Dick, Philip K.

Philip K. Dick ● If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others (1977)

Andrea Cirla · Feb 21, 2026 · partial coverage

• Philip K. Dick
• orthogonal time
• alternate worlds
• programmed reality
• *The Man in the High Castle*
• *Flow My Tears
• the Policeman Said*
• Nixon
• Christianity
• Brahman
• déjà vu
• gnosticism
• science fiction

Coverage note: full for what the captions contain (about thirty-three minutes; YouTube auto-captions with some punctuation, mostly accurate; the transcript is cut off mid-sentence at the end, during the Aphrodite passage, and a few phrases are garbled)

Core ideas

Orthogonal time. Dick opens with a joke about cutting two-thirds of his speech and then proposes a topic "which may not exist at all": orthogonal or right-angle time, a lateral axis along which change happens sideways, alongside the linear past-present-future axis. His metaphor is a rich patron whose servants hang a new picture every day; when they run out, they secretly repaint the existing one (paint out a tree, paint in a little girl), so the patron sees something both new and familiar and feels "I seem to remember a tree, though, and there is no tree." The idea, he says, is not self-contradictory.

The kingdom and the programmer. He reads Christ's puzzling answers about where the kingdom of God is as pointing to a lateral arrangement of overlapping realms, from the unspeakably malignant to the beautiful, which living men can cross; Christ taught the method, but Roman authority crushed it and the secret was lost. He thinks of the reality that wins out as chosen by a "programmer-reprogrammer" (God) who plays a chess game against a blind "dark counterplayer" (a term he credits to Joseph Campbell); each thesis and antithesis yields a synthesis that improves on the previous world, and the prayer libera me domine asks to be moved along the lateral axis. Clues would be fleeting: a light switch that was always elsewhere, a reflex for an air vent that is not there, and above all déjà vu, the sense that we are literally reliving a segment of linear time after a variable was changed in the past.

Memories of a worse world. Dick says that a worse world should be what such memories recall, and claims he has them: after sodium pentothal for wisdom-tooth extraction in February 1974, memories returned of a police-state America, which he says he had already written as fiction in The Man in the High Castle and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. He connects the March-August 1974 events to Nixon's removal, a reprogrammed variable laid decades earlier. He describes a "track A" (police tyranny, in which he thinks he did not live past March 1974), "track B" (ours) and a "track C" garden world he glimpsed for about six hours in February 1975, a non-Christian Arcadia with Aphrodite at the water's edge. He recounts a woman, like Juliana Frink in Man in the High Castle, who came to his door having read all his novels and told him that his fiction was in a literal sense true, and he identifies the omnipresent entity he perceived with Brahman, "the fire within the flint". His lifelong conviction: any society in which people meddle in other people's business is not a good society, and a state that "knows more about you than you know about yourself" must be overthrown.

Excerpts