man bites dogma - an interview with robert anton wilson

7/24/2019 Man Bites Dogma - An Interview With Robert Anton Wilson

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MAN BITES DOGMA - AN INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT ANTON WILSON

He's been called a cult figure to various lunatic fringe groups, Tom Robbins calls him "a

dazzling barker hawking tickets to the most thrilling tilt-a-whirls and daring loop-o-planes on

the midway of higher consciousness," he calls himself an iconoclastic comedian, and whether

Robert Anton Wilson is a philosopher or a public nuisance is now up to you. His books, TheIlluminatus Trilogy, Schroedinger's Cat, and The Cosmic Trigger all fall somewhere in

between non-fiction and pure fantasy, full of unquestionable facts and quotes that somehow

always add up to utterly preposterous conclusions. This devotion to eccentricity and breaking

down barriers reaches its zenith in The Illuminati Papers, a book seemingly written by

characters from all his other books. It contains, among other esoterica, a whole page of Haiku

by Raymond Chandler in which Wilson has simply taken short descriptive excerpts from

Chandler's work and reformatted them into beautiful miniature poems.

With all the passion of a religious crusader, Robert Anton Wilson is out to destroy all

personal belief systems, to force every one of his readers to seriously question any and all

thoughts they hold dear. His specialty is in analyzing systems that seem to contradict each

other and trying to find the points at which they do agree. In Promethius Rising hesynthesizes the works of Leary, Jung, Freud, Sagan, Gurdjieff, Berne, and several others into

a general system that shows how much they have in common, where they disagree, and why.

His newest work, Reality is What You Can Get Away With, reads like a screenplay by

Picasso - it's cubist, outrageous, completely non-linear, constantly startling, and very funny.

All of his books are part of a series; they're cinematic, full of cross cutting, montages,

flashbacks, and flash forwards. But no one seems to be able to figure out if this new one is a

movie or a book since it actively defies both definitions. He's raised the put-on to the highest

art form.

Wilson holds a Ph.D. in psychology, edited the Playboy Forum for six years, has

made a comedy record (Secrets of Power) and a punk rock record (The Chocolate Biscuit

Conspiracy), the stage version of his Illuminatus trilogy has been seen in Frankfurt,

Amsterdam, Seattle, Jerusalem, and was performed recently in Liverpool by the London

National Theater in a 12 hour noon to midnight marathon. His latest play, Wilhelm Reich in

Hell has only been seen in Ireland where Wilson has lived for the past five years. A

screenwriting job brought him to Hollywood recently, where he has been delivering lectures

and running fantasy role-playing encounter groups. These evenings are enlightening, self-

contradictory, very funny, and hazardous to your dogma. We started out talking about one of

his favorite subjects.

DARE

Do you see everything as a conspiracy?

WILSON

No. Somebody once accused me of claiming that everything is subjective, but I don't make

statements about everything, I only make partial statements. I think conspiracy is very

prevalent behavior on this planet. It even precedes humanity. Lions conspire - one lion will

frighten a herd of antelope to get them running in a certain direction where the other lions

will be waiting there to eat them. That's a conspiracy against antelopes, and I'm sure the

antelopes are very bitter about it. Ants conspire, they seize territory and drive off interlopers,

rats have very vigorous conspiracies, when a rat from a strange pack gets into a house they'll

hunt him down and kill him. It's just like the mafia, "Don't do anything on our territory."

DARE


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Is it possible for a conspiracy to be benign?

WILSON

It would have to be open. The difference between a conspiracy and an affinity group is that

when me and my friends do it it's an affinity group and when someone we don't like does it

it's a conspiracy. Conspiracies run the literary world, the art world, marijuana arrives here dueto conspiracies. It's a conspiratorial world.

People naturally form groups and to the extent that they're competing with each other,

they try to hide what they're doing. The best explanation of conspiracy is in The Theory of

Games and Economic Behavior, a very thick mathematical treatise. It explains that it's very

beneficial to have conspiracies in competitive situations - the bigger an alliance you form, the

quicker you move ahead.

The function of every alliance is to conceal information from the other alliance and to

spread false information, just like in a poker game. You don't want them to know what hand

you've got but you want them to think they know. Poker is the essence of conspiracy.

Everybody's trying to deceive one another. A benevolent conspiracy would have to be open,

without the factor of concealment, and everybody's invited in. That's the only kind ofconspiracy that could really improve the world.

DARE

So you think that Summit Conferences should be broadcast live to everybody?

WILSON

Of course. People are so paranoid about the Bilderbergers because they're so secretive. For all

we know they're only getting together to look at stag movies once a year. The Bilderbergers

have a lot of members in common with the Tri-Lateral Commission and the Council on

Foreign Relations and the Royal Institute of International Affairs. To a great extent they're

financed by the Rockefellers and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. They're all part of one

gang that meets once a year in secret. They're called the Bilderbergers because their first

meeting was in Bilderberg. They get more coverage each time they meet because they're so

secretive about what they're doing. They say they're meeting to discuss international harmony

and the peaceful resolution of our problems, but no one's allowed to hear what they're talking

about.

DARE

Would giving away the Bilderberger's secrets make them more benign?

WILSONNo, it would just make them more paranoid, more devious. My business is not to expose but

to collect comparative exposes so that the readers can see that conspiracy is normal behavior

and that there's no one big conspiracy that runs everything.

In the '30s, the Nazis were very much into the theory that the Jewish bankers controlled

everything, and that led to such horror that it became forbidden to think about conspiracies at

all for decades thereafter. The first people who said there was a conspiracy in the Kennedy

assassination were all denounced as obstinate nut cases and wandering loonies. My attitude,

after looking at the evidence for a long time, is that there is no one big conspiracy, that the

historians who refuse to admit conspiracy as a factor in history are just over-reacting to stupid

conspiracy theories.

There really are conspiracies of varying sizes, but they're so busy fighting each other thatthey have nothing to do with us. Most of them are for monetary reasons. There are


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conspiracies to decide whose book is going to be reviewed on page one of the New York

Times or the Herald Tribune. Often it's the same book in both, more often than coincidence

or even synchronicity can account for. There are commercial conspiracies to fix prices. Some

have ideology or mysticism behind them. I don't think you can understand history until you

understand the element of poetic whimsy and sheer irrationality in the minds of so called

practical people.In WW2, both Churchill and Hitler thought they were in direct communication with God.

So did MacArthur and Patton. Hitler and Mussolini both outlawed Freemasonry in Germany

and Italy. The leaders of the war against them were Roosevelt, a 33rd degree Freemason,

Churchill, another high ranking Freemason, Hoover, the head of the secret police in America

was a 33rd degree Freemason

DARE

What exactly to those degrees stand for?

WILSON

They indicate how many initiations you've gone through. Actually, any Freemason who isnominated to the presidency of the United States gets elevated to the 32nd degree right away.

Then if he's elected, he's given the 33rd degree, which is only honorary. The 32nd degree in

mainly concerned with the Knights of Malta, who are the enemies of Freemasonry.

The Freemasons claim that the Knights of Malta have sworn an oath to stamp out

liberalism, free thought, and restore the total reign of tyranny and superstition that existed in

the dark ages. It's a secret society within the Catholic Church that doesn't seek publicity at all.

Very little is known about it. William Casey of the CIA was a Knight of Malta, Alexander

Haig is a Knight of Malta. According to Gordon Thomas, an English journalist, the Knights

of Malta now act as couriers between the Vatican and the CIA. His theory is very

complicated, but it illustrates how conspiracies operate in the real world as distinguished

from paranoid fantasy.

The Gray Wolves are a Muslim fundamentalist group who deal heroin to get money to buy

arms to carry on their campaign to exterminate Israel. They've been very involved in

gunrunning because they have a link with the Bulgarian secret police, who are very much into

selling munitions underground. The KGB uses the Gray Wolves for operations that, if they're

ever blown, can't be traced back to Russia. Roberto Calvi of Banco Abrosiano was taking a

great deal of this heroin money from the Gray Wolves and the mafia and running it through

the Vatican Bank, which doesn't have to show records to anybody. The Italian government

can't examine their records, it belongs to the government of the state of the Vatican, so they're

the only ones who can look at their own books. If you can get illicit money into the Vatican

Bank, it disappears forever, nobody can find any trace of it.The Gray Wolves had a grudge against the Pope because of his involvement with Calvi,

who embezzled so much money that everybody got swindled. He was found hanging from a

bridge in London, his secretary was pushed from a window at Banco Abrosiano the same

day, a few more executives have died mysteriously since then. Calvi's partner in the swindles,

Michele Sindona, was convicted in this country of 65 counts of stock and currency fraud and

faking his own kidnapping to escape prosecution. Back in Italy, he was convicted of the

murder of the examiner hired to investigate his bank. After that they were going to put him on

trial for conspiracy in 80 murders, but he was poisoned in his cell. All of this is part of how

the Bulgarian secret police hired a killer from the Gray Wolves to get the Pope.

DAREIsn't the Pope just a figurehead without much power, sort of the Gerald Ford of the Vatican?


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WILSON

That's not true, the Pope does have a lot of power. Consider the case of Pope John Paul I. He

was a rebel who didn't like the way the church was being run, and in 1978 he announced that

he would be going through a complete overhaul, throwing out a lot of the old crowd and

bringing in new people. Observatori Politico sent him a list of 115 Freemasons in the

Vatican, including members of P2, who had infiltrated 900 members into the Italian

Government, including the secret police. John Paul ordered an investigation, and within a few

days he was mysteriously found dead.

The Vatican has never shown a death certificate and no autopsy was performed. They told

two different stories about who found him dead, things disappeared out of his bedroom that

have never been accounted for, including his will, his medicine bottle, and his glasses.

Pecorelli, the editor of Observatori Politico who sent him the list of P2 and other Freemason

members in the Vatican, was shot to death through the mouth, Mafia fashion, on the streets of

Rome a few weeks later. You can't explain that in terms of one big conspiracy, there are

obviously interlocking and feuding conspiracies - the Mafia, P2, the Freemasons, the

Bulgarian secret police, the CIA, and God knows who else.Liccio Gelli, the grandmaster of the P2 Lodge, was on the payroll of the CIA and the

KGB. He was that kind of operator. He disappeared from Italy, which shows how many

friends he had in the police. He showed up in Switzerland a few months later to take some

money out of a bank account, and he was recognized and arrested. The Swiss put him in a

maximum security prison but he was out within two days. One guard claimed he was

hypnotized. The fascinating thing is that if you look at pictures of Reagan's second inaugural,

you'll see Liccio Gelli right next to Reagan.

Most of this information can be found in two books, In God's Name by David Yallop, and

In Banks We Trust by Penny Lernoux, which explains how the whole international banking

system interlinks with the heroin and cocaine laundering business that the Vatican has been

running.
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DARE

Are you saying the Pope is a drug dealer?

WILSON

The biggest drug laundromat ever busted in this country was the World Finance Corporation

in Miami. The president and several other senior executives were convicted. Two directors ofthe bank were allegedly former CIA agents, but the prosecutors were blocked in Washington

when they tried to investigate the connections between the bank and the CIA.

In any case, the WFC had all this money going into it from South American countries that

are in the cocaine business, and they sent it to the CIS Alpine Bank in the Bahamas, which is

owned by Archbishop Marcinkus who runs the Vatican Bank, which is where the money

ended up. After that it's in a black hole, it disappears from human vision forever, most likely

ending up in Swiss bank accounts. The profits from this go towards keeping those dictators in

power, maintaining the secret police and the death squads.

After the second world war, Liccio Gelli was shrewd enough to start an escape route for

Nazi war criminals, getting them to South America for a fee, giving them new identities, and

complete cover. He kept in touch with them as they found jobs as organizers of the deathsquads, doing the same sort of things they did in the '40s, only now they're doing it for

Ronald Reagan and the money is going into the Vatican Bank. Obviously you can't run a

church on just Hail Marys.

The only reason cocaine is illegal is because there's so much money to be made out of it

while it's illegal. If it were legal, the prices would go way down.

DARE

So Nancy Reagan's whole JUST SAY NO campaign is just a ploy to keep the prices up?

WILSON

Or sheer stupidity. There's so much money in the cocaine business that a lot of Latin

American governments depend on it for their survival. The CIA has been in the cocaine

business for 20 or 30 years now, and it's very useful for them to keep it illegal. That way they

can use it as a form of currency that doesn't leave any records. When you hear about big

cocaine busts, those are just renegades, the entrepreneurs who were trying to work outside of

the system.

DARE

You've painted a rather bleak picture of a conspiratorial world. Are there any positive actions

we can take to change things?

WILSON

In my books, I'm trying to show people how to free their own minds. I think that's the first

step. People have got to become less mechanical and more aware. My books are all

constructed as mindfucks, to get the readers to open their brains up, receive new signals, and

come out of their conditioned patterns of thought and perceptions.

There are a lot of Utopian ideas in my books that I don't think are impractical at all. I call

them Utopian because they're beyond anything the human race has achieved in the past, but

we're moving incredibly fast. I think there are changes right ahead of us that are even bigger

than the industrial revolution. The human life span will be doubled by the year 2000 and

quadrupled by 2010. One man flew the Atlantic in 1928, 200 million flew the Atlantic in

1978. Taking that fifty year time span as a model, people started going into space in the1960s so by 2010 we should have 200 million going into space every year.


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DARE

Are there any existing political systems you admire?

WILSON

Scandinavian socialism. I found the Scandinavians to be about the most admirable people inEurope. clean streets, a low crime rate, a general air of high civilization - luxuries for all and

a total absence of slums, poverty, and ugliness. They seem very happy and productive, with

one of the most way out futurist movements in the world. They're the California of Europe.

I hate to sound like a Marxist, which I'm not, but the reason you haven't heard about

Scandinavian Socialism is because the media of this country is controlled by rich people who

are scared shitless of socialism. They want Americans to think there's only one type of

socialism, Soviet Communism, which is the kind of place where dissident scientists get

thrown in lunatic asylums, all of which is true. Americans are paranoid about Russians but

Scandinavians regard them with amusement; they're those backwards people who think that

you can only have socialism by putting all the poets and painters in jail. The Scandinavians

reward their poets and they don't put anyone in jail for dissident political opinions.

DARE

Aren't you scared of getting in trouble, of finally saying the one thing you shouldn't have

said?

WILSON

We're all living in a world in which one cannot apply one's highest ideals without getting into

a lot of trouble. I've gotten in trouble, but I haven't gone to jail, which shows I may have

more common sense than Tim Leary. I certainly don't claim to be more intelligent than him.

He's the most intelligent human being I've ever encountered.

DARE

Do you share his conclusions about LSD?


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WILSON

LSD breaks up habitual circuits of the brain. It opens new circuits, breaks down old circuits,

and there's no evidence whatsoever that it destroys brain cells. LSD is very much a

metaprogramming device, it changes the basic programs, that's why it's dangerous. It creates

acute paranoid states in bureaucrats who've never used it.

To get the best out of it needs a scientific or religious approach, one or the other. People

who are just tripping for the fun of it are more likely to imprint a whole new reality tunnel or

personality on themselves that they weren't looking for. If you're going to do LSD, you

should decide the changes you're aiming at and structure the trip to lead to that kind of

change.

There's no doubt that you can change every part of your personality with LSD, that's why

Leary calls it a reimprinting drug. It changes basic imprints which are much more rigid than

conditioning. There's no doubt that I am a different person than I am before I took it.

I was a statistical materialist before I started experimenting with LSD, that is I didn't

believe the laws of the universe were absolutely deterministic because I knew enough

quantum mechanics to know that it broke them down. But I was still a statistical materialist,

everything could be explained by the accidental permutations of little hunks of energy thatsolidify into matter. I was perfectly satisfied with that explanation of the universe, and I never

realized that I was as dogmatic about it as any Catholic was about their faith. After LSD

impacted on me, I became a total agnostic, and I'm not dogmatic about anything any more. I

know that every system I make up is my own brain making up a system. None of the systems

is big enough to include the whole universe, so all of my beliefs are only relatively true.

Some are undoubtedly wrong because I'm not that brilliant that I never make a mistake.

There are a lot of people who don't realize how conceited they are. By asserting with such

certitude the things they believe in, they don't realize that they're saying "I'm the smartest

person in the world, I can answer all the questions." People like Carl Sagan. I just don't know

how he can be so sure of everything when, by and large, the more intelligent you get, the

more you realize you can't be sure of anything.
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DARE

Since Newtonian physics don't apply to sub-atomic particles, how can you apply logic on the

quantum level to objective reality?

WILSON

There's a lot of disagreement among quantum physicists on that subject, but I am veryinterested in, and almost believe, the school that includes David Boem, who was driven out of

the United States during the McCarthy era, and considered the most brilliant pupil of J.

Robert Oppenheimer.

There is a non-locality principal in quantum mechanics, which means that things are

correlated even if they're not connected mechanically or by energy transmissions. Up until

this was discovered, everything in physics could be explained by energy transfers. You hear

me because sound waves move from my voice to your ear, and so on.

Then they discovered that there were things that were moving in harmony with each other,

and that there was no way that energy could be getting between them. Energy can't move

faster than speed of light, and yet these actions were instantaneously correlated. There are

several approaches towards understanding non-locality, but, as Schroedinger put it, the sumtotal of all minds is one. The appearance of separate egos is only a hallucination, like that of

the flatness of the earth or the movement of the sun around the earth. These ideas have all

been corrected, and the idea that we're different from the animals has created mass hysteria.

The appearance of separate egos is a hallucination. We are all facets of one mind.

DARE

But it's a necessary hallucination. You can't play chess with yourself.

WILSON

It's necessary for the game on this planet that every organism have a sense of self and a sense

of the hive, the pack, it's us against the rest of them out there. Antland Uber Alles is the song

the ants sing in T.H. White's Merlin stories, and every gene pool has that basic philosophy,

just as every individual has its "self". You can go through consciousness alterations by means

of yoga, certain types of shamanic magic, and various drugs that teach you how to identify

with the gene pool instead of your private ego. You can get beyond that and identify with the

whole biosphere.

DARE

Can you actually affect your own genetic structure so that these structural changes can be

passed on to other generations?

WILSON

I tend to believe in Sheldrake's morpho-genetic field, in which he proposes that there's a non-

local connection in biology too. Biologists are denouncing him as a nut and a heretic. Though

the first two experiments to check Sheldrake have tended to very strongly support him,

they've been ruthlessly criticized.

It makes sense that if you've got non-local connections in physics that you could have

them in biology too. Freud and Jung and Leary have all tried to account for racial memory or

our ability to remember past lives. They've had to posit that somehow genes are carrying

information from one organism to its descendents, but this part of modern psychology has

always been rejected by biologists because there's lots of evidence that genes can't do that.

Freud had racial memory, Jung had the collective unconscious, Leary has the neurogeneticcircuit, but there's no way any of it can work mechanically, and that's why biologists reject it.


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The only way it can work is with Sheldrake's non-local morpho-genetic field, which, if it

exists, would let me send signals that will be able to effect the genes of future generations,

and not just those directly descended from me. I can control the direction of evolution

through thought forms I'm putting out, and so can everybody else.

People can't stay in their old reality tunnels any longer, they've got to start accelerating

their brain activity. Very specifically, a world full of Islamic fundamentalists, Protestantfundamentalists, dogmatic Marxists, and Reaganite chauvinist Americans is moving us closer

and closer to World War III, and the only thing that's going to head that off is if people stop

being midwestern methodist bankers or Shuto computer executives or Muslim heroin

smugglers and develop a bigger identity. They've got to get out of these narrow little trips.

Buckminster Fuller used to say that one of the consequences of the traditional game is

nationalism. Planet earth is a spaceship with 150 independent and sovereign admirals all

steering in different directions.

DARE

What is the next stage in evolution?

WILSON

The model I use is adapted from Leary. The oral-bio-survival circuit is what the amoebas

operate on - taste everything. Babies operate on that too. That's the circuit we go back to

whenever we're in danger, and depending on what we imprinted there, we will either attack or

run away.

Then there's Freud's anal circuit, which has to do with claiming territory and status within

it. That's when we go through the mammalian rituals concerning who runs the family,

outsmarting our brothers and sisters and trying to run the whole show, imprinting our

domination and submission reflexes. It's why people can hold jobs; their boss becomes a

father substitute and they attach all their reflexes to him.

Next there's the rational circuit in which we do our abstract reasoning with words and

mathematics, and the sociosexual circuit where we imprint the pattern of how we relate to

people; with what degree of amity or sexuality. Everybody has a different imprint, and

society has only one general set of rules, so everybody is a heretic as far as that circuit is

concerned. Those four circuits are the natural child, the adoptive child, the adult, and the

parent in Berne's system.

Beyond that is the neurosomatic circuit, where, through yoga or drugs or body work like

Rolfing, one gimmick or another, you are able to turn on to your own body in a new way, and

instead of just reacting to the conditioned and imprinted programs on the first four circuits,

you are able to relax and go with the flow and enjoy life.

The sixth circuit is the neurogenetic circuit, which has to do with morpho-geneticresonances, coming in contact with the experience and religious symbols of your ancestors,

learning that they've been controlling you below the level of consciousness all your life. This

is what Shamanism traditionally deals with. Jungian psychology was the first attempt to deal

with it scientifically, now we've got dozens of others trying to bring people into harmony

with archetypes of the collective unconscious or genetic heritage.

The next is the metaprogramming circuit, which is learning how the brain can work on the

brain, how you can imprint different identities and reality tunnels as you go along. Before

you get to that circuit, you have no idea what true freedom really is, you're being manipulated

all the time whether you know it or not. It's the circuit where you develop true choice.

DAREHow do you get there?


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WILSON

If you do a lot of work on the 5th and 6th circuits, the 7th tends to click on. First you get a lot

of synchronicities, meaningful coincidences, accidental reinforcement from your

environment, like someone coming by to loan you a book that's exactly the one you were

looking for. Jung found that his patient's dreams had more and more symbols out of Greekand Egyptian and Hindu mythology as they progressed into that circuit, even without

studying them consciously. They pulled them out of the collective unconscious, which I think

is actually the morphogenetic field.

Above that there's the non-local quantum circuit, which is the circuit in which we get true

out of body experiences, cosmic identification with the whole of existence.

We're learning so much about the latter four circuits, which Leary calls the extraterrestrial

circuits, that we're moving into a new stage of evolution. More people are on the fifth circuit

than ever before in history, and there are growing sixth and seventh circuit minorities. It's not

an accident. We're changing just as we have to change. These circuits were there, ready to be

used, when we got to this point in evolution. Earlier, mankind could just coast along on the

first four circuits, and only visionaries and mystics and poets ever turned on the highercircuits. Now everyone does it.

DARE

How to you teach people to turn on their higher circuits?

WILSON

You've got to teach with humor to make the pill palatable. Besides, humor is the essence of

realizing our true situation in space and time. We are these tiny fallible beings crawling

around on a relatively small planet, and anybody who pontificates dogmatically about

anything is giving evidence that they are an idiot, even if you agree with them. They

shouldn't sound that certain. We think we're so damn smart and we know so fucking little.

man bites dogma - an interview with robert anton wilson

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