Wilbur Mercer's Empathy Box Analysis

In addition to creating a strong sense of community, Mercerism allows its followers to feel a deep and impactful connection to each other through the futuristic empathy box. This contrasts with another cultural influence on the society in the novel, Buster Friendly, whose talk show is vapid and devoid of meaning. Empathy boxes connect its user to the consciousness of every other person using an empathy box at that time and to experience the events of Wilbur Mercer’s life as a part of a group. Isidore describes using an empathy box as “… the way you touch other people [and] the way you stop being alone.” (Dick 58) Through a shared experience of Wilbur Mercer’s life, the empathy boxes create a brief but powerful connection between its users.

People, consider it “immoral and unempathetic […] not to keep an animal.” (Dick 10) Such a strong taboo exists against not owing an animal that there is a massive industry that provides artificial, but realistic, animals to those who are unable to acquire real animals. While this social taboo may be inconvenient to those who must care for an artificial animal, it does encourage or pressure many people to care for actual, living animals. This taboo appears to have arisen after the nuclear war. In fact, not owning an animal was illegal immediately after the war (Dick 10). The ultimate cause of the sudden support for keeping animals is likely that the radioactive dust that spread across the world caused many species of animal to go extinct, such as the donkey and toad. This caused people to more highly value the animal species that survived the war. People often value what they feel they will lose soon because, only then, does its importance become clear, such as when a person feels sentimental about their house only before they move out. In this way, people became aware of their sentimental attachment to animals and collectively decided that caring for them and ensuring their survival was important. The social institution of keeping animals arose to protect them from the radioactive dust by keeping them in one’s home. The life of Wilbur Mercer, as depicted

The nuclear detonations covered the world in radioactive dust and destroyed much of the infrastructure existing before the war, forcing the survivors to live in ruins. Throughout the novel, Dick invokes a sense of deterioration, decay and emptiness, using words such as “dust-stricken”, “rotted”, and ”sagging in ruin”. People’s decaying surroundings force them to regularly confront the reality of life’s impermanence; one realizes that, just as the building and lives of those who lived before the war are now decomposed or destroyed by radioactive dust, one’s own life, and everything in it, will eventually decompose and turn to dust. Likewise, it leads to the recognition that the universe itself is slowly decomposing through the process of entropy and will ultimately end, which means humanity must ultimately end as well. Indeed, the characters in the novel are acutely aware of life’s impermanence. In fact, people have even coined a word for the concept of unstoppable deterioration and decay: kipple. The recognition that humanity will ultimately end has caused people to realize the importance of preserving human creations, similar to how the extinction of some animal species caused people to realize the importance of caring for the