Surviving With Robert Anton Wilson
by Tiffany Lee Brown
FringeWare Review 08:20
Deep in the heart of darkest California, home to cults, crystals, and
the techno-elite, pioneers of the psychedelic revolution live in quiet
houses alongside surfers, artists, and programmers. Tourists flock to
the beaches and craft shops while hippies drum in peaceful parks and
hearty yuppies unload their cycling gear.
In one such community lives Robert Anton Wilson, icon to Discordians,
conspiracy theorists, modern mystics, subgenii, and trippers the world
over.
Best known for the The Illuminatus Trilogy (with Robert Shea),
Wilson's writing romps from the medieval Church to the Chicago
Democratc Convention, from puns to ciphers, from LSD to JFK, fusing
impressive historical research with mindbending science fiction and
postmodern fable.
When I first met Wilson in 1991, I'd just spent a couple of years
immersed in his works: Masks of the Illuminati, Cosmic Trigger: Vol 1,
the Schroedinger’s Cat Trilogy, etc. I wasn't sure whether his writing
had helped me toward indelible epiphanies, led me to Chapel Perilous,
or just fucked my brain so hard it didn't know which way was
up. Perhaps it had done all three; in any case, I immediately liked
the man himself. Even while illustrating its ambiguity, he seemed
solidly grounded in what passes for reality, treating with equal parts
cynicism, humour, and hope.
In spite of flooded highways and a multitude of glitches on the part
of my usually-trusty tape recorder, I managed to talk survival and
politics with Wilson..
fwr: We're interested in how people process their own instinct to
biosurvival, and how they deal with it in relation to society. This
theme recurs in your work, most specifically in Prometheus Rising, in
which you presented a tutorial of Timothy Leary's 8-Circuit model of
consciousness. Do you still use that as a construct?
raw: Yes. I find the 8-Circuit model very, very useful. I've been
saying for a long time now that everything is temporary these days,
and the a-Circuit model will be obsolete in 15 years. Then someone
pointed out to me, "You've been saying that for 20 years!" I haven't
found a better model yet.
I don't call them Circuits anymore, I call them the eight Systems. I
think Leary used too much cybernetic metaphor; "Systems" are a little
more complex and abstract, and the word sounds better. The first thing
is that Leary believes behavior results from genetics, imprinting, and
conditioning. He hardly ever mentions learning, but I'm sure if you
backed him into a corner he would admit that it plays a role, too.
Even if you don't believe Leary's model all the way down the line,
there's plenty of things which are neither conditioning nor genetics-
they result from imprinting, or learning, or situational
conditions. John Dillinger was a heterosexual outside of prison, and a
homosexual inside prison. I think that's a pretty general
pattern. This "either/or" I don't like.
So, you've got four factors to behavior, and the Biosurvival System
has a genetic drive to survival. Through bad imprinting this instinct
can be negated, as in the case of autistic infants who don't make any
effort to be alive at all. The main biosurvival drive is to find a
Mommy, and reptiles don't have that drive because they're born ready
to deal with the world as it is. But mammals need a certain period of
nurture; so we all have some sort of mother complex, to some
extent. There is a strong bond to the mother, and some degree of
neurological damage appears to occur if there is no bond.
Throughout history, the Biosurvival System has been attached to the
tribe. Since tribalism has broken down and civilization has gotten
more and more abstract, the biosurvival urge has hitched to "Survival
Tickets", what we call money. It's not just Americans, it's everybody
in the industrial world that is money-mad. We don't have tribes, we
don't have extended families, we don't even have families anymore- so
everybody's biosurvival drive is attached to money. When the money
disappears, people experience dizziness, anxiety, general sense of
panic, and near-death experience –which is what tribal people feel
when they're lost from the tribe.
In traditional societies, exile from the tribe was considered a
terrible reproof. In Shakespeare, Romeo says, "Exile! The damned use
that word in Hell!" Everybody in Shakespeare hates the idea of exile;
nowadays, nobody gives a damn, because our survival drive isn't
attached to the family and the tribe, it's attached to money. Nobody
minds going into exile if they can take a million dollars with them.
So how do you get your money? There is no general answer. Everybody's
gotta figure that out for themselves.
fwr: One of FringeWare's exercises in community has been fostering
some online tribalism, using the Internet to find like minds. We even
try to earn survival Tickets through the Internet, without giving our
energies over to the usual corporate entities...
raw: On the Internet, you don't know who you're talking to, so you
respond to people's minds. Ageism, racism, and sexism become less an
issue in that environment. In a sense, people are fundamentally their
minds; a strange thing for me to say, since I try to put things into
functional and non-Aristotelian terms, and I just came up with
something very Aristotelian.
But the mind of a person is what interests me most about them, and the
Internet puts you in a position to interact with the mind, with the
Third Circuit or Semantic System. You don't know their colour or
gender or sexual orientation.
fwr: It seems to me that government creates itself in an attempt to
satisfy biosurvival urges; since we lack organic tribes or families,
we create an external structure to act as our tribe, our protective
father archetype, our nurturing mother, and to allocate our Survival
Tickets.
raw: I agree with Tom Payne – government is a necessary evil. Or
George Washington, who said "Government is a dangerous servant and a
fearful master." I think government has become our master too much,
and I find a great deal of morbid humour in the right-wing talk show
hosts who are blaming it on the liberals. Most of the things the
government does which have annoyed me have been done by
conservatives. The government has become a monster that pries into our
private lives and harasses us; continually, the conservatives have had
as much blame to take for this as the liberals. It's amazing how they
can get away with saying that the liberals are to blame.
fwr: How do you suggest that Americans get involved with politics, or
should they at all?
raw: For years, I was in the anarchist headspace: "Don't vote, it only
encourages them." I didn't vote for years. Then I went through a
change; part of it was living in Europe, then moving back here, and
part of it was the end of the Cold War, in which I began to see the
differences between the Republicans and the Democrats again. During
the Cold War, those differences tended to disappear. The Democrats
have been corrupted to some extent, but they do pretend to be on the
side of the working class. And some of them really are trying to help.
The main thing I learned from Europe is that a multi-party system is
better than a two-party system. Every part of Europe has amenities
that are distinctly absent here, due to the fact that they have three
or four parties in their parliaments. A party that only represents a
minority can change things, through blocking the legislation of the
major parties.
I tend toward the libertarian, but I think – and this is going to
shock every Libertarian who reads it – I think every country in Europe
that's had a socialist government has benefited from it. Having four
or five parties, with the radicals winning occasionally, tends to
produce a more balanced society than here, where we've got basically
two right-wing parties, one of which has a nostalgia for its left-wing
past. Relative stasis here – even Perot, whom I trust about as much as
I would trust David Rockefeller – Perot was helpful in the sense that
he made the debate more interesting in the last presidential election.
But if I could be dictator for a day and pass any law I wanted, I'd
pass a law that every medium- television, radio, papers- has to give
equal coverage to any political party that has over a million
members. The media keeps telling us that a third party can't win-
well, they win all the time in Europe, and they would here if they got
some coverage. The media always starves them out. If people knew more
about the Libertarians, or about Peace and Freedom . . . the thing is
people need to see more than just this incredibly narrow choice that
they've got in the two-party system.
fwr: The media presentation encourages us to stay uninvolved. It
generally presents two viable parties, and prevents those in the third
parties as freaks, losers, or radical revolutionaries who wanna blow
shit up.
raw: Every country that has a multi-party system has a higher voter
turnout than we've got. We've got the lowest voter turnout in the
Western world, and we were the first major democracy formed. People
have gotten so disillusioned with it that they don't bother; at the
polls, they’re confronted with “not a choice, but a dilemma” as John
Anderson said back in 1980.
The rest of the world is changing – Mandela comes out of prison and
now he's president? Apartheid is ended? You look at the USSR coming
apart, the Berlin Wall coming down, the British and the IRA
negotiating -- the whole world is undergoing tremendous change because
of the information revolution. And mathematically, this does lead to
more unpredictable systems appearing.
As information flow increases, according to chaos Theory,
unpredictable increases. So we're gonna see a lot of surprising
changes here. The way the country went to the Liberal side in '92 and
toward the Conservative side in '94 is just a hint of the way the
system is moving towards chaos, changing rapidly. I don't think anyone
really understands the changes: I think the pundits are just guessing
about why it went the way it did. The people are dissatisfied.
fwr: How could we make third parties viable in American politics?
raw: Educate, talk about it, try to get the media to adopt such a
law. If Clinton and Gingrich had a debate with a Libertarian, somebody
from Peace and Freedom, and someone from the Green Party and the
American Independent Party, boy the voters would turn out. Everybody
would see somebody up there who was close enough to them to be worth
voting for, and we'd have a more interesting Congress.
It's going to surprise everyone. I think the changes that are going to
happen have a good chance of occurring nonviolently, because of what
happened in South Africa and others. Any attempt at a violent
revolution in this country wouldn't last very long. Nobody could
overthrow this government, it's so goddamned powerful and it's got so
many atom bombs to begin with.
The one thing I'm keen in keeping is the division of powers within our
government.
fwr: One option for handling the discrepancy between how we think we
ought to live and the reality of living in society is to "drop out,"
or withdraw from the social or governmental structure. Have you made
experiments in extracting yourself from American government and
society?
raw: I extracted myself from the major society by going to live on a
farm for a while, twice I did that, once in Ohio and once in
Mendocino. It didn't really work; rural life is okay for those who
like it, but I'm not one of them.
I also did so by moving to Europe. The IRS doesn't tax you when you're
in Europe unless you make over $75,000 a year. I went over there
because I was so fed up with the pinhead bureaucrats in the IRS and
their pinhead rules that get more incomprehensible every year.
Newt Gingrich was right in claiming the Clintons are counterculture
McGovernicks or whatever the hell he called them. They're definitely
counterculture types who are trying to cover it up by acting
respectable. You read about what they were doing in the 60's, and they
have the same sort of education and background- they're the first
First Family in my lifetime that I would enjoy having dinner with,
that I would enjoy conversation. I feel that all this hatred that's
being directed at them is directed at me, too; it's directed at the
whole aspect of American society that they represent- and we've turned
out to be a much smaller group than we thought we were after the last
election.
I like Hillary and Bill; I don't like all the compromises they've
made, but compromise is what government's about. .
fwr: I guess compromise is the problem I have with the government and
with today's structures for seeing to my survival needs; I know that
compromise is necessary for any kind of social unit to exist, but it
seems so impossible to reach acceptable compromises. You seem to have
reached an equilibrium, which I admire, actually. You write good
stuff, get it published, you have a home and family you care for. Yet
a lot of your work is incredibly subversive.
raw: But in a good-hearted way. I don't hate anybody.
BOB '95
So, what's up with Robert Anton Wilson in 1995? Is he resting on his
hard-won laurels, drawing Social Security and drinking Guinness all
day? Are he and his lovely wife Arlen lounging on cruise ships while
some flunky ghost-writes their memoirs?
Nope. Wilson's still cranking out his trademark prose and publishing
Trajectories newsletter. "I've completed Cosmic Trigger 3," he says,
"which like everything when I've finished it, seems like the best
thing I've ever written. I started thinking of things that would round
out Cosmic Trigger 2, which I'd thought would be the last, and it
turned into a whole new book."
"I didn't set out to be a trilogy writer, it's just sort of happened,"
he adds with a chuckle. CT3 will be available later this year from
Falcon Books.
Previously, Wilson and Robert Shea has begun work on Bride of
lIIuminatus, collaborating on the outline together. He explains, "The
title derives from my saying to Bob Shea, "Let's name it after the
first great sequel.' He said, “Bride of Frankenstein.” Then I thought
that the first great sequel was really the New Testament. They said,
"Hey, the God book is selling. Let's do ‘Son of God!'"
Shea passed away before the book had been written. Regretfully, Wilson
says he's writing Bride of the Illuminatus pretty much on his own now
– though he did stick with the title Shea suggested. "It does make
more sense to do the Bride before the Son, so I decided to follow the
Frankenstein model," he says with a laugh. "I may do a Son of
Illuminatus later."
There's also a new Wilson book on the shelves of your local bookstore
right now: Chaos and Beyond, a collection of articles from the first
six years of the Trajectories newsletters.
Miss Brown (a.k.a. magdalen) guest-edited Issue #8 of Fringe Ware
Review with Erika Whiteway (a.k.a. outrider), in which this interview
was first published. Nowadays, she is a Portland-based writer and
performer who edits 2 Gyrlz Quarterly – online at 2GQ.org. Though
copyright is unfashionable, she'd appreciate it if you'd contact her
should you be interested in reproducing this interview in whole or in
part. Please seem magdalen.com for more info. Thanks.
