TOTAL INFORMATION ANALYSIS

Friday, January 12, 2007

Author and visionary Robert Anton Wilson left his body at 4:50am PST on binary date 01/11.

Discovering Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy a decade ago was one of this editor's greatest exercises in mind expansion. RAW once posited that the nature of the Illuminati is such that, as soon as you learned of its existence, mere knowledge of such a profound and illuminating secret automatically separated you from the unwashed masses of humanity and made you a de facto Illuminatus. Fortunately, the Internet has given all of us "rogue Illuminati" the chance to take down the Illuminati establishment which has used its monopoly on occult ("hidden") knowledge to mold history toward its own ends; a chance to build a better world. Will we rise to the challenge?

More insight from Brian Doherty:

"Wilson made libertarian anarchism--both political and epistemological, even ontological--seem open-hearted, fascinating, with a mysterious and energetic history, something that could win hearts and minds against any number of competing means of modeling human social reality.....[he] was a grand recruiter for libertarianism, both through Illuminatus! and his series of optimistic, futuristic, epistemologically anarchistic essays and nonfiction works that stress the glories of no human limits, physical, spiritual, or political. This is true despite his separation from most aspects of the standard movement, and despite the fact that his work appeals on so many levels that one can become a Wilson Head without reaching his libertarianism. Through Wilson's influence one might become an Aleister Crowleyan, a Wilhelm Reichian, an old-fashioned Tuckerite, a techno-future-optimist in the manner of Buckminster Fuller or Timothy Leary.[...]

But he also said, as quoted in my book, when asked to expound on the differences between him and the then-dominant Misesian-Rothbardian strain of the movement in a 1976 interview, "this is turning into a diatribe against the group I find least obnoxious on the whole politico-economic spectrum...The orthodox conservatives and liberals, not to mention Nazis and Marxists, are really pernicious, and the Austrian libertarians are basically OK." [...]

He was my gateway to Welles and Chandler, to Leary and Fuller, to Pound and Reich, to conspiracy theory and libertarianism, and to all the ideas and experiences, intellectual, aesthetic, and actual, that rolled from those varied and fascinating entryways into art, ideas, and living. I hope I can do good by the principles he helped imbue in me. He excelled as both novelist and essayist; he was a noble steward of the ideas he espoused, a brilliant and passionate popularizer, and the characters and scenarios and approaches to fiction of his novels reward constant reading with constant pleasure and insight--he was a pop-Pynchon of sorts in his sprawling, comic-serious approach to Big Crazy Ideas, who got a thousandth of the respect and delivered a thousand times the joy and humanity.
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. . . and Jesse Walker:

"One of the things I like best about Wilson's writing is his ability to spin stories that managed to be "real" and "a put-on" at the same time. One theme of his later work, for example, was an elaborate parody of those far-right theories that say the U.S. is controlled by a Zionist Occupational Government. Pointing to the Drug Czar, he said we actually live under a Tsarist Occupational Government, and then constructed a historical argument that Tsarist agents of influence had infiltrated and taken over the American government. It was hilariously absurd, yet most of the details were real -- and so was the point he was making about the drug war... He called this "guerilla ontology."
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| Posted at 14:21 | PERMA-LINK |

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