I finished up Philip K. Dick’s freaky book VALIS last night. It’s gnostic, and if there’s anything consistently true about Gnostic writing, it’s that it’s freaky.

“Phildickian” gnosticism does not disappoint on that account. There’s the VALIS—the Vast Active Living Intelligence System—which controls the world and even creates it. There’s the Black Iron Prison, which is Phil’s tag for the oppressive, inescapable, bullshit socio-political order we live in.

And then there’s the sentence that pops up over and over again: The empire never ended. (Almost always in bold, natch.)

I write a lot about Empire here. By “Empire,” I mean something like the powers-that-be, something like the psychological, economic, political order that changes and evolves but always keeps us from being our best and brightest.

I don’t believe Empire is “real.” It’s just that it explains things to me. It’s a metaphor that works for me, so I run with it.

Other folks use other metaphors for it. Liberation theology types call it hegemony, racism, patriarchy, and more, pointing out how it shapes our very selves. Joe Bageant calls it the Hologram, pointing out it’s fakeness. Walter Wink calls it the Powers That Be, his paraphrase of Paul’s notion of “the princes and principalities of the air.” Folks used to call it the Man. And Phil Dick calls it the Black Iron Prison. It’s not a nation or person, it’s a way of exercising power.

What does it explain to me? It’s challenging for someone who doesn’t believe in Original Sin to explain how human shittiness keeps happening and happening. Upward and onward never happened like the great high modernists said it would, and some of the folks who were upwarding and onwarding, it turns out, were pushing Empire despite themselves.

To further wear out a worn out joke, you don’t rule the Empire, the Empire rules you.

Why do the systems we create keep keeping us down? That, I think, is the question Gnosticism is trying to solve. The Gnostics believe we’re inherently good but that the world got set up wrong. The god who did it is either stupid or evil, or both, depending on the Gnostic you talk to.

That’s a lot to swallow, but it explains a lot.