Lessons from 'The Man in The High Castle'
The Man in the High Castle is an alternative history TV series based on the 1962 novel of the same name by Philip K. Dick.
It shows a world where the Axis powers have won the second world war. The United States has been divided between Germany and Japan. Nazi Germany rules the East, Imperial Japan controls the West, and a fragile Neutral Zone lies between. Swastikas hang over Manhattan; and the imperial Japanese military police patrol San Francisco.
After his sister and her children are murdered for his girlfriend Juliana’s ties to the resistance, Frank Frink – an arms-factory worker – seeks solace from Ed McCarthy, a practising Jew who openly lives his faith despite the mortal risk it carries.
Ed: One thing I realize about my people (the Jews). We have a different sense of time. These may be dark years, but we will survive. We always do. You’ve just got to find something to hold on to.
Frank: Faith, you mean.
Ed: Yeah, faith
Frank: I don’t have any of that
Ed: Well, what about art? You’re supposed to be an artist, right?
Frank: No one wants to buy my art.
Ed: So do it for yourself. Beauty is important, Frank. It gives us hope
Frank: I don’t know. I don’t know where it would get me.
Ed: You don’t need anyone to keep you down because you’ve got your own little fascist right there (points to Frank’s head) telling you what you can or cannot do. That’s how you let them win.
That brief exchange distils three profound truths about surviving life under an authoritarian regime:
“We have a different sense of time. These may be dark years, but we will survive. We always do. You’ve just got to find something to hold on to.”
History bears out Ed’s insight that real resistance moves on a long clock. Apartheid in South Africa took 46 years to dismantle; India’s freedom struggle unfolded over two hundred years; Black Americans waited a full century from emancipation to secure basic voting rights; and Ireland’s fight against British rule unfolded over more than a century. Even women’s suffrage in Britain took about 50 years of sustained agitation.
The hardest thing about resistance is not the oppressor’s power; it is often the cynicism of those who have already decided defeat is inevitable. Those who are tempted to become weary with the struggle should remember Martin Luther King’s words, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
“Find something to hold on to…faith…art…Beauty is important. It gives us hope.”
Colour, art, laughter, and imagination refuse the emotional discipline authoritarianism tries to impose. To remain fully alive in soul-deadening times is an act of resistance in itself. In his Power of the Powerless, Czech dissident and later president, Vaclav Havel argued that living truthfully, creatively, and fully was in itself an act of resistance. “The struggle against the system is not just a political struggle, but a struggle for life itself.”
Arundhati Roy says something similar: “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
It is important for those engaged in resistance to step away from the noise and the struggle regularly, and take time for the things that give them joy and strength so they too may be able to ‘hear the breathing of another world.’
“You’ve got your own little fascist (in your head) telling you what you can or cannot do. That’s how you let them win.”
Ed McCarthy’s warning about the “inner fascist” highlights the strongest weapon of authoritarianism: the voice inside us that says don’t risk it, don’t stand out, don’t hope.
There is a reason fascist regimes plaster their leader’s image everywhere, on billboards, walls, newspapers, even vaccination certificates. The purpose is to crowd out thought itself, and to whisper – constantly and subconsciously – this is all there is. It creates the illusion of inevitability.
But when we insist on creating, celebrating, and imagining freely, we puncture that illusion and deny authoritarianism its final victory: the occupation of the inner life.
Joy, art, music, faith and humour, thus, become some of the most effective ways to disarm the “inner fascist.”
In The Man in the High Castle, forbidden newsreel films circulate through the Reich showing an alternate reality in which the Allies won the war. Hitler fears these films so deeply that he orders their destruction. The series turns on this terror: not of weapons or armies, but of imagination itself, and the destabilising power of seeing that history could have turned out differently and that nothing is permanent.
The Man in the High Castle ultimately reminds us that authoritarianism is sustained as much by thought as by force—and undone the same way. Long before regimes fall, they begin to crack when we refuse to surrender our inner lives: when we create beauty without permission, hold faith without guarantees, and imagine futures that power insists are impossible.
History moves slowly, hope often feels irrational, and resistance is not always dramatic. Tyranny may rule streets and institutions; it cannot rule a mind that insists another world is possible.
Rohit Kumar is an educator and can be reached at letsempathize@gmail.com.
This article went live on December twenty-seventh, two thousand twenty five, at forty-three minutes past three in the afternoon.The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.
