ROBERT ANTON WILSON
Interview: 1988

This is an edited transcript of an interview which took place in Los Angeles on April 23, 1988. I would like to thank Bob Wilson and his wonderful wife Arlen for inviting me into their home, and special thanks to Bruce Eisner for helping to arrange it. The interview was broadcast on college radio station KFJC, 89.7 FM in Los Altos Hills, California five weeks later. --David A. Banton

DAB: This is David B, here in Los Angeles in the home of Robert Anton Wilson. It is April 23, 1988, a significant day in Robert Anton Wilson philosophy. What is the significance of 23?

RAW: Well, 23 is a part of the cosmic code. It's connected with so many synchronicities and weird coincidences that it must mean something, I just haven't figured out yet what it means! In several of my books, including the Illuminatus trilogy and Cosmic Trigger, I have given examples of a tremendous number of coincidences connected with 23. Take today as an example, April 23: this is the anniversary of Shakespeare's birth, April 23, 1556 and his death, April 23, 1616. Also April 23, 1616, the same time Shakespeare died in England, Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, died in Spain. April 23, 1014 is when Brian Boru died, he was the first high king of Ireland to be a political as well as religious leader. He unified all Ireland and drove the Danes out, and on April 23, 1014 he was killed by one of the Danes after the battle of Clontarf, where he defeated the Danes for the final time, and liberated Ireland from foreign rule. August 23, 1170 is when the Normans came in, and Ireland has been under foreign rule again, in whole or in part, ever since. On Aug. 23, 1920 James Joyce was discussing coincidences with a friend in a Paris bar when he suddenly saw a giant black rat and fainted dead away. So that ties Joyce together with the invasion of Ireland, and Shakespeare, and Brian Boru. All of this is in (James Joyce's) Finnigan's Wake, by the way.

DAB: You have a whole series of books focusing on the Illuminati. What is the Illuminati, and how did that become an inspiration for so many books?

RAW: Well, the Illuminati was a secret society in Bavaria in the 18th Century. A certain number of paranoid individuals believe the Illuminati still exists and has either taken over the world, or taken over most of the world, or something like that. I discovered the anti-Illuminati literature in the late 60's when there were all sorts of weird conspiracy theories going around. And then I discovered there were two ambiguities connected with the Illuminati. First, there are those who say the Illuminati don't exist, versus those who say the Illuminati still exist, and then among those who say the Illuminati do exist, there are two schools of thought: those who claim they're the arch-villains of all history, and those who claim they're the heroes who are trying to liberate the human race from superstition and ignorance. And so, I decided a group that ambiguous, where we don't know whether they exist or not, and we don't know whether they're the good guys or the bad guys, they're the perfect symbol, to me, for all the confusions of the age we're living through, and all of the rampant paranoia of our time. Conspiracy theories have never been more popular, not even in Nazi Germany.

RAW: Recently, Falcon press has been reprinting a lot of your books, and there's a little joke in the list of Falcon Books. With so many of them by Robert Anton Wilson, it asks, is Falcon Press owned by Robert Anton Wilson? Well, is it?

RAW: No, that's just one of the publisher's little jokes. Falcon Press is actually owned by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which was the English branch of the Illuminati, according to some conspiracy buffs. Of course, it wasn't really, that's just what some nutty people say. And I want to also deny Mae Brussel's claim, uh, no it's not Mae Brussel, it's Lyndon LaRouche. Lyndon LaRouche claims I'm the head of the Illuminati; there's no truth in that whatsoever. Mae Brussel is the one who said I'm an agent of the Rockefeller conspiracy. That is the truth, I can't deny that one! Actually, my whole cellar is full from floor to ceiling with bars of gold sent to me personally by David Rockefeller for all the services I provide for the Rockefeller Conspiracy.

DAB: Ah-ha!

RAW: I confessed that several years ago when Mae first made the charge against me, and I confess as frequently as possible to that, because the more people who believe my cellar is full of bars of Rockefeller gold, the better my credit rating will be, so I don't see how that can harm me at all. It can only do me good.

DAB: Speaking of the Golden Dawn, they have a mysterious reputation as some sort of secret society, and you say there is some variation of that going on today?

RAW: Oh yes, the Golden Dawn has three chapters in the Los Angeles area alone. It's got chapters all over the country, in England, in Canada, New Zealand, Australia . . . and I believe there's a chapter in Switzerland, I don't know where else.

DAB: What exactly do they do?

RAW: Well, the Golden Dawn is a hermetic society devoted to altering consciousness on a planetary scale. Its objectives cannot be defined more clearly than that. It's a Cabalistic, Rosicrucian, magickal group. Among the more famous members of the Golden Dawn have been William Butler Yeats, the great Irish poet; Arthur Machen, the great fantasy writer; Florence Farr, one of the great actresses of the Victorian age, who incidentally was the mistress of both Yeats and Bernard Shaw, that's an interesting link; and, oh of course, Aleister Crowley was a member of the Golden Dawn all his life. The current head of the Los Angeles Temple of the Golden Dawn is a close friend of mine. However, I am not a member of the Golden Dawn myself.

DAB: Nor have ever been?

RAW: (laughing) Nor have I ever been! Except that the head of the Golden Dawn says I am . . . he was asked that question in an interview, Christopher Hyatt, the head of the Golden Dawn, the Outer Head. He was asked if I was a member, and he said Wilson belongs to all groups and none. I think that's such a perfect definition, I don't attempt to improve on it.

DAB: You mentioned Aleister Crowley. You've written about him a lot. How did you first become interested in him?

RAW: Sometime around 1970, or '69, I was having lunch with Alan Watts and I mentioned the Illuminatus trilogy, which I was working on at the time, and the symbolism of the eye on the pyramid, which is the symbol of the Illuminati. And Alan said, that reminds me, the best book I've read all year is called The Eye in the Triangle by Israel Regardie, and I took Alan Watts very seriously. I mean, he was a very funny man, but when Alan said something was worth reading, I took that seriously, so I went out and bought the book, The Eye in the Triangle, and it turned out to be a biography of Aleister Crowley. Israel Regardie was Crowley's secretary for a while in the 1930's. Then later he was a psychotherapist right here in Los Angeles . I got into correspondence with Dr. Regardie for several years, before his death, and learned quite a bit from him about the inner traditions of the Golden Dawn, and about Crowley's work.

DAB: So how about the eye in the triangle, what does that symbol represent?

RAW: The eye on top of the pyramid, let's start with, the eye on top of the pyramid represents the transcendental ego as distinguished from the normal ego. It represents your awareness of your role as an evolutionary agent with all past generations holding you up to the position you're in now. The pyramid represents all past generations and the open eye represents your realization of your oneness with all past generations, especially all past generations of magicians. Reality, as we call it, is the temporary resultant of continuous conflict between rival gangs of magicians and shamans. The eye in the triangle by itself represents the Eye of Horus. Horus is the lord of two horizons in Egyptian mythology; that means he's the lord of the rising and the setting son, birth and death, and all other opposites. War and meditation are two of his chief characteristics.

DAB: The average person would think of a magician as a side-show entertainer. What is a magician, in your definition?

RAW: Well, it's an ambiguous word. It can refer to prestidigitation, conjuring, other show business tricks, or it can refer to the ancient science of the magi, which is where the word magic comes from etymologically, it's the science of the magi. It's the science of rapid, voluntary brain change, how to use the human brain for fun and profit.

DAB: That brings us to something you've written about called the HEAD Revolution: Hedonic Engineering and Development.

RAW: The HEAD Revolution is my term for what's been happening since the 1960's, the discovery of newer and better technologies all the time for rapid alteration of brain functioning. We've gone from psychedelic drugs, to biofeedback and Lilly isolation tanks, and a lot of fascinating new machines like the Mind Mirror, which is an accelerated biofeedback system that gives you a continuous profile of both hemispheres of your brain, and which frequencies they're working on. Every year, the technology of rapid brain change gets more advanced, trying to figure where it'll be five years from now particularly makes me dizzy, it's moving so fast at present.

I think it's a great example of the evolutionary function of stupidity. When the government made psychedelic research illegal in the 60's, scientific, open above-board research I mean, that did not stop research, the research just went underground, together with a great deal of partying and hell-raising and whatnot with those drugs. I thought it was the stupidest thing the government ever did, but in retrospect I think stupidity has an evolutionary function, because when they stopped that research, all the leading researchers in the field went into other areas, and so we've discovered dozens of other ways of rapid brain change. Lilly worked on his isolation tank, others went into biofeedback. Stan Grof, who came to this country seeking scientific freedom because he felt he didn't have enough scientific freedom in Czechoslovakia, he came to this country seeking scientific freedom and they told him he couldn't do any more LSD research, so he went to work on breathing techniques and the effect of sound on the brain, and has developed some very interesting post-Reichian, post-yogic techniques of brain change. So, by and large, the stupider the establishment is, the smarter the rebels become. Establishment stupidity is the greatest spur to creativity in evolutionary history. That's why I think Reagan has been a godsend to this country. He's brought more stupidity to Washington than anybody in my lifetime, and there's been a tremendous upsurge of creativity while he's been in there.

DAB: Have you tried any of these new brain machines?

RAW: Every one I can get my hands on. I started out with the Pulstar, which sends magnetic pulses into the brain, and the brain goes into the rhythm of those pulses, so you go to any frequency you want to go to, you move down from beta to alpha, to theta to delta, wherever you want to go, with direct magnetic impulses. I tried the Isis ,which uses light, and the Synchro-energizer, which uses light and sound, and the Neuro-pep which uses light and sound. I have a Pulstar, and Neuro-pep, and an Endomax. Endomax uses impulses against the mastoid bones behind the ear, and affects the hypothalamus directly, which controls the neuropeptide system in the whole body. And recently, I got to try the Graham Potentializer, which is a long, table-like contraption between two electromagnetic generators, and it revolves in a certain mathematical pattern that Graham has worked out. He claims ten sessions on that will raise your IQ tremendously. I only had one session on it, so I can't judge yet, but after one session I was high as a kite, and I was feeling delighted with myself and the world for about 24 hours afterwards.

The Graham Potentializer is much more expensive than the others. I think what will happen, the way it'll reach the mass market, is not people buying Potentializers, but people setting up places like with Lilly tanks, where you can go in and rent an hour on a Graham Potentializer like you can go in and rent an hour in a Lilly tank in most cities these days. When I go around the country on my tours, I always ask my audiences, can you get an hour in a Lilly isolation tank here, and in the last year I haven't been anyplace where the answer wasn't yes. No matter where you go in this country now, you can rent time in a Lilly tank. I think in a couple of years, you'll be able to rent time on a Graham Potentializer, wherever you go.

The latest one I've tried is the Mind Mirror, which is the most sophisticated biofeedback system to come along. It gives you an instantaneous reading. I found out I've got a disorganized awakened brain, I found that very interesting, I kind of suspected it.

DAB: What exactly is a disorganized awakened brain?

RAW: Well, it's a pattern that's similar to the awakened brain state measured in Zen masters and yogis, but it's not quite, it's a little more raggedy. It's usually found in scientists and artists, and some psychics.

DAB: Do you think these new brain technology tools and the flotation tanks are good enough to replace say, LSD and other chemicals for brain change? Are those no longer relevant?

RAW: I think the avant-garde edge of the consciousness revolution, the HEAD Revolution, is moving away from chemicals towards machines, because you can get much more precise control. Molecules are great big ungainly things to throw at your brain compared to electronic impulses. I think pretty soon, within five years, we'll be able to have a little computer keyboard, and just punch in the right code to send the right impulse into your brain, to have any brain experience you want. The first time you tasted chocolate ice cream, you just punch in the right code, you get that back; your first sexual experience, you punch in the right code you get that; samadhi, you punch in the right code, you get that. And so on. I think that can't be more than five years away, the way this technology is moving.

DAB: In the 70's you and Leary came up with the SMIILE formula, which stands for Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, and Life Extension. Do you still find those three things to be important?

RAW: Oh, very much so. Space migration is tremendously exciting to me, because it's the opening of a new frontier. Historically, every time a new frontier has opened, there's been a big upsurge of creative energies, a Renaissance effect, a creativity boom, and the human race badly needs that at this point. Also, I think most of the energy problems that it's fashionable to worry about will be solved when we get out of the closed system of one planet and start dealing with many worlds. When we have hundreds and hundreds of space colonies dotted all over the earth-moon system, or as far out as the asteroid belt probably, then there won't be any more energy problem, there's so damn much energy out there compared to the energy available on the surface of the Earth. And it will also solve the population problem, more and more people will be migrating into space, I'm sure. I want to go myself, some people think that's whimsical in a man my age, but I'm expecting rejuvenation technology will be along in the next 10-15 years . . .

DAB: The Life Extension part of SMIILE . . .

RAW: Yes, I figure 20 years from now, I'll be 20 years younger instead of 20 years older.

DAB: So you think you'll make it into space one day then?

RAW: Oh, absolutely!

DAB: Do you think you'll run into any UFO's? You talk about that a lot, do you believe in UFO's?

RAW: Of course! I don't know what they are, but to deny them is like denying frogs falling out of the sky or brick walls, these are very obvious things. You may have different explanations of them. I don't know what UFO's are, I don't know whether they're spaceships, or time ships, or a special kind of hallucination triggered by abnormal electromagnetic conditions . . . that's a theory suggested by a psychologist named Persinger, which I find very persuasive, but not totally convincing. Or maybe they're archetypes escaped from the collective unconscious, as Jung suggested, or maybe they're all heat inversions. I don't know, maybe there is no one theory that accounts for all of them. But they're certainly there, to say that they're not there is like saying that Charlie Chaplin doesn't exist. Charlie Chaplin may have been an actor, but he existed in some sense. Charlie Chaplin and UFO's are at least as real as the Gross National Product.

DAB: We've covered the Space Migration part of the SMIILE formula, what about Intelligence Increase?

RAW: Well, I think these brain machines I'm talking about are going to play a tremendous role in raising intelligence. Graham, who claims to do more scientific measurement than anybody else in the brain-machine field, he claims he can demonstrate a definite increase in IQ in anybody who has used the Potentializer more than 10 times. And I've seen, I think it's pretty clear that most of these machines have some effect on the IQ, as well as general health and tranquilization.

DAB: Life Extension: You were once Director of the Prometheus Society, right? Weren't they involved in that?

RAW: I was the Western Director.

DAB: Does that group still exist and are you still involved with them?

RAW: I sort of lost touch with them, I don't know whether they still exist or not. I've lived in Ireland for five years, I sort of lost touch with the L5 Society, the Prometheus Society, and a lot of things I was involved in before I went over to Europe. Now I'm trying to reestablish connections with groups that interest me.

DAB: What is the L5 Society?

RAW: That's a society of scientists and others that are concerned with colonizing the L5 area, which is La Grange Point 5. There are 5 La Grange points around the moon, which are places where the gravity of Earth and Moon are approximately equal to each other, and they're good places to build space colonies, for engineering reasons. L5 used to be considered the best. The latest calculations I've seen indicate that L4 may be better, but the L5 Society has already got that name, so I doubt they're going to change it, even if we end up colonizing L4 instead of L5.

DAB: You've been living in Ireland for the last 5-6 years, now you're back here in California . What are you current plans?

RAW: Oh, I intend to hang around LA for quite awhile, but I'm doing a lot of traveling, too. So far this year, it's only April, so far this year I've been in Phoenix, Dallas, New York, New Jersey and Boulder, Colorado. Next week I go back to Austin, Texas, and at the end of May I'm going over to Europe and doing lectures all over Germany and Switzerland and Holland. And I intend to keep traveling, I find it exhilarating to be a citizen of the planet, rather than of one particular place.

DAB: Are you planning to go back to Ireland eventually?

RAW: Well, I am going back to Ireland to pick up a lot of my property I left there last Fall. When I came over here the last time I was doing a lecture tour, I didn't expect I'd get hired to write a movie, so I didn't go back to Ireland to get all my gear right away. I was trying to figure out how long will I be on the movie, how long do I want to be here, and so on, I've got involved in several other projects around Hollywood and it's obvious I'm going to be here for quite awhile, so I'm bringing more of my gear over from Ireland while I'm doing the European lecture tour. But nothing is permanent, I may be living in Switzerland in five years, or I may be living in Mexico, or maybe in Japan.

DAB: I understand you've been working on a book about James Joyce.

RAW: Well, I was working on a book on Joyce, and I finally decided that for financial reasons, the kind of money you make out of writing scholarly books on Irish writers is not really huge. I'm publishing about a third of the Joyce book together with essays on other writers, under the title Coincidance, and that's due out any day now from Falcon Press. Meanwhile I'm working on more commercial ventures. There will come a time, sometime in the future, when I will write a whole book on Joyce. Meanwhile, I've got a third of a book on Joyce bound together with two-thirds of a book on other subjects.

DAB: What is your fascination with Joyce?

RAW: I could talk all day about that! Joyce was more interested in synchronicity more than any other writer before me, and he influenced me a great deal. My fascination with synchronicity grows more out of Joyce than out of Jung. Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake are all about synchronicity, and they came out long before Jung ever wrote anything on the subject. Joyce fascinates me because of many other things. In Ulysses, he was the first one to write a relativistic novel, the first Einsteinian novel. Every other novel before Ulysses had one point of view, which was supposed to be the objective point of view, and in Ulysses, Joyce refuses to give you an objective point of view. He gives you about 54 different points of view, and leaves it up to you to decide which of the various narrative voices you're going to believe. And I find that a very appropriate style for the 20th Century, it's entirely compatible with relativity and quantum mechanics . . . the amount of deception and propaganda in the 20th Century world, where you can't take anything at face value. It's compatible with modern philosophy, everything from Nietzsche and Wittgenstein on, we've learned more and more about how the mind creates its own reality-tunnel; it's entirely compatible with modern psychology and neurology and cultural anthropology.

I don't see why anybody is still writing Victorian novels, I think everybody should be writing Joycean novels, to be contemporary, to be compatible with modern science, modern philosophy and modern civilization in general. People who are writing pre-Joycean novels, it seems to me like they're riding around in a stagecoach instead of using a car or a plane.

DAB: Of all the books you've written, how many are novels, 6 or 7 maybe?

RAW: It depends on how you count. If you count the Illuminatus trilogy as one novel, you get a different figure. If you count the Schrödinger's Cat trilogy as one novel, you get a different figure. If you count the Illuminatus trilogy as three, and the Schrödinger's Cat trilogy as three, then I seem to have nine novels in print.

DAB: And the other three are Masks of the Illuminati . . .

RAW: The Earth Will Shake, and The Widow's Son.

DAB: Aren't those two books part of a trilogy, too?

RAW: No, that's part of a pentology.

DAB: A pentology?

RAW: Yes, that's a series of five books.

DAB: And so far two of them have come out.

RAW: That's right. I'm working on the third, which is called Nature's God.

DAB: And what is the basic concept behind that series of books?

RAW: Well, that series deals with European, and to some extent, American history, between 1764 and 1824. That was a period in which all the rules changed, everything, the whole Western world went through a total change. We went from feudal, agricultural monarchy to capitalist democracy and industrialism. Everything changed, the style of music changed, we went from Baroque to Romantic, everything changed. Philosophy changed, it was in that period that David Hume's books appeared, knocking the bottom out of all previous philosophy. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations appeared there, the Declaration of Independence, of course. I'm taking that as a model to show how revolutions work. They work on many levels besides violent revolutions, there are non-violent revolutions, but they're all tied together. We're going through a period like that right now, and what got my started writing those novels was to give an example of a previous period that was as revolutionary as the period we're living through; to show some of the general laws of what happens when society goes through rapid transition. We're going through a dozen revolutions at once right now, too.

DAB: So the new novels could almost be thought of as an earlier . . . For example, the Illuminatus Trilogy took place in the seventies, right? So the new series takes a similar view, but from an earlier cultural revolution.

RAW: Well, the pentology deals with 1764 to 1824. Masks of the Illuminati deals with the 1890's to 1914. Illuminatus is set in the 70's, but has flashbacks to the 1930's and everything in between the 30's and the 70's. The Schrödinger's Cat trilogy is set in the 80's and the early 90's, and when I write a few more and fit them into the pattern , I'll have a complete history of the Western world from 1764 to 2001.

DAB: That's quite a feat! Do you have a favorite of the books that you've written? I think my personal favorite right now is the Schrödinger's Cat trilogy.

RAW: Oh, thank you, that's the one that got more bad reviews . . . you know, that's about to be reprinted, I'm happy to say. But that got more bad reviews than anything else I've ever written, it only got two good reviews I ever saw. The "LA Times" said it was hilarious, multi-dimensional, a laugh a paragraph, something like that. "New Scientist" in England had the other good review, they said it was the most scientific of all science-fiction novels. Everybody else said it was unintelligible, deliberately obscure, pretentious, incoherent, everything they say about Joyce!

DAB: Right, like when Finnegan's Wake came out.

RAW: Yes, exactly, just like Finnegan's Wake. As a matter of fact, it's my attempt to translate Finnegan's Wake into a quantum comedy. Even the title has the same rhythm as Finnegan's Wake: Finnegan's Wake, Schrödinger's Cat, Finnegan's Wake, Schrödinger's Cat, there are all sorts of analogies built in.

DAB: You appeared on a punk rock album by a band called the Chocolate Biscuit Conspiracy?

RAW; No, that was the title of the album, the name of the band is the Golden Horde.

DAB: How did you get involved with that project, and what exactly did you do on that?

RAW: Well, they came up to me after a lecture in Dublin, and said, we're a punk rock group. And I said, yes, I kind of suspected that from the way you're dressed. And they said, we'd like to have you on our next record. And I said, hey, I'd love that, I'd love to make a punk rock record. Not many men my age get invited to make punk rock records. And I wrote a whole bunch of lyrics, and they picked out the ones they liked, and then they lured me down to the studio to improvise some surrealist poetry in between in the songs, and so it's a combination of rock and poetry and surrealism and gnosticism. It's basically Celtic-Gnostic punk rock.

DAB: Is this album available anywhere that you know of?

RAW: It seems to be released on a need-to-know basis. People have found copies of it in the United States. I have seen them, I have autographed them. It's very hard to find, but not impossible.

DAB; You have another album called "Secrets of Power," made up of talks you gave . . .

RAW: No, that was a stand-up comedy act I did in a nightclub in England. I'm doing stand-up comedy these days, just because I've never done it before. I've done stand-up comedy in London, Dublin, New York, San Francisco and a couple of other smaller places I don't quite recall. I think I'm getting better at it all the time, and I'm enjoying it, I'm having a great time. It's a tremendous challenge. When you're doing a lecture, or even a workshop, they don't have to be laughing all the time. But when you're in a nightclub, they've got to be laughing all the time or you feel like you're dying up there, and it gives you a tremendous adrenaline rush. It's the next best thing to skydiving, as far as scaring the hell out of yourself for fun. As Edmund Kean said on his deathbed, Sir Edmund Kean the great British actor, his last words were, "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard." And it really is, so I enjoy the challenge.

DAB: Leary's been doing some stand-up comedy, too. Have you seen his act?

RAW: Oh, yes!

DAB: Back to the album: The "Secrets of Power" album is released on the Illuminated Records label. How was that arranged?

RAW: Well. the boys down at Illuminati Headquarters said, Bob, we want you to put . . . no, no, I'm not supposed to reveal that! The cover story is that the people who started the record company named it after my Illuminatus novels. And then when they discovered I was in Ireland, and they were in London, they decided to have me do a record for them. That's the cover story, anyway, and I'll stick to that!

Oh, this morning I looked at "Bride of the Monster" for the first time.

DAB: "Bride of the Monster"?

RAW: It's an Ed Wood movie, he made the world's worst movies. He made "Plan 9 From Outer Space," you must have heard of that. "Bride of the Monster" has Bela Lugosi live, instead of his (Wood's) wife's chiropractor pretending to be Bela, as in "Plan 9"? This one has Bela Lugosi while he was still alive, and Tor Johnson, the guy who played the sheriff in "Plan 9," he plays Bela Lugosi's moronic assistant. Bela plays a classic mad scientist, and it is just as bad as "Plan 9," it's incredibly bad! Ed Wood was a backwards genius, he set out to make horror movies and he didn't know how to do it, and he ended up making, unintentionally, he made the funniest movies ever to come out of Hollywood. Ever scene in this movie which tries to scare you is so stupid that you bust out laughing. Ed Wood is proof that Mencken was wrong. Mencken said, "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people." Well, Ed Wood did go broke by underestimating their intelligence. It is possible, you can underestimate the intelligence of the masses!

DAB: So, you're a fan of bad science fiction movies?

RAW: Oh, yes. Bad movies are generally just plain bad, and you can't stand them, but bad science fiction and bad horror is funny. And the worse it is, the better it is, because the less convincing, the more amateurish, the more stupid and clumsy it is, the funnier it gets. Like "Plan 9," with that immortal line, "The message couldn't get through because of the weather conditions in outer space." "Bride of the Monster" has some really wonderful stuff, too. There's an atomic explosion at the end and the main characters are all standing around, there's no fall-out, no blinding white light, none of the side effects of a real atomic explosion, just a mushroom shaped cloud and they stand there and look at it. And the chief of police says, "He meddled in God's domain," which is probably the corniest line in the history of films, but this together with an atomic explosion that isn't an atomic explosion, it's absolutely hilarious. I think there should be an Ed Wood memorial toilet somewhere in Hollywood. He brought movies, he brought his movies down to the crap-house level!

DAB: What about good science-fiction? A lot of your books are considered science-fiction, although they are often hard to categorize. Do you have any current favorite science-fiction writers?

RAW: The guy who wrote Neuromancer,William Gibson. I'd say he's my current favorite. Phillip K. Dick, but he's dead, or they claim he is. They took the liberty of burying him anyway. There are people who think Phil isn't dead, you know.

DAB: Like some people think Jim Morrison isn't really dead.

RAW: That's another interesting question. Why did so many photographs disappear from the LA Police Department connected with the Bobby Kennedy assassination?

DAB: One of your recent books is The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about this book.

RAW: I coined the term irrational rationalism because those people claim to be rationalists, but they're governed by such a heavy body of taboos. They're so fearful, and so hostile, and so narrow, and frightened, and uptight and dogmatic. I thought it was a fascinating paradox: irrational rationalists. Later on I found out I didn't invent that. Somebody else who wrote an article on CSICOP, that's the group they all belong to: Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. Somebody else who wrote about them also used the term irrational rationalism. It's a hard term to resist when you think about those people.

I wrote this book because I got tired satirizing fundamentalist Christianity, I had done enough of that in my other books. I decided to satirize fundamentalist materialism for a change, because the two are equally comical. All fundamentalism is comical, unless you believe in it, in which case you'd become a fanatic yourself, and want everybody else to share your fundamentalism. But if you're not a fundamentalist yourself, fundamentalists are the funniest people on the planet. The materialist fundamentalists are funnier than the Christian fundamentalists, because they think they're rational!

DAB: They call themselves skeptical.

RAW: Yes, but they're not skeptical! They're never skeptical about anything except the things they have a prejudice against. None of them ever says anything skeptical about the AMA, or about anything in establishment science or any entrenched dogma. They're only skeptical about new ideas that frighten them. They're actually dogmatically committed to what they were taught when they were in college, which was about 1948-53, somewhere in that period. If you go back and study what was being taught in college in those days as the latest scientific theories, you find out that's what these people still believe. They haven't had a new idea in 30 years, that's all that happened to them. They just rigidified, they crystallized around 1960.

DAB: The Amazing Randi recently "debunked" Uri Geller, the guy who bends metal. What do you think about the Amazing Randi in particular? I understand that he has investigated some of these faith healers, he's debunked some of that. So some of the work that he's done seems to be rational. What would be an example of something irrational that he's done?

RAW: Well, his whole critique of the research of Plutof and Targ, at Stanford Research Institute. Randi was not there, he was not on the scene, and yet he claims to know what was going on there better than the two scientists who were supervising it. This implies 100% accurate telepathy. He was in New Jersey at the time of the experiments. The only way he could know better than the scientists running the project what was going on in their laboratory is if he had 100% accurate telepathy. Now he's offering a $100,000 reward to anybody with 100% accurate telepathy; he should give all the money to himself! How else could he know? If he wasn't there, he can't know, he's only guessing, and to the extend that he thinks he knows, and doesn't realize he's guessing, that's what I mean by irrational rationalism. He's lost all track of reality. He doesn't know when he's guessing anymore.

I've heard him make charges against scientists that remind me of Joe McCarthy. The only excuse for such things is that such a person doesn't realize he's guessing anymore, he thinks any suspicion that crosses his mind must be true. And that's the only way you can forgive them, because every ethical system has some equivalent to the Bible injunction against bearing false witness against your neighbor. Anybody who goes around charging so many people with being frauds and criminals and whatnot, the only way to forgive them is that they don't understand the seriousness of what they're doing. And they believe they are infallible. If he had any sense of fallibility, he couldn't do such things.

DAB: Let's talk about the whole New Age movement happening now, Shirley McClaine, crystal healing and all that: Didn't I hear something about you writing a book about that?

RAW: Yes, I'm writing a book about New Age sewage.

DAB: New Age sewage?

RAW: Yes, I got the idea from William Erwin Thompson, the anthropologist. He pronounces New Age as "Newage" so it rhymes with sewage. And I thought, boy there sure is enough of that around, isn't there, New Age sewage. Just because there's a slight chance people may not have read my other books, and may read The New Inquisition, and think I'm only against one type of fundamentalism, I decided to make the sequel to it, an attack on the imbeciles on the other side. And so, I'm going to tear into Ramtha and all these other sages who come back . . . the main thing Ramtha proves is you can be dead 40,000 years and still be a bore. That may be interesting news, but that's . . . Everything I've heard from Ramtha sounds like an editorial from the Reader's Digest in 1958 or something.

Then there are these ecological loonies who would like to abolish the human race so that the trees could live in peace again. I think they're kind of funny. Then there's these animal rights activists who also seem to have a very low opinion of humanity. I don't know why they don't all commit suicide, and get rid of the most, I mean, if you hate humanity, you've got to regard yourself as one of the prime offenders, because you know yourself better than the rest of humanity. If they have a low view of humanity, they must have a very low view of themselves. I wish they'd remove themselves from the scene and stop annoying the rest of us. I like people, I like humanity.

DAB: Except for the ones who don't like people?

RAW: Well, I like them, too, I just find them a bit of a drag!

DAB: Is the Pope infallible?

RAW: I regard that as a game rule of the Catholic game. If you want to play the Catholic game, you've got to accept that rule. Like if you want to play baseball, you've got to accept the rule of the umpire, who is considered infallible. I don't believe umpires or popes are de facto infallible, it's just a game rule. I choose not to play the Catholic game. I'd find myself terribly constricted to live in a world where some right-wing Polish schlimazel is supposed to be infallible. I'd sooner accept Randi as infallible than the Pope.

DAB: Don't you, in fact, hand out Pope cards?

RAW: Oh yes, I do. Kirby Hensley set out back in the 50's to make every man, woman and child, and other miscellaneous, on the planet a clergy-entity.

DAB: Clergy-entity?

RAW: Yes, well clergy-person has human chauvinism in it, and Hensley got over that very early in his career. After ordaining all sorts of men and women, he started ordaining chimpanzees and parrots, and house cats and all sorts of critters. A friend of mine named Malaclypse the Younger got the idea that it's not enough to make everybody a clergy-entity, let's make everybody a Pope. He started printing up Pope cards and distributing them, and I thought it was a good idea, so I started distributing Pope cards too, and there are oh, a couple hundred at least Discordians who are distributing Pope cards.

Only recently, the Vatican announced that Cardinals can give indulgences over television, which raises some interesting theological problems, because if you make a videotape of it when a Cardinal is giving an indulgence and you play the videotape over and over, do you get perpetual indulgence? And then can you join the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in San Francisco? The Jesuits haven't answered that, yet. But while they're working on it, I figure, well, if they can do indulgences over television, I can do pontifications over television, or radio. So every time I'm on a television or radio show, I make the whole audience Popes.

As a matter of fact, everybody who is listening to me right now, if they take a deep breath and relax while I say the magic formula, "Spectacles, testicles, brandy, cigars," they're all Popes. Everybody listening, they're all now as infallible as the guy in Rome, or Randi, or Carl Sagan, or the Ayatollah Khomeini, or any other authority on the planet. You're all equally infallible, and take crap from nobody!

DAB: And they thought they were just listening to the radio!

RAW: Yes, they didn't know I was about to liberate them totally, did they?

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ROBERT ANTON WILSON

Paradigm Shift Interview by Philip H. Farber

We think many of our readers are already familiar with the work of Robert Anton Wilson. If you're not -- hoo boy! -- we are a little envious of you, because you've got the chance to discover for the first time an amazing collection of books including Illuminatus! (with Robert Shea), The Earth Will Shake, The Widow's Son, Prometheus Rising, Cosmic Trigger, Quantum Psychology, and a bunch more. Wilson's novels and non-fiction are guaranteed to blow the cobwebs from your neurons, rattle your cage, yank your chain, and open your eyes.

Paradigm Shift recently had the pleasure of conducting the following interview with Dr. Wilson:

PHF: What is it that you most like to do with your time these days?

Robert Anton Wilson: I like to get stoned and surf the Web. I find all sorts of wonderful wonders, both in text and art. This hobby occupies a few hours a night, three or four nights a week. Otherwise, I enjoy most of what I do but feel more pressure about it. I look after my wife Arlen, who is recovering from a stroke; I shop and cook and houseclean etc.; and I keep working on an encyclopedia of conspiracy theories for Harper Collins. All that has its own rewards, but stoned Websurfing is just pure play... and often educational, too.

PHF: Heh heh.... That's a common pastime around here, too. Do you think that the hyperlinked nature of the web encourages a different kind of thinking? If so, does surfing stoned enhance that?

RAW: I kind of suspect that hyperlinking encourages holistic or at least nonlinear perception, but I had a lot of experience with that before the Web. Most of my favorite 20th century writers --especially Joyce, Pound, Williams, Burroughs -- seem to have a hyperlinked style. McLuhan compared them to the front page of the New York Times and Kenner compared them to film montage. It's all blended in my head --nonlinear page make-up in journalism, montage in film, collage in painting, Joyce, Pound, Williams, Burroughs, now the Web -- and being stoned certainly helps you groove with that kind of "cubist" sensibility. In fact, stoned dial surfing on TV makes for much the same effect. (I once thought I invented dial surfing but so many others invented it at about the same time I don't think we'll ever know who was first...)

All that said, websurfing remains the most fun, and probably the most educational.

PHF: What are some of your favorite sites to surf stoned?

RAW: Well, I'd rather turn that around and ask you and your readers the same question. I'm working up a list of The 10 Best Sites To Visit While Stoned, which I'll add to my own web site when it's finished, and I'm still looking for more leads...Just tack them on at the end of this interview and I'll explore all the ones that are new to me.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Please send submissions for the Best Sites To Visit While Stoned to para93@aol.com, and we will forward suggestions to Dr. Wilson.

PHF: Okay... I'm sure we have enough stoned people surfing these pages. Perhaps we can set up a form to submit URLs that can accompany this interview.

RAW: I hope so. By the way, not to be too coy, a few of my favorite web sites, which I have bookmarked and don't keep the URLs for, are the Unofficial George Carlin site, the Monty Python sites, the SubGenius site, the Discordian site and the Republic of Texas site.

PHF: Anyway... From what you see in your virtual travels, do you think people are generally using the web with intelligence, or has it become a wasteland to rival prime time television?

RAW: I don't know what "people"are doing with the Web. Since most people seem to me to be moderately retarded, I assume they're not using much of what is available to them. However, the brightest people I know are using the Web very creatively and all seem to be getting brighter...or at least better informed.

I assume the brightest people use TV that way, too, and they have used books that way for 500 years now.

PHF: Our webzenmaster, John Hoke, asks, "Do you think the web is a conspiracy to keep all the other conspiracies out in the open?"

RAW: Well, that's certainly an amusing way of looking at it. In general, I regard the Web as the closest approximation yet achieved to the ideal of a free marketplace of ideas. The Marxist criticism of democracy ("freedom of the press belongs only to those who own the press") has always been uncomfortably close to the truth. But with the Web (and newsgroups, chat rooms etc.) more people have more freedom of the press or freedom of speech than ever before. I believe that is the most positive development in this generation.

It's not just the conspiracy pages that show a much greater diversity of opinion than the general media. Diversity is all over the net. Everybody who can save up enough money to get a computer can send their own version of reality to the world at large. "Just what I always wanted," Tom Jefferson would say.

PHF: Is there anything you'd like to see happening on the 'net that you haven't found there?

RAW: A more perfect union of internet, TV and VCRs. And that can't be more than a few years away...

PHF: I'm interested in your recent work with Richard Bandler. Have you found NLP to be useful in your writing?

RAW: Yes and no. Dr. Bandler keeps insisting that I have used NLP for years, even if I didn't know it myself. I can see what he means. Both Richard and I have been strongly influenced by Alfred Korzybski, whose system of non-aristotelian logic and general semantics underlie a lot of what Bandler does in his workshops and hypnotherapy; and they also underlie much of my "guerilla ontology," not just in my ideas but in my styles of presentation and my way of altering styles. (For instance, my psychedelic theories derive as much from Korzybski as from dear old Timothy Leary.)

So you might say I "knew" NLP before I studied it. On the other hand, studying NLP has helped me a great deal. I understand my own work better and therefore I think I can do it more skillfully and powerfully now.

To put this into wider context, in a recent conversation Dr Bandler agreed with me that Faulkner uses many NLP techniques in his prose, particularly in his famous long sentences, where the readers absorb a lot more than they consciously comprehend. And, of course, Faulkner also influenced my work a good deal.

PHF: Okay... Since NLP was developed from modeling effective language, that makes sense. Apart from writing skills, have you been playing with it in other ways? Accessing altered states or otherwise changing brains?

RAW: Of course. Chiefly, I use it to relax and stop worrying -- two things I need to work on these days, due to medical problems afflicting people near and dear to me. I use a combination Sufi listening exercise (which gets you into relaxation and near trance) and Bandler's mighty mantra, which you repeat every time you start going back into worry or anxiety. The mantra is slow and spaced and it says to the voice of worry, "Shut     the     fuck     up." After a few tries you get very good at making that damned voice shut the fuck up.

I've also used some NLP techniques in my workshops to make various meditation exercises quicker and more efficient. No doubt about it, NLP has one of the most practical and efficient reprogramming systems around.

PHF: Do you think NLP or Ericksonian hypnosis has potential for changing imprints? Or just conditioning?

RAW: Gee whillikers, I wish you wouldn't ask such hard questions. I have been trying to figure this one out ever since I learned a little NLP, and the more I learn, the more unsure I become. NLP certainly changes conditioning. Maybe, just maybe, it can even reverse imprinting. I'll have more definite opinions about that in another year or so.

PHF: Damn... I was hoping you had the answer to that one! Anyway... on to other territory... What's your take on the Clinton administration's attempt to squelch medical marijuana, even in the states where people have voted for medical herb?

RAW: I hate to become predictable, but I regard Clinton's position as not only wrong, morally and medically, but unconstitutional, fascistic and all-around rotten. If Bob Marley hadn't said it already about the pope, I'd say Clinton was Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Godfather of the Mafia and general all-around Anti-Christ; but I guess that line does work better for the pope.

To sound less violent and more precise, the Constitution lists the powers of the federal government very clearly. Nowhere does it list the power to create an official school of correct medical theory and use force to prevent competition by rival theories.

This power is clearly reserved "to the States or the people," an ambiguity I assume was deliberate because the founders wanted power divided as many ways as possible and each part in some tension (a la Bucky Fuller's dynamic tension philosophy) with all the others. The growth of federal power over all the traditional checks and balances is the worst single event of this dying century and I hope it will be reversed in the next century.

This is not just a matter of one medical heresy; the FDA is cracking down more and more often on any doctor who does not obey orthodoxy, and orthodoxy always turns out to be that which benefits the billion-dollar pharmaceutical industry. Materialists may consider that match between orthodoxy and profits mere coincidence, Jungians may call it synchronicity, but to me it looks like a conspiracy to rip off the public.

There's a new medicine for AIDS, I forget its name, but it will cost $20,000 a year. Those with less money than that will just have to suffer on. Now really does anybody believe this medicine would be legal if you could grow it in your backyard and it made no profits for the corporate elite?

As Bismarck said, "Laws are like sausages. You have more respect for them if you haven't seen how they're made."

Oh to get back to that Bob Marley quote. I don't really consider Clinton the Godfather of the Mafia or Imperial Wizard of the KKK, but he does look more and more like a General All-Around Anti-Christ.

PHF: Heh... I'm in agreement. Do you think the various pro-medical-pot bills that passed in a few states bodes well for legalization in the near future, in spite of Clinton and the pharmaceutical industry? Under what conditions would YOU like to see herb legalized, if at all?

RAW: I have an Ideal Answer and a more Pragmatic Answer. Ideally, I would like a government that let everybody to hell alone and let us all make our own medical decisions and even our own recreational decisions. That, I think, is the kind of government intended by the Constitution. The idea that we are ignorant children and Papa Government has to make all our decisions for us is not a democratic idea, not at all; it's a medieval, almost Papist idea. I'd get rid of all victimless crime laws and let everybody do anything that harms not their neighbors. I know that sounds looney, like one of those 18th Century radicals of the Tom Jefferson ilk, but ideally it is the kind of government I'd like.

Pragmatically, since most Americans, like most people everywhere, have an emotional anchor to the patriarchal- authoritarian structure, as described by Reich in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, I don't expect the radical ideas of 18th Century intellectuals to have any sudden rebirth here, or anywhere else on the planet. So, pragmatically, I just hope for gradual moderation of the present insane drug laws, as more and more people, even conservatives, become more and more aware that we're spending vast billions of dollars on a "war" that cannot be won, while other parts of our country are falling apart because of lack of funding for better schools, civilized medical care, etc. According to Pete McWilliams's Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do, we spend around 450 billion a year trying to enforce victimless crime laws. People who want a balanced budget or a smaller national debt have more and more realized what a vast waste that is. They will favor moves toward more moderation and some sanity.

Of course, the major argument for cutting back on the War On Sin is simply that in real crimes you've got victims who are eager to help the police identify the culprit, public agreement that such crimes (robbery rape etc.) should not be allowed, and a general cooperation between the people and the cops. In victimless crimes, you have the opposite situtation. The only way the power elite can really win any war against Sin is to spend trillions, not billions, and establish a full-scale totalitarianism. There's enough growing resistance to federal power already; I don't think the public will allow the higher taxes and total loss of liberty such a war would cost us.

PHF: Free associating from the federal gov't to conspiracies... Do you think the current media glut concerning aliens, X-files, Men in Black, etc., is an indication of some organized attempt at propaganda or disinformation? Or something rising from the collective unconscious?

RAW: This requires a complicated answer. I don't see one organized conspiracy running the whole show, but I do agree with Jacques Vallee and Phil Klass that the government has used UFO flaps to help plant certain belief systems (Vallee) and also to cover up other things they didn't want us to know (Klass) --for instance, in early days, the U2 spy planes. However I think most UFO events come from somewhere else...and my favorite model combines Jung (spontaenous release of archetypes of the collective unconscious) and Persinger (energy fluctuations that provoke real Lights, usually ball lightning, plus "poltergeist" type phenomena (dancing furniture, electric systems going on and off unpredictibly etc.) plus brainwave change unleashing the Jungian archetypes...>

But these are just my favorite models. The UFO experience seems to me profoundly more puzzling than either the dogmatic Believers or dogmatic Debunkers seem to realize. I guess my third favorite model, or non-model, is Hynek's agnostic notion that we may have to change basic ideas (about time, space, ego or whatnot) before we can begin to fathom this galloping wierdity.

Based on experience with media, I don't think any central conspiracy "controls" everything totally, although certain ideas get notably ignored in mass media and certain ideas get reinforced over and over... but on the other hand, what gets fashionable depends most often on box office returns. For instance we've had so many films about serial killers,not because the Power Elite wants to make us more afraid of one another, but because The Silence of the Lambs did so damned well; and we have so many alien movies because ET did so damn well, and now we have sinister alien movies because X Files did so damn well.

PHF: Any thoughts about where such a radical change in basic ideas might come from?

RAW: As of today (August 11, 1997) I find the most interesting ideas in traditional Buddhism, Nietzsche, Charles Fort, several quantum physicists (Nick Herbert, David Bohm, Fred Wolfe, David Finkelstein) and in Rupert Sheldrake. Add together the Buddhist yoga of detachment from fixed ideas and emotions, Nietzche's and Fort's merciless assault on the cultural prejudices that are so deeply embedded we usualy don't notice them, quantum uncerainty and holism, Sheldrake's special variety of holism, and I think we have the beginning of a hint of the New Paradigm we need.But after looking at this list I realize I should have included Korzybski's general semantics, Bandler's neurolinguistic programming and Leary's evolutionary-existentialist neuro-psychology or info-psychology as he most recently labelled it.

PHF: Okay... so why are conspiracy theories so popular?

RAW: Information flow is accelerating, as several studies have indicated and as I have documented in a few of my books. Information acceleration leads to fractal functions, according to mathematician Theodore Gordon. Fractal functions are always unpredictible. Okay?

Well, most people don't know enough math and sociology to understand that simple paragraph.All they know is that everything is getting more unpredictible and that looks spooky to them. (The unpredictible tends to spook all mammals...) Unable to grasp what is happening (accelerated evolution), most domesticated primates feel spooked and threatened and look around for some Evil Force to blame. Conspiracy theories will continue to proliferate as long as the acceleration does not include an acceleration of general education...but that will have to happen as the whole world moves into high gear. Then we'll have more understanding (science) and less demonology (conspiracy theory.)

PHF: Any suggestions for those who might find themselves curious about conspiracy theories, or on the verge of swallowing one whole?

RAW: I am 100 per cent in favor of studying conspiracy theories because, next to quantum mechanics, they represent the best test of how well you can handle ambiguity and uncertainty. Most people at present cannot handle indeterminacy at all and generally evade it by rushing to premature certitude. If you really study conspiracy theory carefully, examining all its flavors, the result is like studying quantum theory and all of its conflicting models. You either go bonkers or you learn to think beyond the aristotelian either/or logic of our culture.

The best way to study conspiracy theory without swallowing one theory whole is to prepare yourself by a thorough training in clasical logic, fuzzy logic, general semantics and quite a bit of Zen-Sufi humor, until you have internalized the realization that Universe is infinite chaos and any model you make at a date cannot possibly contain all of it but only represents the mixture of your knowledge and ignorance at that date.

PHF: You recently joined the Board of Advisors of the Fully Informed Jury Association. Why is this group so important in your estimation?

RAW: Well, after I quit the ACLU I had to find some outlet for my energies. (The ACLU has decided they're in favor of discrimination against certain groups.I'm not in favor of discrimination against any groups, so I had to withdraw.)

The Fully Informed Jury Assocation seems to me the best safeguard against the absolute tyranny of the federal government, toward which we seem to be headed. When juries know that they have the right, both de jure and de facto, to nullify any law they find obnoxious or trannical, we have a real chance of withstanding the increase of omnipresent State meddling in every aspect of our lives. (They're prying into our bladders already. When even your bladder is not private and safe from invasion, how much liberty is left concretely?)

De facto any jury can vote as they damned please, and they often do. De jure, they have the right to acquit when the law itself seems unfair or unjust to them, but judges often lie and tell them they do not have this right. FIJA is around to spread the word that juries have had this right since Magna Carta and still have this right, and any judge who says otherwise is a liar and tyrant.

Of course, as an advocate of jury nullification, I also belive in the equally old tradition that juries should be chosen totally at random. In the early days, a jury was the first twelve men the bailiff saw when he walked out the door of the court. It should be both men and women,of course, but it should remain equally random. The lawyers should have no ability to stack a jury. The traditional system, with its random factor, comes as close as humanly possible to obtaining a true cross section of the common sense, the common decency and the common humanity of the people, and I trust those factors, if not blindly the way Catholics trust the pope, certainly a lot more than I trust lawyers and judges.

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bkMarcus: belief: celine

CELINE'S LAWS

by Hagbard Celine

As every thinking person has noticed, our national life has become increasingly weird and surrealistic. The waiting lines at banks and post offices are growing longer all the time, even though demographers tell us US population is no longer rising. The street signs more often than not say WALK on the red and DON'T WALK on the green. You can't get a plumber on the weekends. Nobody has been able to explain the cattle mutilations yet. Every survey shows that the price of consumer goods, the number of violent crimes, and the eerie popularity of THE GONG SHOW are ominously accelerating.

I believe I have found the explanation these distressing trends. Needless to say, I cannot present, in a short article, all the evidence which I have accumulated in three decades of careful metasociological research; that will have to await the publication of my three-volume study, "Why Everybody Is Going Bonkers." Here I can only mention the thousands of depth interviews, the innumerable flowcharts and helix-matrix equations, the vast files of computer readouts, the I CHING divinations, and other rigorous scientific techniques used in developing what I modestly call Celine's Laws of Chaos, Discord and Confusion.

Celine's First Law is that National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity!

That may sound like a paradox, but I will explain it at once.

Every secret police agency must be monitored by an elite corps of secret-police-of-the-second-order. There are numerous reasons for this, but three are especially noteworthy.

NATIONAL SECURITY
IS THE CHIEF CAUSE
OF NATIONAL INSECURITY!!!

1). Infiltration of the secret police, for the purpose of subversion, will always be a prime goal of internal revolutionaries. This is an ordinary part of the spy-counterspy game. There is nothing Weather Underground would like better than having a few agents in the FBI or CIA, for the same reasons that the FBI or CIA would like to have a few agents in Weather Underground. 2). Such infiltration will also be a prime goal of hostile foreign powers, for the same reasons.

Please note that these are simple facts of the secret-police game, well-known even to the general public, the subject of many ingenious plots in popular spy films, and not particularly alarming...yet. Nonetheless, the seeds of Chaos, Discord, Confusion, and Paranoia are already here, for the simple reason that once a human being develops the habits of worry and suspicion, he or she finds increasing justifications for more worry and more suspicion. For instance, Richard Q. (not his real initial), one of my interview subjects, became concerned, after ten years in the CIA, with the possibility of infiltration by "extraterrestrial" agents. He was eventually retired when he began to claim that demons in the form of dogs wanted him to assassinate Laverne and Shirley. 3). Secret-police officials acquire fantastic capacities to blackmail and intimidate others in government.

Stalin executed three chiefs of his secret police in a row, because of this danger. One of my informants claims that every president since the National Security Act was passed in 1947 has learned how to have sexual intercourse without making a single audible sound, because of the possible electronic eavesdroppers. As Nixon says so wistfully on the Watergate transcripts, "Well, Hoover performed. He would have fought. That was the point. He would have defied a few people. He would have scared them to death. HE HAS A FILE ON EVERYBODY!" . Thus, those who employ secret-police organizations MUST monitor them th be sure they are not acquiring too much power.

In the United States today, the super elite that monitors the CIA is the National Security Agency. ( And a group called "The Store" monitors the NSA).

Here is where a sinister infinite regress enters the game. Any such elite, second or third order secret-police agency must be, according to the above pragmatic and necessary rules, subject to infiltration by native subversives or hostile foreign powers, or to acquiring "too much power" in the opinion of its masters. (It may even be subject, if Richard Q. was correct in his anxieties, to extraterrestrial manipulation). And so, it, too, must be monitored by a secret police of the third order.

But this third-order secret-police (such as Nixon's notorious "plumbers", or more currently, "The Store"). is also subject to infiltration or to acquiring too much power...and thus, with relentless logic, the infinite regress builds. Once a government has n orders of secret police spying on each other, all are potentially suspect, and to be safe a secret police of order n+1 must be created. And so on, forever.

THOSE WHO EMPLOY SECRET
POLICE MUST MONITOR THEM TO
BE SURE THEY ARE NOT ACQUIRING
TOO MUCH POWER.

In practice, of course, this cannot really regress to infinity, but only to the point where every other citizen, or until the funding runs out, whichever comes first.

National Security in practice, then, must always fall short of the logically ideal infinite regress which we have shown is necessary to the achievement of its goal. In that gap between the ideal of "One nation under surveillance, with wiretaps and mail covers for all" and the strictly limited real situation of finite funding, there is ample encouragement for paranoias of all sorts to flourish. In short, every government that employs secret-police agencies must grow more insecure, not more secure, as the strength, versatility, and power of the secret-police agencies grow.

For instance, a certain left-wing nation which has employed secret-police agencies for 61 years has now reached the point where the leaders are terrified of painters and poets. In another, right-wing nation infested with secret-police agencies, several purges have been caused by three practical jokers who regularly call middle-rank officials on the phone and talk in what appears to be a code. The secret police, of course, are no fools, and are aware that this might be what it in fact is, a form of anarchist humor; but they can't be sure.

What usually happens in such cases is this: an official receives one of these mystery calls, saying perhaps "Pawn to queen rook five. No wife, no horse, no mustache. A boy has never wept nor dashed a thousand kim." He knows immediately that surveillance upon him will be increased tenfold. In the next few days, while memories of all his mistakes, small bribes, incautious remarks, and other incriminating events haunt his imagination, he observes the increased surveillance, and begins to suspect even the most loyal of his subordinates of watching him with eyes that miss nothing and to give a sinister interpretation to everything. Within ten days, he usually attempts to contact a foreign government to seek political sanctuary, and the secret-police net closes on him.

By the same process of worry leading to more worry and suspicion leading to more suspicion, the very act of joining a secret-police organization will eventually turn a man or woman into a clinical paranoid; in layman's terms, "bananas" or "wigged out." THE AGENT KNOWS WHOM HE IS SPYING ON; BUT HE NEVER KNOWS WHO IS SPYING ON HIM! Could it be his wife, his girl friend, his secretary, the newsboy, the Good Humor man?

For these reasons, secret-police agents develop elaborate and complex theories to account for what is actually going on. According to one of my tables of data, there isn't a single theory held by professional conspiracy buffs which isn't also believed by many members of our various secret-police agencies. In fact, the exact percentages of believes in these extravagant scenarios are quite similar among a group of 1,000 CIA agents and a control group of 1,000 readers of the underground press, as shown in table 1. Table 1. True Believes in various Conspiracy Theories Among CIA Agents and Underground-Press Readers.

CONSPIRACY THEORY

CIA

UNDERGROUND PRESS READERS

The Yankees (Eastern millionaires) run everything

25%

30%

The Cowboys (Western millionaires) run everything

25%

15%

It's the result of civil war between Yankees and Cowboys

23%

17%

It's the 33 degree Masons

5%

5%

It's the Jesuits

5%

5%

It's the Elders of Zion

2%

2%

It's the Military Industrial Complex

1%

2%

It's the Bilderbergers

1%

2%

It's the Gnomes of Zurich

1%

2%

It's the Lesbian Vegetarians

10%

28%

It's the Rock n Roll Empire

2%

2%

1. Source: Gallup, Roper, and Hogtied, "WHO'S WATCHING WHOM" (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1979), p. 432.

2. All figures are percentages. Figures do not add to 100, for a variety of reasons. For a list of them, please send 25 cents and a list of suspicious persons in your neighborhood to the US Dept. of Bedding, Washington DC 20001.

3. Includes those who blame it all on the Bavarian Illuminati; those who hold a multiconspiracy theory (e.g., the Lesbian Vegetarians are allied with the Yankees and Bilderbergers against the Cowboys, the TV Networks, and the Cattle Mutilators); those who believe it is all part of the UFO Cover-Up; and those who claim that demons in the form of dogs told them it's connected somehow with the alligators in New York's sewers.

IN RUSSIA, THE GOVERNMENT IS
TERRIFIED OF PAINTERS AND POETS!

Now, Table 1 clearly gives a picture of a rather schizzed-out nation. This is the result of the impossible infinite regress and its resultant of worry leading to more worry.

Furthermore, if there is a secret police at all, in any nation you care to imagine, every branch and department of that country's government becomes suspect, in the eyes of cautious and intelligent people, as a possible front or funnel to the secret police. (That is, the more shrewd citizens will recognize that something titled a branch of the HEW or even PTA might actually be run by the CIA). Inevitably, the government as a whole, and many nongovernmental agencies, will be regarded by reasonable persons with fear and trepidation. Proverbs like "One can't be too careful these days" and "Better safe than sorry" become a kind of sinister folk wisdom.

But further yet: any government which already has a secret police (and a secret police monitoring the secret police, etc). will become alarmed on observing that its more hip and intelligent citizens now regard it with loathing and misgivings. The government will therefore increase the size and powers of the secret police. This is the only rational move, within the context of the secret-police game.

SOMETHING PASSING AS A
BRANCH OF HEW MIGHT BE A
FRONT FOR THE CIA!

(The only alternative was once suggested sarcastically by playwright Bert Brecht, who said, "If the government doesn't trust the people, why doesn't it dissolve them and elect new people?" No way has yet been invented to elect a new people; so the police state will instead spy on the existing people even more vigorously).

This, of course, creates additional paranoia in both the governors and the citizens, because a sufficiently pugnacious secret police will eventually "have a file on everybody," including its own creators. This leads to another infinite regress: the more people will loathe the government, the more power will be given to the secret police.

Thus, whether any of the hypothetical conspiracies mentioned earlier really exist or not, a system of clandestine government inevitably produces, in both the rulers and the ruled, a mood of paranoia in which such conspiracy theories flourish.

This escalating sense of suspiciousness is accelerated by the fact that every secret-police organization engages in both the collection of information and the production misinformation. That is, you score points in the secret-police game both by hoarding signals (information units)---that is, by hiding facts from competitive players---and by foisting false signals (fake information units) on the other players. This creates the situation which I call Optimum Fuckup, in which every participant has rational (not neurotic) cause to suspect that every other player may be attempting to deceive him, gull him, con him, dupe him, and generally misinform him. As Henry Kissinger is rumored to have said, "Anybody in Washington these days who isn't paranoid is crazy!"

One could generalize the remark: anyone in the United States today who isn't paranoid must be crazy!!!

"IF THE GOVERNMENT DOESN'T
TRUST THE PEOPLE, WHY DOESN'T
IT DISSOLVE THEM AND ELECT A
NEW PEOPLE?"

The deliberate production of misinformation (or, as intelligence agencies more euphemistically call it, disinformation) creates a situation profoundly disorienting to the philosopher, the scientist, and the ordinary Joe who wants to know the best time to go to the bank. The desire to discover "what-the-hell-is-really-going-on" (the definition of science offered by physicist Saul-Paul Sirag) is totally incompatible with the circulation of disinformation; we all need to know, at least roughly, what the hell is really going on if we are not to stumble around like blind robots colliding with things we weren't told were there.

Maybe the UFO's really exist---or maybe the whole UFO phenomenon is a cover for an intelligence operation. Maybe there are black holes where space and time implode---or maybe the entire black-hole cosmology was created to befuddle and mislead Russian scientists. Maybe Jimmy Carter really exists---or maybe he is, as the National Lampoon claims, an actor named Sidney Goldfarb specially trained to project the down-home virtues that the American people nostalgically seek. Perhaps only three men at the top of the National Security Agency REALLY know the answers to these questions---or perhaps those three are being deceived by certain subordinates (as Lyndon Johnson was deceived by the CIA about Vietnam) and are as disoriented as the rest of us. Such is the logic of a Disinformation Matrix.

Personally, I find it easier to believe in UFO's than in black holes or Jimmy Carter; but that may just indicate the damage to my own brain caused by the Optimum Fuckup of the Disinformation Matrix.

According to a recent survey 19 per cent of the population believe the moon landings were faked by Stanley Kubrick and a gang of special effects experts. Perhaps these arch skeptics are the sanest ones left among us. Who among the readers of this file has a security clearance high enough to be ABSOLUTELY sure that these ultraparanoids are wrong?

This general tendency toward chaos discord, and confusion, once a secret police has been established, is complicated and accelerated by Celine's Second Law, to wit: "Accurate communication is only possible in a nonpunishing situation."

This is a very simple statement of the obvious, and means no more than that everybody tends to lie a little, to flatter or to protect themselves, when dealing with those who have power over them, especially the power to punish. (this is why communication between parents and children is notoriously befoolzled).

Every authoritarian structure can be visualized as a pyramid, with very few at the top and very many at the bottom, as in the flowchart of any corporation or bureaucracy. On each rung, participants bear a burden of nescience in relation to those above them. That is, they must be very, very careful that their natural sensory activities as conscious organisms---the acts of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, drawing inferences from perception, etc.---be in accord with the wishes of those above them. This is absolutely vital; job security depends on it. It is much less important---a luxury that can easily be discarded---that these perceptions be in accord with actual reality.

COMMUNICATION IS POSSIBLE
ONLY BETWEEN EQUALS.

For instance, in the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, the agent had to develop the capacity to see godless communists everywhere. Any agent whose perceptions indicated that there were actually very few godless communists anywhere in this country would experience what psychologists call cognitive dissonance: his or her reality grid was at variance with the official reality grid of the pyramidal authority structure. To talk about such divergent perceptions at all would be to invite suspicions of eccentricity, of intellectual wiseacreing, or of being oneself a godless communist. The same would apply to any Dominican Inquisitor of earlier centuries who lacked the capacity to see witches everywhere. In such authoritarian situations, it is important to see what the authorities see; it is inconvenient, and possibly dangerous, to see what is actually there.

But this leads to an equal and opposite burden of omniscience on those at the top, in the Eye of the authoritarian pyramid. All that is forbidden to those at the bottom---the conscious activities of perception and evaluation---is demanded of the master classes, the elite and the super-elite. They must attempt to do the seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, and decision making for the whole society.

But a man with a gun (the power to punish) is told only what his target thinks will not cause him to pull the trigger. The elite, with their burden of omniscience, face the underlings, with their burden of nescience, and receive only the feedback consistent with their own preconceived notions. The burden of omniscience becomes, in short, another and more complex burden of nescience. Nobody really knows anything anymore, or if they do, they are careful to hide the fact.

As the national security paradigm approaches (or attempts to approach) the ideal infinite regress of spies-spying-on-spies- spying-on-spies, etc., the resultant general trepidation causes all persons to hide anything they know (if it differs from the official reality), not only from their superiors, but from peers and inferiors as well. Anybody, after all, might be part of the nth-degree secret police. "One can't be too careful these days." The burden of nescience becomes omnipresent. More and more of reality becomes unspeakable.

But as Freud noted, that which is objectively repressed (unspeakable) soon becomes subjectively repressed (unthinkable). Nobody likes to feel like a coward and a liar constantly. It is easier to cease to notice where the official reality grid differs from sensed experience. Thus Optimum Fuckup gradually becomes Terminal Fuckup, and rigiditus bureaucraticus sets in; this is the last stage before all brain activity ceases, and the society is intellectually dead.

Celine's Third Law is like unto the first two, and holds that AN HONEST politician is a national calamity.

At first glance, this seems preposterous. People of all shades of opinion agree that at least on the axiom that we need more honest politicians, not more crooked ones. Please remember, however, that people of all shades of opinion once agreed that the Earth is flat.

Your typical dishonest politician (bocca grande normalis) is interested only in enriching himself at the public expense, a goal he shares with most of his fellow citizens, especially doctors and lawyers. This is normal behavior for our primate species, and society has always been able to endure and survive it.

NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING, OR IF
THEY DO, THEY ARE CAREFUL TO
HIDE THE FACT!

An honest politician (bocca grande giganticus) is far more dangerous. He or she is sincerely committed to bettering society by political action. In practice, that means by writing and enacting more laws. Indeed, many groups of idealistic citizens publish rating sheets on politicians every year, and those who have created more laws are estimated as having higher value than those who are frequently absent when bills are voted upon. The assumption is that adding more laws to statute books is a positive achievement, like adding more money to our paychecks or more art works to a museum.

A little thought, however, shows that this assumption is not tenable. Every law creates a whole new criminal class; for instance, when marijuana was illegalized in 1937, several hundred thousand formerly law-abiding citizens became criminals overnight, by Act of Congress. As more and more laws are passed, more and more citizens become criminals. The chief cause of the rising crime rate is the rising number of laws being enacted. An honest politician, who keeps his nose to the grindstone and enacts several hundred laws in the course of his career, thereby produces as many as several million new criminals.

It is furthermore mathematically demonstrable that the more laws there are, the more restrictions there are on the freedom of the individual. If there were, say, only three laws in a given society---e.g., Thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not lie or defraud---there would be only three restrictions on freedom, which all rational persons would accept as obviously necessary to the maintenance of order. When there are several hundred thousand restrictions on freedom, most of which are felt as extremely irksome by large segments of the populace.

In fact, it would take a brigade of lawyers several weeks, minutely examining your affairs, to determine if you are a criminal. Certainly, no ordinary citizen has the time or research facilities to discover if he or she is in violation of one out of skillions of laws currently on our statute books. In many cases, two lawyers consulted independently will give opposite opinions about whether or not a given course of action is in violation of the statutes.

And new laws are being enacted all the time. Obviously, unless there is a sudden paper shortage, the number of laws on the books will eventually reach the point satirized by T.H.White, in which "everything not prohibited is compulsory." It would then probably only take a few years or decades more for a cadre of honest politicians diligently writing even more laws to reach the complementary point where "everything not compulsory is prohibited."

EVERY LAW CREATES A WHOLE
NEW CRIMINAL CLASS OVERNIGHT!

At that stage the nightmare world of Orwell's 1984 will be achieved. Crooked politicians, merely interested in the normal human activity of making themselves rich and comfortable, could never create that ultimate horror; but honest and idealistic politicians bring us closer to it every day, with every new law they enact.

These three generalizations---that national security produces national insecurity; that authoritarianism produces miscommunication and eventual idiocy; and that honest politicians are a plague upon society---will be found to fully explain the Decline and Fall of Rome, the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, and the Decline and Fall of any country you care to name. They are as universal as Newton's laws of motion and apply to ALL cases. Of course, the American Sociological Association says I am mad. Mad, am I? They said the Wright Brothers were mad. They said Edison was mad. They said Baron Frankenstein was mad...

HAGBARD CELINE was trained in contract law and naval engineering but claims he acquired his real education playing the piano in a whorehouse. He is captain of the world's largest yellow submarine, the Leif Erikson, and president of Gold and Appel Inc., an import-export firm that has frequently aroused the suspicions of law enforcement agencies ("137 arrests and no convictions," Hagbard brags). Some claim that he is a master of disguise and has successfully passed himself off under such alternative identities as Howard Cork, Carl Cory, Hugh Crane, Clutch Cargo, Captain Nemo, etc., and has appeared in countless epics and sagas. I am mad.

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