Books That Can Change Your Life - The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart 

Great book and really great video. The film choices and moments you chose for the edit were top notch! Really enjoying these videos.

Excellent analysis of a truly life-changing book!

Good video 👍🏻

Was I the only one who found this book very seductive? Anyone who is dissatisfied with their life and who reads this would be sorely tempted to just “go with the roll” and try out this randomised decision process. I actually learned about this book while overhearing a conversation among my colleagues about censorship. One was saying that there is never a good reason to sensor a book, and someone said: ”What about ‘The Diceman’?”. Ok, came the answer, we might make an exception for Diceman. Wow! I thought a book that is so dangerous that my liberal friends would censor it?! I’ve got to read this! And sure enough, I was almost seduced. And still, 40 years later, I have the feeling that if my life ever went seriously off the rails, and I was left in a bad situation, maybe I would buy some dice.

Still would love to see a screen adaptation, Walken would be an interesting lead!

It's a long time since I read this and it's debatable whether I 'liked' it, but I might be interested to read it again. I suspect a response to it might depend a lot on the reader's own psychological integrity as well as perhaps their experience. The main thought that keeps nagging me is that no-one anywhere close to 'sane' (and, no, I'm not viewing that so much a measure according to societal expectation as a standard imposed from within as a feeling of peace within oneself and accompanying lack of conflict and torment) would be able to just respond to commands from a dice with equanimity, and to carry them out without enormous difficulty, if at all, or not quickly decide that the whole idea is bollocks and a quick road to ruin and nothing learned in the process. The tension between impulse and control and the tension within the latter between autonomous creation of the constraints of that control versus their external imposition, not to speak of the difficulties in deciding the boundaries between any of these things, is an eternal one, fraught, subtle, complex, paradoxical, and all the other nouns that denote something that will mess you up too much. And this pure, 'feel nothing and just throw the dice' thing seems kind of ludicrous and empty. But, read with the view to being about someone emptied out this much maybe it has a different value, depending where it goes, but I don't remember the book well enough. Doing this all the time to give you a chance to learn what really does matter to you, apart from societal expectations, might make some vague sense, but that you could actually do what the dice says if that were still possible seems unlikely. Basically I'd suggest punk rock, a few years after this book, or even in its seminal stages as it was being written, offered a far better insight and tool into this conflict, letting impulse out but letting it exist in its ugly mess with the emotions that struggled with it and the ideas and political realities that it willingly submitted to. This view of it seems to have an almost psychopathic black & white, empty, nothing, quality to it, which is a vague feeling I have of reading the book so long ago. I kind of worry that it will on second read be a fruitless experience of watching a psychopathic state of mind. I see it's in the list on GRs of 'disturbing books', along with 'Perfume', which left me with a similar empty feeling, not really conveying much that felt genuinely human to me, and also 'American Psycho'. As you point out here, there were lots of cultural moves at the time to undermine the 'square paradigm' with lifestyles and behaviour that created paradigms discordant with it, consciously contrary, doing what society forbade, or undermining the mental and emotional processes people had learned to use to live in that society, but they often seemed to come out empty, and often having caused damage, somehow missing how we do and must have and/or create our own individual, underlying values. By being directly 'contrary' to the 'norm', even by creating a randomness that undermines the 'norm', in the end that external norm is still dictating to the person, when really being alive is developing your own, grounded, internal norms and standards. A radical disconnect is just kind of saying 'the world gives me clumsy meanings, thus I'll give up on meaning'. Good art and human engagement brings all the meanings out, impulsive or controlling, and allows human feeling and thought to process it simultaneously without prejudgement to find better meaning. So, as a critique of a lost person, psychopathically disconnecting, maybe this book works, but for any kind of approach to this issue, maybe listening to free jazz would be more beneficial. Here's a decent piece on the author, which also creates an interesting counterpoint to this book and how it might be received by a reader: www.theguardian.com/news/2019/nov/07/the-dice-man-elusive-author-luke-rhinehart-george-cockroft-emmanuel-carrere

Was looking for something to send a friend re: The Dice Man, had explained it as “basically, you don’t know what’s best, most satisfying, or fulfilling in your life and chance mixed with your initial intuitions may yield better results.” I wanted something more or clickable to send and heard a British voice, with reasonable editing and sent after a minute of viewing... thanks for putting it together, I watched and subscribed. If you’re looking for a book request: Tiger in a Trance - Max Luddington. I’d gladly PayPal you if you’re able to put together and post a similar analysis if you’re down. Thanks for this review - hit some points I hadn’t considered. Well done mate.

Not a Christian but - The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord. Proverbs 16:33 Chance is god's choice Chaos is order beyond human perception

💕💕💕💕💕👉🤩🤩 Its Another True Story. 👉 Loved this since i was a teenager. 💕 For a while did real life dice life in Levenshulme M19. Mixed with loads of LSD and 🍄 So good. 🤩

His book Matari was better.