Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
[… But] unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind.
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The bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans—as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves.
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The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.
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But another way to control the minds of people is to control their perceptions. If you can get them to see the world as you do, they will think as you do. Comprehension follows perception. The blank are filled in retrospectively. And falsified. [And] we [participate] unknowingly in the creation of a spurious reality.
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What is the authentic human? (…) The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves.
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I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not.
— PK Dick, “How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later”