"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"
About this Quote
Language, in Philip K. Dick's hands, is never neutral wallpaper; it's the control panel. This line distills his lifelong obsession with unstable reality into a political technology: if reality is partly a shared agreement, then whoever edits the agreement edits the world. Dick isn’t praising eloquence. He’s warning that words are the most scalable form of power because they don’t just describe experience, they pre-sort it.
The first sentence frames "reality" as something you can work on, like a machine. "Basic tool" is chillingly practical, stripping manipulation of its melodrama. The second sentence tightens the vise: meaning isn’t an academic debate, it’s a lever over bodies. The phrase "the people who must use the words" is doing a lot of work. Must. Not choose. Dick points at how institutions force vocabulary onto us - bureaucracies, media, employers, states - and then punish us for speaking outside it. Once a label is standardized, dissent becomes literally inarticulate: you can feel something is wrong, but the available nouns and verbs route your anger into approved channels.
Context matters: Dick wrote during the Cold War, amid propaganda, advertising’s golden age, and the rise of corporate-administered life. His fiction keeps staging the same nightmare in different costumes: counterfeit worlds maintained by slogans, brands, and official narratives. Read now, it lands like a pre-internet prophecy about "messaging", "narratives", and euphemisms that launder violence into policy. Control the dictionary, and you don’t need to win the argument; you decide what arguments are possible.
The first sentence frames "reality" as something you can work on, like a machine. "Basic tool" is chillingly practical, stripping manipulation of its melodrama. The second sentence tightens the vise: meaning isn’t an academic debate, it’s a lever over bodies. The phrase "the people who must use the words" is doing a lot of work. Must. Not choose. Dick points at how institutions force vocabulary onto us - bureaucracies, media, employers, states - and then punish us for speaking outside it. Once a label is standardized, dissent becomes literally inarticulate: you can feel something is wrong, but the available nouns and verbs route your anger into approved channels.
Context matters: Dick wrote during the Cold War, amid propaganda, advertising’s golden age, and the rise of corporate-administered life. His fiction keeps staging the same nightmare in different costumes: counterfeit worlds maintained by slogans, brands, and official narratives. Read now, it lands like a pre-internet prophecy about "messaging", "narratives", and euphemisms that launder violence into policy. Control the dictionary, and you don’t need to win the argument; you decide what arguments are possible.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
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