Quotes from Robert Anton Wilson

The Irish proverb quoted at the beginning — If you see a two-headed pig, keep your mouth shut — contains profound pragmatic wisdom. Maybe most people are shrewd enough to understand that, and the reports that get into books like this are a small, very small, cross-section of the Chaos that is actually going on around us. Maybe.

Semantic noise also seems to haunt every communication system. A man may sincerely say I love fish, and two listeners may both hear him correctly, yet the two will neurosemantically file this in their brains under opposite categories. One will think the man loves to dine on fish, and the other will think he loves to keep fish (in an aquarium).

Wilson believes that these are good guesses based on scientific probabilities, but he does not think there are any hard economic or karmic laws guaranteeing them. He recognizes that this reality-tunnel was generated by his own brain, that he is the artist who created it, and that it expresses his own hopes and desires, as well as scientific probabilities. It is, he knows, the reality-tunnel that keeps him happy, creative, busy and full of zest for life.

Since critics appear notoriously dogmatic and pugnacious, it seems that meaning (a)—admitting relativity—is not what they mean. Is criticism then a form of theology (the only other field that claims access to the mind of God?) Or are we to take it that they are all Platonists?

So EMIC realities are very powerful. Six million Jews died because of an EMIC realtiy. That reality was as real as the guns and bombs of the war because that reality was believed in.

Every Real Universe is easy to understand, because it is much simpler than the existential continuum. Theists, Nazis, Flat Earthers, etc. can explain their Real Universes as quickly as any Fundamentalist Materialist explains his, because of this simplicity of the edited object as contrasted with the complexity of the sensory-sensual continuum in which we live when awake (unhypnotized).

It seems that when any model becomes an Idol its advocates begin to act like priests and inquisitors.

The only thing (or process) precisely equal to the universe remains the universe itself. Every description, or model, or theory, or art-work, or map, or reality-tunnel, or gloss, etc., remains somewhat smaller than the universe and hence includes less than the universe.

He doesn't think it is any crazier than anybody else's reality-tunnel, and he claims it is a lot more fun than any other.

Would you regard it as a monstrous satirical exaggeration on my part or a mere statement of anthropological fact, if I assert that art criticism is the only place in the modern world, outside the Vatican, where medieval metaphysics (the Aristotelian absolute is) still flourishes?

The first and second circuits are Evolutionary Stable Strategies. They have worked, in more or less the same form, not just for primates but for other mammals, and for many other species, over vast aeons of time. The third, semantic circuit is an Evolutionary Unstable Strategy. It could very accurately be called revolutionary rather than evolutionary.

Mammalian sociobiology, rooted in the antique neural circuits of the old brain, contains many factors opposing the evolution of domesticated primates into true freedom and objective intelligence.

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

The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization.

I regard belief as a form of brain damage.

Nothing of any importance can be taught. It can only be learned, and with blood and sweat.

The longer one is alone, the easier it is to hear the song of the earth.

Ego is a social fiction for which one person at a time gets all the blame.

The abandoned infant's cry is rage, not fear.

The Right's view of government and the Left's view of big business are both correct.

Pregnancy is a kind of miracle. Especially so in that it proves that a man and woman can conspire to force God to create a new soul.

History, sociology, economics, psychology et al. confirmed Joyce's view of Everyman as victim.

When the rose and the cross are united the alchemical marriage is complete and the drama ends. Then we wake from history and enter eternity.

A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of monopoly in the means of production.