Quotes from Robert Anton Wilson

In brief, 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 plus 1 must be created. And so on, forever.

It all rather reminds me of a remark once made to me by Alan Watts: The great error of academic historians is the belief that the Roman Empire 'fell.' It never 'fell.' It still controls the Western world through the Vatican and the Mafia.

ETIC REALITY: the hypothetical actuality that has not been filtered through the emic reality of a human nervous system or linguistic grid. If you have anything to say about Etic Reality without using words or any other symbols, please send a full description of it to the author at once.

But Charles Fort argued, at length, that such data is not uncommon at all; it is merely repressed by the same mechanisms of avoidance that Freud analyzed, the mechanisms that allow e.g. Roman Catholics and Marxists to forget things inconvenient to their emic realities.

However, the position of my books, and of post-modernism in general, which regards all representations, or maps, or models, as probabilistic and relative to their social context, Gross and Levitt dismissively call "perspectivism" (a good word in my estimation, so I cheerfully accept it). Gross and Levitt see perspectivism as an insidious threat to their One True Faith and a pathway downward to the bottomless abyss of nihilism.

Entropy is a measure of the deadness of a system. Negentropy or information is a measure of the liveliness of a system.

In practice, of course, this cannot regress to mathematical infinity, but only to the point where every citizen is spying on every other citizen or until the funding runs out.

It needs to be stated again and again that all opiates without exception are fundamentally depressants, so that the normal pattern, as dosage is increased, is from torpor to sleep to coma (ending in death, if there is an overdose).

The human increment accelerates faster than pre-human evolution because through the third, semantic circuit and its symbols (words, maps, equations etc.) we are able to pass information (negative entropy: coherence) from generation to generation.

National Security, in practice, must always fall short of the logically Empedoclean infinite regress it requires for perfect "security." In that gap between the ideal of "One Nation under surveillance with wire taps and urine tests for all," and the strictly limited real situation of finite resources and finite funding, there is ample encouragement for paranoias of all sorts to flourish, both among the citizens and among the police.

INFORMATION: as used in mathematical information theory, this denotes the amount of unpredictability in a message; information is, roughly, what you do not expect to hear. In this sense, information may be true or false, but is always a small surprise. Resistance to new information measures the degree of Fundamentalism in a culture, a sub-culture, or an individual.

Thus, the USSR after 62 years of Marxist secret police games reached the point where the alpha males were terrified of painters and poets.

It is a well-known idea, not just among mystics, but among modern psychologists, that the sad person lives in a sad world, the angry person in an angry world, etc. Then the sad person reads sad books and the angry person reads angry books? Even if those books seem funny and optimistic, say, to other readers?

NEUROSEMANTICS: the study of how symbolism influences the human nervous system; how the local reality-tunnel programs our thoughts, feelings and apparent sense impressions.

And that reminded me--as everything in the universe does--of Finnegans Wake. Now, I'm sure in an educated audience like this, you're all thoroughly familiar with Finnegans Wake, and I don't have to explain its deep structure or its polylinguistic meanings.

The Citadel has a vigorous and versatile propaganda department in the United States called the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal or CSICOP for short. You will not be surprised to learn that Martin Gardner and Prof. Bunge are among its spokesmen. CSICOPs method of scientific investigation generally is to wage a campaign of vilification, in the media, against any researcher whose ideas they don't like.

In spying-and-hiding transactions, worry leads to more worry and suspicion leads to more suspicion. The very act of participating, however unwillingly, in the secret police game — even as victim, or citizen being monitored — will eventually produce all the classic symptoms of clinical paranoia.

A heroin (or opiate) diet seems to "solve" sex problems in the same way this meatless diet does: by removing sex entirely. This is analogous to Jonathan Swift's famous solution to the barefooted condition of the poor in Ireland (cutting off their feet). It will recommend itself only to those who have lost all faith and hope that a real solution is possible.

The agent knows who he is spying on, but he never knows who is spying on him. Could it be his wife, his mistress, his secretary, the newsboy, the Good Humor man?

This book is a mirror. When a monkey looks in, no philosopher looks out.—Lichtenstein. Does that refer to one book only, or to all books?

In 1919 at Fatima, Portugal over 100,000 people saw a bright light descend from the sky, rose petals fell, everybody smelled perfume, and saw lights flashing. The rationalists say "mass hallucination." The Catholics say it's "a miracle by the Blessed Virgin." I say "it's some unknown property of the human mind.

REALITY-LABYRINTH: existence regarded as a multiple-choice intelligence test; the sum total of reality-tunnels available to an open-minded or non-Fundamentalistic human at a given time and place.

Malraux invented the term and concept of the "museum without walls," which sees modern art as developing, not from previous Western traditions alone, but from African, Hindu, Chinese and various other Third World traditions also. I consider him the godfather of multi-culturalism.

Seamus told that story many times after he returned to Ireland and lived in the Burren. He told how he had met General Washington in a pub in Philadelphia and leaped at the chance to fight the Brits. He never mentioned that Washington had gotten him blind drunk before he made that patriotic decision, and that, while sober, he had been firmly convinced he wanted no part of any war in inches or feet or miles anywhere at any time for any cause.