Libertarianism, Phil Dick, and the New Yorker

What do those three things have in common? Eh, not much. However, a smart review essay on Dick by Adam Gopnik just appeared in the New Yorker. I think Gopnik gets Dick's virtues and faults pretty much right, and while doing so nails my own occasional old school SF geek resentment of Dick's "special" status in the past few decades among hipsters and literati.

The libertarian angle comes in in Gopnik's last lines. Though neither author nor topic are libertarian, this conclusion struck me as a poetic evocation of a certain spirit among radical libertarians, worth recording:

The vision of an unending struggle between a humanity longing for a fuller love it always senses but can't quite see, and a deranged cult of violence eternally presenting itself as necessary and real-this thought today does not seem exactly crazy. The empire never ends.