Robot Speaks His Mind
In regards to your article, “Coincidence or Cosmic Conspiracy” (see Barb, May 19), I have a few reflections. I’ve read your books and have found them highly entertaining, loaded with necessary and useful information and always something that wrenches my mind a bit — of which I always need more. However, there’s a particular undercurrent in your work, especially exemplified in the Berkeley Barb article, which I think needs some exploration.
When I read your piece I immediately recognized my robotic emotional behavior pattern regurgitate, “Here’s Wilson again, going to titillate me with some strange theories, connections and outrageous bits of information.”
As I observe that in myself, I need to question if it’s all my responsibility. Yes, I allow certain material to feed my emotional addictions, but what about the specific author who has an enthusiastic audience, listening and learning from him. In other words, I wonder if you feel the responsibility of what may go on in your reader’s mind.
What’s needed is not to go on excitedly about such things as the cabala relationships with the “Prisoner,” Aleister Crowley’s symbolic interrelationships with Sirius the Dog, or expressing childish enthusiasm over your acquired psychic capacities of precognition, ESP, etc. You could accept your capacities of precognition and psychic “synchronicity” and put them to some genuine service.
For example, you could use those powers by writing responsibly — understanding the potentially dangerous response from an emotionally addictive audience.
As I write and share this “perception” with you I can’t help but see those same tendencies in myself — the emotional driving force to understand the inter and inner connections between metaphysics, politics, UFO’s, Sufism, etc. Yet I wonder what can I do with material of this kind (such as yours)?
How can I use such information, ideas, hypotheses and theories to radically transform myself into something more than an emotionally obsessed, rebellious punk, living my life in total consumption of various ideologies and delusions?
You could explore more purposefully, as you do elsewhere, how the left and the right are being manipulated by a controlling elite which finds it most profitable to dupe us into believing and “fighting” the useless, dualistic battle; how it keeps us active in imagining that we know our enemy and can truly ‘act.’
You could explore how in everyday life we could assist in dehypnotizing ourselves from fascist belief systems and rigid behavior tapes. You could relate your experiences, both real and imaginative, concerning the necessary initiation preparation in order to become a contributing member of a secret society which assists man in becoming man and not simply an idle and passive worm.
It is imperative for the mindless, anti-intellectual and drug-ged milieu which has permeated all spheres recently, to wake up to a radically different conception of ourselves and what we possibly can become. You have a responsibility to assist in this potentially evolutionary phase, or deny it and promote a more bizarre and subtle delusion.
— A. Weisdman
Wilson Replies
My books and articles are deliberately constructed, using every literary trick and gimmick I can devise, to provoke the reader to think. I try to lure the reader into thinking, to frighten the reader into thinking, and in every other way to get the victim (pardon me, the customer) to begin using his or her brain cells in new and creative ways. As part of this sadistic strategy I very carefully avoid what in music is referred to as the resolving chord (i.e. the definitive climax), or as it is called on Broadway “the revelation scene.”
I write this way because I think stupidity is the main problem afflicting this planet and that the best use to which I can put my literary talents, such as they are, is to incite thinking in general and more original thinking in particular. (Also, despite the arrogant postures I occasionally assume for rhetorical purposes, I don’t think I have all the answers, and it would be dishonest for me to pretend that I do.)
However, like Einstein’s God I am “subtle but not plain mean.” To all those readers who (like A. Weisdman) find my writings not only provocative but annoyingly inconclusive, I gladly offer the following advice:
1) Make a detailed study of both classical and mathematical logic. It is shocking, tragic and absurd that so many people these days, including college graduates, don’t know enough logic to distinguish a valid argument from an invalid one. The more logic you know, the more invulnerable you become to demagogues of all schools.
2) After thoroughly mastering logic investigate General Semantics and read a few good books on scientific method (e.g. Rapoport’s Operational Philosophy) to avoid the errors of that kind of abstract logic which doesn’t connect at all with existential reality.
3) Make a list of those things which you and everybody in your clique or sub-culture believes. Write out a logical proof that each of these beliefs is wrong. If necessary, read some books by the opposition, to make your proofs more convincing. This will teach you detachment from your own prejudices.
4) Join in sequence several groups which promise consciousness expansion or enlightenment. Don’t stay with any group too long. Don’t believe them when they tell you such shopping around is just going to get you more confused. Keep moving. Learn what is valid in each system and discard the bullshit.
5) Don’t believe anything I say, or anybody else says. Check everything against logic science, common sense, the most stringent skepticism and your own personal experience.
May the Force be with you.
— Robert Anton Wilson
Wilson Replies
by Robert Anton Wilson appeared in Berkeley Barb, Volume 27, Issue 24 in June 1978