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, The Illuminatus
Trilogy, Schrödinger'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 Prometheus Rising he synthesizes 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
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 due
to 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 of conspiracy 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?
WILSON
No, 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 that
they have nothing to do with us. Most of them are for monetary reasons. There
are 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 is nominated 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.
DARE
Isn't the Pope just a figurehead without much power, sort of
the Gerald Ford of the Vatican?
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.
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 of the 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 death squads, 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 the 1960s so by 2010
we should have 200 million going into space every year.
DARE
Are there any existing political systems you admire?
WILSON
Scandinavian socialism. I found the Scandinavians to be
about the most admirable people in Europe. 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?
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 meta-programming 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 re-imprinting 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 that solidify 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.
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 very interested 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 sum total 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 descendants, 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 neurogenetic circuit, but
there's no way any of it can work mechanically, and that's why biologists
reject it. 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, Protestant fundamentalists, 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 mid-western
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-genetic resonances,
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
meta-programming 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.
DARE
How do you get there?
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 Greek and
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
higher circuits. 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.
Years later, I remember one of the most important
things Robert Anton Wilson Taught me
