoteric, oracular remarks every two minutes which confused and bored even me. I shouted, “I’m Batman,” at the top of my lungs at the end of a telephone conversation with Dr. Mann—all not because the dice said so, but because I felt like it.

How we laugh and take joy in the irrational, the purposeless and the absurd. Our longing for these bursts out of us against all the restraints of morality and reason. Riots, revolutions, catastrophes: how they exhilarate us. How depressing it is to read the same news day after day. Oh God, if only something would happen: meaning, if only patterns would break down.

if only a sportscaster would just once say, “Sure is a boring game, folks.” But they don’t. So each of us travels, to Fort Lauderdale, to Vietnam, to Morocco, or gets divorced, or has an affair, or tries a new job, a new neighborhood, a new drug, in a desperate effort to find something new. Patterns, patterns, oh, to break those chains. But we drag our old selves with us and they impose their solid oak frames on all our experiences.

My sleeping a random number of hours at randomly selected times quickly made me irritable, washed out and occasionally high, especially when kicked by drugs or alcohol. When and whether I ate, washed, shaved, brushed my teeth were also dice-determined for a three-day period. As a result, I once or twice found myself using my portable electric razor in the middle of a midtown crunch of people (passersby looking around for the camera crew), brushing my teeth in a nightclub lavatory, taking baths and getting a rubdown at Vic Tanny’s and eating my main meal at 4 A.M. at a Nedick’s.

You must never question the wisdom of the Die. His ways are inscrutable. He leads you by the hand into an abyss and, lo, it is a fertile plain. You stagger beneath the burden he places upon you and, behold, you soar. The Die never deviates from the Tao, nor do you. The desire to manipulate your surrender to the Die so that you may gain from it is futile. Such surrender never frees you from the pains of the ego. You must give up all your struggling, all your purposes, values and goals, and then, only then, when you have given up the belief that you can use the Die to gain some ego end, will you discover liberation from your burdens and your life flow free. There is no compromise: you must surrender everything.

To change man, the audience by which he judges himself must be changed.

My goal was to destroy all sense of an audience: to become without values, evaluators, without desires: to be inhuman, all-inclusive, God.

Shouldn’t I try to turn other people into dice men? If Arlene enjoyed housewife-with-a-lech for a day and Terry call-girl-for-a-day, might not each enjoy other roles the dice might fling her way, as I had? Shouldn’t I be using dice games as dice therapy for my friends and patients?

“You miss the point. Since there is no real enemy, all of life’s wars are games, and the dicelife permits a variety of war games instead of the continual sluggish trench warfare of the typical life.”

And you, Reader, good friend and fellow fool my reader, you, yes you, my sweet cipher, are the Dice Man. Having read this far, you are doomed to carry with you burned forever in your soul the self I’ve here portrayed: the Dice Man. You are multiple and one of you is me. I have created in you a flea which will forever make you itch. Ah, Reader, you never should have let me be born. Other selves bite now and then no doubt. But the Dice Man flea demands to be scratched at every moment: he is insatiable. You will never know an itchless moment again—unless, of course, you become the flea.

We wanted them to come to realize that neither “immorality” nor “emotional breakdowns” earn either condemnation or pity except when the Die so dictates. We wanted them to come to see that in group diceplay they are free of the usual games, rules and behavior patterns. Everything is fake. Nothing is real. No one—least of all us, the leaders—is reliable. When a person becomes reassured that he lives in a totally valueless, unreal, unstable, inconsistent world, he becomes free to be fully all of his selves—as the dice dictate.

Only in a total environment in which nothing is expected does a student feel the freedom necessary to express his host of minority selves clawing for life.

There are work rooms (laundries, offices, therapy rooms, clinics, a jail, kitchens), playrooms (emotion rooms, marriage rooms, love rooms, God rooms, creativity rooms) and life rooms (restaurants, bars, living rooms, bedrooms, moviehouse, etc.). He must spend from two to five hours a day working at various dice-dictated jobs: he waits on tables, sweeps out rooms, makes beds, serves cocktails, acts as a policeman, therapist, clothing clerk, mask maker, prostitute, admissions officer, jailer, etc. In all of these the student is diceliving and playing roles.

he realizes that all other humans are leading chance-dictated multiple lives even though they don’t know it and are always trying to fight it.

in dice therapy we encourage our patients to reach decisions by casting dice. The purpose is to destroy the personality. We wish to create in its place a multiple personality: an individual inconsistent, unreliable and progressively schizoid.”

“My theory is that we all have minority impules which are stifled by the normal personality and rarely break free into action. The minority impulses are the Negroes of the personality. They have not enjoyed freedom since the personality was founded; they have become the invisible men. We refuse to recognize that a minority impulse is a potential full man, and that until he is granted the same opportunity for development as the major conventional selves, the personality in which he lives will be divided, subject to tensions which lead to periodic explosions and riots.”

“Every personality is the sum total of accumulated suppressions of minorities. Were a man to develop no consistent pattern of impulse control he would have no definable personality; he would be unpredictable and anarchic, one might even say, free.”

“In stable, unified, consistent societies the narrow personality had value; men could fulfill themselves with only one self. Not so today. In a multivalent society, the multiple personality is the only one which can fulfill. Each of us has a hundred suppressed potential selves which never let us forget that no matter how mightily we step along the narrow single path of our personality, our deepest desire is to be multiple: to play many roles.

“Your therapies tried to give them a sense of an integral self and failed. Isn’t it just possible that the desire not to be unified, not to be single, not to have one personality may be the natural and basic human desire in our multivalent societies?”

Every society is based upon lies. Our society is based on conflicting lies. The man who lived in a simple, stable, single-lie society absorbed the single-lie system into a unified self and spouted it for the rest of his life, uncontradicted by his friends and neighbors, and unaware that ninety-eight percent of his beliefs were illusions, his values artificial and arbitrary and most of his desires comically ill-aimed.

to ask this man to be honest and true to himself, when his contradictory selves have multiple contradictory answers to most questions, is a safe and economical method of driving him insane.

“If our methods are so bad,” asked Dr. Weinburger harshly, “then why do any of our patients improve at all?” “Because we’ve encouraged them to play new roles,” Dr. Rhinehart answered promptly. “Primarily the role of ‘being honest,’ but also the roles of feeling guilty, having sinned, being oppressed, discovering insights, being sexually liberated and so on. Of course, the patient and therapist are under the illusion that they are getting at true desires, when in fact they are only releasing and developing new and different selves.

“The social consequences of a nation of dicepeople are, by definition, unpredictable. The social consequences of a nation of normal personalities are obvious: misery, conflict, violence, war and a universal joylessness.”