The Dice Man

by Luke Rhinehart

“Honesty and frankness?” Dr. Rhinehart said. “Jesus! They’re the worst possible things in normal human relations. ‘Do you really love me?’: this absurd question, so typical of our diseased minds, should always be answered ‘My God No’ or ‘More than mere reality is my love; it is imaginary.’ The more someone tries to be honest and authentic, the more he’s going to be blocked and inhibited. The question ‘How do you really feel about me?’ ought always to be answered with a belt in the teeth. But if someone were asked: ‘Tell me fantastically and imaginatively how you feel about me,’ he’d be free from that neurotic demand for unity and truth. He could express any of his conflicting selves—one at a time of course. He’d be able to play each role to the hilt. He’d be at one with his schizophrenia.”

‘Two roads diverged within a wood, and I, I took the one directed by the Die, and that has made all the difference.’

“We also show them how to use the die as a veto. Every time they do something we ask them to shake a die and if it comes up a six they can’t do it; have to ask the die to choose something else for them. Veto’s a great method but hard. Most of us go through our lives from one thing to the next mechanically, without thought. We study, write, eat, flirt, fornicate, fuck as the result of habitual patterns. ‘Pop’ comes a dice veto: it wakes us up. In theory, we’re working toward the purely random man, one without habit or pattern, eating from zero to six or seven times a day, sleeping haphazardly, responding sexually randomly to men, women, dogs, elephants, trees, watermelons, snails and so on. In practice, of course, we don’t shoot so high.

The psychotic break is caused by his need to avoid admitting that he can act, and he can change, that he can do something about his problems. He can’t face the fact that he’s free, and not the helpless, pitiable object he’s under the illusion he is.

The illusion that an ego controls or has ‘willpower’ must be abandoned. The student’s got to see his relation to the dice first as that of a baby in a rubber raft on a flooded river: each motion of the river is pleasant; he doesn’t need to know where he’s going or when, if ever, he’ll arrive. Motion is all.”

Emotional roulette, for example. The student lists six possible emotions, lets a die choose one and then expresses that emotion as dramatically as he can for at least two minutes. It’s probably the most useful of the dice exercises, letting the student express all kinds of long-suppressed emotions which he usually doesn’t even know he has. Roger Meters reports that a dicestudent of his found after ten minutes of a dice-dictated love for a specific person that he remained in love; in fact, the student has since married her.”

“Then there’s Russian roulette. We’ve got two versions. In one the student creates from three to six unpleasant options and casts a die to see which if any he has to do. In the second, he creates one extremely challenging option—say, quitting a job, insulting a mother or husband, robbing a bank, murder—and gives it a long-shot chance of being chosen.

we have not with our method produced any well-adjusted miserable humans. All of our surviving dicestudents surveyed are completely maladjusted to the insane society. There is thus hope.”

Whereas conventional psychoanalysis sees the desire for an Immaculate Anus as neurotic and counterproductive, we maintain that the desire, like all desires, is good, and causes trouble only when followed too consistently. The individual must come to embrace, in effect, both the Immaculate Anus and the excreted lumps of turd.”

“Big deal, I’m inhuman. But with the human pattern such as it is these days can the word inhuman constitute an insult? Considered in the light of normal, everyday, garden-variety human cruelty in the marketplace, the ghetto, the family, in war, your inhuman refers to the abnormality of my actions, not their level of moral depravity.”

“The suffering our dice-dictated actions causes is clearly nothing as compared man for man to that caused by rational, civilized man. Dice-people are amateurs at evil. What seems to disturb you guys is that others are sometimes manipulated or hurt not by an ego-motivated me but by a dice-motivated me. It’s the seeming gratuity of the occasional suffering we cause that shocks. You prefer purposeful, consistent, solidly structured suffering. The idea that we create love because the dice order us to, that we express love, that we feel love, all because of accident, shatters the fabric of your illusions about the nature of man.” When Dr. Weinburger began to rise in his chair again Dr. Rhinehart simply raised his huge right arm and continued calmly: “But what’s this nature of man you’re so gung-ho to defend? Look at yourselves. Whatever happened to the real inventor in you? to the lover? or the adventurer? or the saint? or the woman? You killed them. Look at yourselves and ask: ‘Is this the Image of God in which man was created?’ ”