Quotes from Robert Anton Wilson

Neither capitalist indust-reality nor socialist indust-reality have been able to give humanity what most of us really want: liberty and justice, freedom and the abolition of poverty, continued growth and continued security. In looking at capitalism vs. socialism, we are always confronted with a dilemma, not a choice.

A popular fallacy holds that there are no non-objective realities: that objective reality is the "only" reality. The error of this view can clearly be seen when one contemplates the range of non-objective realities encountered and endured by different people on ordinary days, without any occult operations being performed at all:

I passed on to the kitchen, as if Bill were not a major item of interest at the moment. That was step one; everybody, I was sure, had been treating his symptoms as a grave problem, and I wanted to give him back his sense of perspective. There were nearly three billion people on earth who didn't know and didn't care about his mental states and I was standing in for all of them.

The Third Wave can, and will, transcend this problem within industrialism. The Third Wave will be neither capitalist nor socialist, nor some milkwater blend of the two. It will demand a whole new economy, just as feudalism created an economy unknown to tribal humanity and industrialism created the two competing economies of capitalism and socialism, both unguessed and unpredictable from the perspective of the feudal stage.

What I call Idols are projections of these inner compulsions of human psychology. When an Idol speaks (through its priests) it only says what the Faithful want to hear.

Absolute Laws in the Platonic sense cannot be known scientifically — as Plato himself realized. They can only be known (or imagined) by intuition or by some Act of Faith. Empirically and existentially, nobody knows today, right now, if we have any Absolute Laws in our intellectual common market. All that we know is that we have some models that work a lot better, practically, than some of the older models we have discarded.

Once you have given up asking "what day is it?" you will soon find it easy to give up asking what anything really "is." Then, in Melville's fine phrase, you can strike through the mask — pierce the veil of cultural conditioning (emic tunnel-reality) and see and hear with your own eyes and ears. In the words of a great poet, Don't believe the human eye In sunlight or in shade: The shadow-show of sight and sense Is the Devil's masquerade.

Please remember that we deal always with probabilities, not certitudes, and you will not get too flustered as we proceed to the next twist in Quantum Psychology's kinky yellow brick road.

If the so-called laws contained in our models are only generalizations based on our experience until this date — if they are not spaceless, timeless, eternal and given by some divinity or other — then things that do not fit our current models should not be rejected a priori. They should be studied carefully, as clues that might lead us to better models tomorrow.

In existential experienced life, we notice that we are making bets and choices all the time, and are responsible for being alert and aware enough to make them intelligently and to revise them when necessary. We cannot blame everything on The Real Universe, since it is only a model we have created to deal with experienced life. If the model is not good enough, we do not blame it but revise and improve it.

Subsequent learning will tend to get processed through these imprints, and those with strong neophobic reflexes will usually, if they ever reject the initial dogmatic family reality-tunnel, settle at once into an equally dogmatic new reality-tunnel. E.g., if raised Catholic, they seldom become agnostics or zetetics; rather, they will move, like iron filings drawn by a magnet, to dogmatic atheism or even a crusading atheist religion like Marxism, Objectivism or CSICOP.

All experience is a muddle, until we make a model to explain it. The model can clarify the muddles, but the model is never the muddle itself. "The map is not the territory"; the menu does not taste like the meal.

Among domesticated primates, emotions also confer status and power. That is, the most emotional person in the room "dominates" everyone else in the room: they must all react to his or her emotions, one way or another, or surrender the turf by retreating from the room entirely.

You can easily kill yourself with negative mind-sets, by developing ulcers, heart problems, high blood pressure, etc., or by drunken driving, or simply by getting so depressed you jump in front of a train. Conversely, you can survive "objective realities" that would mentally or physically destroy others, if you are maintaining a positive mind-set.

In cold fact, all three statements [1, 2 and 3] contradict my actual ideas. I just wanted to remind you how easily humans can go from statement S1 to conclusion S5 without noticing that the inferences in between — S2, S3 and S4 — have no basis in logic, and result only from mechanical reflex. I already quoted Andre Gide about that. Now I quote the father of linguistic analysis, Josiah Warren; "It is dangerous to understand new things too quickly.

The belief that the human umwelt reveals reality or deep reality seems, in this perspective, as naive as the notion that a yardstick shows more reality than a voltmeter, or that my religion 'is' better than your religion. Neurogenetic chauvinism has no more scientific justification than national or sexual chauvinisms.

Since the mechanical bio-chemical reflexes on this level remain invisible (and cannot even reach translation onto the verbal level except in an altered state of consciousness, such as hypnosis, or under certain drugs), this hard-wired infantile information system controls all later information systems (or selves) without the knowledge of the conscious ego.

Of course, we all consist of molecules, which consist of atoms, which consist of particles and/or waves and we all remain in various maybe states until we make a choice in the existential sense.

The hardware is more "real" than the software in that you can always locate it in space-time — if it's not in the bedroom, somebody must have moved it to the study, etc. On the other hand, the software is more "real" in the sense that you can smash the hardware back to dust ("kill" the computer) and the software still exists, and can "materialize" or "manifest" again in a different computer.

The "married look," "the "Mom and Dad look," etc., which are not scientific concepts but which everybody can recognize at once, have to do with an acute time-sense. The parent is concerned not just with acquiring bio-survival tickets for personal nurture, but with acquiring tickets for the young, and for the future.

In other words, in the intellectual conflict between Utopians and Dystopians, the mathematical odds actually are on the side of Utopians. Our human world is so information-rich (coherent) that it is almost certain to "collapse" into even higher coherence, not into chaos and self-destruction.

The New Fundamentalists are not as far separated from the Old Fundamentalists as they like to think they are.

NO "EXTERNAL" SITUATION MAKES A MENTAL STATE "INEVITABLE

Between choices, we evidently return to the maybe state until we make another choice. Existence precedes essence, remember?