I don't get it.

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>>8437181
>A kind of pulp fiction Kafka

>>8437181
everything there is to get about it is expressed much better in Blade Runner.

>>8437187
>A prophet

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>>8437219
>>8437187
>The New York Times

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i take it none of you have ever spent any time with serious speed freaks? they go on and on about their personal theories ("Everyone around me is a robot"), endlessly elaborating them and going off onto unusual tangents. PKD just wrote all of his down.

also he was a robot.

>>8437199
Except, you know, the whole plot, which is cut from the movie.

>>8437181
It's about the nature of our humanity contrasted with that of which seeks to strip us of it.
We can be more deluded and even nastier than the machinery we create, but at the end of the day we share a kind of empathy and yearning for divinity we can't escape, even when we try to suppress it because of the circumstances we find ourselves in, or are being told to do so by external forces.

Dick got the idea while researching The Man in the High Castle. He read this letter one of the guards posted at Auschwitz asking for a transfer because the wails of the dying were annoying him and keeping him up during sleep hours. What struck Dick was the fact the man seemed not to be haunted by the circumstance, rather he was just complaining about noise the way you'd do if your neighbors are always watching their tv too loud.

>>8438324
Quite the contrary. I've met many a people who did many drugs. And that's why philip is so boring predictable and mundane to me and why his characters all remind me of the retarded people I was hanging around with when I was 20. If you want to give him credit for that, sure. But it's easy to write characters that go nowhere and no nothing and do nothing but drugs. You just have to go nowhere and do nothing and know nothing but drugs.

>>8438626
>I've met many a people who did many drugs.

how many earnest speed freaks have you met? the ones that worship it as a profane religion, not the weekend tweekers. people like Rory Hayes. the ones whose brains are 3/4 burned out. perhaps you're not listening, because this is extremely important to get across, but i first discovered this principle while i was doing speed and thinking about how the patterns of history repeat themselves, almost like the harmonics of a sound made long ago as it dies out, you notice how the Romans, the Germans and America all use the Eagle as their symbol? What's so amazing about eagles that they should be a nation's totem, and what does that say about the people who chose it? Why not something with a little more grace, like the Bower bird - a creature that devotes almost all of its time to preparing an elaborate nest for its mate, even down to selecting items of a particular color and arranging them neatly - and have you noticed how many robots there are among us these days? perhaps you didn't notice because you're one of them, but that's fine, a robot is something to be, i'm not biased against mechanical life because if you think about it most of the life in the universe has to be mechanical in order to survive the harsh conditions on a planet when the ecosystem goes to hell because they cut down all the trees, and who's to say machines can't be as flexible and even creative as an organic life form? and if you look at so-called "organic" life at the molecular level it's all very mechanical, proteins and such connecting and disconnecting according to the laws of physics, being a robot doesn't necessarily mean you aren't capable of the finer qualities of life, love, dedication, empathy, respect, so if you look at it that way there isn't really any distinction between being a human and being a robot, HEY, COME BACK, I WANT TO TELL YOU ABOUT HOW THE EMPIRE NEVER ENDED -

>>8438783
10/10 you made an oldfag smile :)

>>8437181
What's not to get? It's about what makes us human.

Mercerism is a religion that promotes community and empathy, and humility. It is a construct, made to unite people after nuclear war, but it is validated by the genuine feelings it engenders.

Humanity is defined by empathy. Dick suggests that people can be bereft of humanity by introducing Deckard's bounty hunter counterpart, whose lack of empathy for the androids is contrasted with his own. Deckard mistakes him for a robot, even.

All of this is clear on the page. Dick is trying to show us that to have empathy, humility, and care about your community is to be humane. It is clear on the page - hardly James Joyce.