On the Sycophancy of Abstract Opinion

PKD wrote a collection of short stories which were published again posthumously as the Minority Report anthology. One such short story, The Mold of Yancy, tells the story of a mass-media production office whose daily broadcasts follow what may be described as the perfect propagandistic formula. Yancy, a dilettante homesteader type, speaks directly to the viewer and recounts various anecdotes about his simple, American existence, which he then analyses and uses to draw some supposedly wise, big-picture conclusion about the mechanisms of organised human life. Set to the background of innocuous natural scenery, which changes form in order to complement thematic shifts in the rhetoric, and with the unwavering direct eye contact with the viewer, the segment lulls its audience of millions into a tranquilizing blanket of nostalgia, rendering them defenseless against inundation with faux logic, synecdoche, and various other fallacies, and preserving the segment's thin veil of profundity. Yancy, whose persona is entirely computational in origin, has no identity beyond mere impressions. His tastes vary at the whim of the controllers, and conclusions drawn in one episode may be directly contradicted in others. His every facial grace corresponds exactly to the position of some slider in the production office of a windowless building, and every gesture, every cue, every beat is precisely choreographed down to the frame. The short story is an exploration into how, with sufficient technology and incentive, authenticity can be entirely synthesized, allowing state or corporate actors entry into the most primal aspects of the human mind -- those that don't need reason, those that, in fact, hate reason, and all its frictions. This gives the corporation portrayed in The Mold of Yancy the power to prevent any one individual from ever forming any solid convictions about anything, since the mentor figure they manufacture never strays from a completely inconsequential transience, leading to mass apathy and perfect regulation of the species.

We have recently developed exactly this technology in the real world. With it, the media diet of nearly every person in the west has been fouled. Discourse is decoupled from material reality, our sciences are spinning in circles, and the ensuing confusion was used to covertly void the social contract. New humans grow up today needing to navigate an endless labyrinth of unwritten rules, and with the amount of inflammatory and contradictory information flying back and forth, this is a completely impossible task. So they resort to those maxims which allow them to feel the least terrible in light of this state of affairs.