"I watch the children watching TV and at first I am afraid of what they are being taught, and then I realise, They can’t be corrupted or destroyed. They watch, they listen, they understand, and, then, where and when it is necessary, they reject. There is something enormously powerful in a child’s ability to withstand the fraudulent. A child has the clearest eye, the steadiest hand. The hucksters, the promoters, are appealing for the allegiance of these small people in vain. True, the cereal companies may be able to market huge quantities of junk breakfasts; the hamburger and hot dog chains may sell endless numbers of unreal fast-food items to the children, but the deep heart beats firmly, unreached and unreasoned with. A child of today can detect a lie quicker than the wisest adult of two decades ago. When I want to know what is true, I ask my children. They do not ask me; I turn to them."
They detect the first lie, yes, but what about the second lie?
There's an excellent point being made – if you try to engineer a world by insulating children from the harsh realities of it, you'll make the next generation extremely vulnerable to the simplest exploitation or difficulty.
I really want to see that Paris TV interview with him and Norman Spinrad that he talks about. I checked youtube, nothing. After some googling I found this page[1] which notes that, "apparently a tape of this is available for viewing at the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel, in Paris".
So I searched the ina.fr site, but apparently they haven't digitized it. This is a long shot, but does anybody who speaks French want to ask them? Their contact info lists 'assistance@ina.fr'. It just sounds way too surreal and odd to be hidden away forever.
> It reminds me of a headline that appeared in a California newspaper just before I flew here. SCIENTISTS SAY THAT MICE CANNOT BE MADE TO LOOK LIKE HUMAN BEINGS. It was a federally funded research program, I suppose.
It was particularly interesting to me how PKD's themes of simulacra, Disneyland, and Watergate closely matched those of Jean Baudrillard who wrote[1], somewhat more pessimistically but very much in the same vein as PKD, in 1981:
... Watergate. You remember this. Nixon. Wiretaps in the
plants. Deepthroat. All that jazz. Watergate was the exact
same fucking thing as Disneyland—an imaginary thing whose
only purpose is to distract us from the fact that every
last thing is now imaginary. But where Disneyland is a
fictional magic land, Watergate is instead a “scandal.”
The real scandal beneath the surface is that there is no
difference between facts and bullshit. Both the CIA and
the journalists from the Washington Post who broke the
story use the same tactics. What Watergate did was create
a fiction moral compass of sorts. All politics are
permanently buttfucked, but if we occasionally point
fingers at some buttfucker who is doing some serious
buttfucking, it creates this sense that there are less
serious degrees of buttfucking and even possibly regular,
wholesome vagfucking. ...
A bit unpleasant to say that about someone we know had enduring mental health problems - hallucinations and delusions, and some drug-related stuff too.
They detect the first lie, yes, but what about the second lie?