by Luke Rhinehart

I have been trying to read this book for the longest time. Finally, I was able to finish it. I used to know a man who loved this book so much. I am suspecting that he’s actually following the rule of the dice. He was interesting. I used to understand him until I read this book and got to know the extent to which the dice were being followed in this story.

Since I have been reading the book for so long, I have forgotten most of the details of the story and just remembered some points and the summary.

This book is about a psychiatrist, Dr. Luke Rhinehart, who invented a treatment (which eventually became a lifestyle even for “normal” people) to cure psychiatric disorders by destroying humans’ egoistic tendencies. The way he recommended to do it was to use the dice and chance to decide on what to do next instead of following the conventional ways.

He even followed this method. He left his own family and engaged in so many socially unacceptable ways. Some of his cases ruined their lives following the dice but they seemed not to care about it.

It became a way of life for him and a lot of people. It became a religion. In the last part of the book, his son, whom he left many years ago, was being interrogated by the FBI. They wanted to know what is he up to at that time. The book ended openly.

Here are my favorite lines from the book:

“Understand yourself, accept yourself, but do not be yourself.” Pg 13

“The nineteen consecutive white men have kicked you in the balls doesn’t necessarily mean the twentieth will.” -pg 46

“I’m bored. I’m bored. I’m sorry but that’s about it. I’m sick if lifting unhappy patients up to normal boredom, sick of trivial experiments, empty articles- “ pg 63

“A man without habits, consistency, redundancy- and hence boredom-is not human. He’s insane.” -Pg 66

“We formed a deep, irrational, obviously neurotic need for one another: love- one of society’s many socially accepted forms of madness. We got married: Society’s solution to loneliness, lust, and laundry.” -pg 117

“Men must become comfortable in flowing from one role to another- why aren’t they?” – pg 147

“ If a person can attain a strong confidence in his inconsistency and unreliability, a strong yea-saying sense of the impermanency of things and of an unintegrated, nonpatterened chaos of self, he will be fully at home in a multivalent society- he will be joyous.” – pg 318

“To know”me” that way is to limit me, cement me into something stonelike and predictable.” -pg 428

“Everything may evaporate at an instant. Everything!” -pg 428

“If we always limited ourselves to what was natural to us, we’d be midget dwarfs compared to our potential. We must always be incorporating new areas of human action which we can make natural.” – Pg 432