Anas’s Blog

Question. If the current idol of many so-called progressives in the US and elsewhere, Barrack Obama, ever becomes President of the United States of America will the American policy of bombing and killing, or aiding others in the bombing, killing and repression, of hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of poor brown people end?

Answer.No and not a chance in hell.

He turned Playboy readers’ conspiracy theories into drug-assisted cult fiction

Michael Carlson
Thursday January 18, 2007
The Guardian

As 1960s counterculture morphed into the me-decade of the 1970s, part of any hip library was the Illuminatus trilogy, whose co-author, Robert Anton Wilson, has died aged 74. Post-polio syndrome had weakened his legs and a fall confined him to bed. The trilogy - Eye Of The Pyramid, Golden Apple, and Leviathan, all published in 1975 and co-written with Robert Shea, who died in 1994 - grew out of their experience as editors at Playboy, particularly from the Playboy Forum, readers’ letters which they answered and occasionally wrote. The steady stream of conspiracy theories they received inspired them to detail the battle of the Bavarian Illuminati, secret controllers of the world, against the Discordians, whose embrace of chaos may have owed more than a little to the paranoid uses of entropy in the fiction of Thomas Pynchon.

Illuminatus brilliantly incorporated elements from the cult literature of the time: borrowing elements of Colin Wilson, Philip K Dick (and his SF pulp predecessors), Flann O’Brien, Carlos Casteneda, Timothy Leary and Kurt Vonnegut in a mix both knowingly tongue-in-cheek and pseudo-intellectually challenging. It was also funny. “My goal,” said Wilson, “is to try to get people into a state of generalised agnosticism, not about God alone but agnosticism about everything.”

Born in Brooklyn, Wilson contracted polio as a child and felt the effects throughout his life. He studied engineering and mathematics at Brooklyn Polytechnic and then New York University, but engineering soon gave way to sales, then to copywriting and freelance journalism, most notably in Paul Krassner’s early counterculture journal The Realist. He was hired as an associate editor at Playboy in 1965, perhaps because of his Realist cover story “Timothy Leary and the Psychological H-Bomb”.

Playboy at the time saw itself at the cutting edge of the new liberated lifestyle. It is interesting to see, in the progression of the four books he wrote while working there (Playboy’s Book of Fabulous Words, Sex and Drugs: A Journey Beyond Limits, Sex Magicians and The Book of the Beast), a presaging of the concerns of Illuminatus, and the conceptual leap the trilogy made, from consumer lifestyle in the direction of a philosophical world view, no matter how facetious. Published as paperback originals, they were a cult hit. Never bestsellers, they have remained in print ever since. Their biggest impact in this country came when Ken Campbell’s Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool adapted the trilogy for the stage. The 10-hour epic debuted in 1976, then became the first presentation of the National Theatre’s Cottesloe in 1977.

Wilson followed up with the autobiographical Cosmic Trigger: Final Secrets of the Illuminati, which included encounters with extraterrestrials while under the influence of peyote and mescaline. He would produce two more volumes of the Cosmic Trigger, in 1991 and 1995. Where he had fun with the conspiracies of Illuminatus, in his non-fiction he pursued the revelation of a parallel kind of secret control, the way society acts to restrain individual consciousness, and the search for freedom through expanding that consciousness. Drugs played an important role. He collaborated with Leary on two books, Neuropolitics (197 and The Game of Life (1979) reflecting those concerns, but he also practised what he preached.

A prodigious smoker of marijuana, he once told Krassner that he wrote the first draft of each book “straight, the second stoned, then straight, then stoned, and so on, until I’m absolutely delighted with every sentence. Or until irate editors start reminding me about deadlines, whichever comes first.” Marijuana also helped with the effects of polio, and as they worsened he became an advocate for its medical use.

His best science fiction was the Schroedinger’s Cat trilogy (1980-81), which brought quantum physics into the mix. Illuminatus became a sort of alternative franchise: The Illuminati Papers (1980), Masks Of The Illuminati (1981) and another trilogy, The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles (1982, 85, 91) all followed. His dissertation for a PhD in psychology from the unaccredited Paidea University was published as Prometheus Rising (1983). Other works included a play, Wilhelm Reich In Hell (1987), Quantum Psychology (1990), and Everything Is Under Control: An Encyclopedia Of Conspiracy Theories (1998). Among many projects, all of which generated writing, recordings, websites and followings, were the Church of the Sub-Genius, the Association for Consciousness Exploration and E-Prime, dedicated to the elimination of the verb “to be” from the language in favour of something less definitive.

When his last illness became terminal, he was bombarded with financial support from readers. He paraphrased comedian Jack Benny to thank them, saying: “I do not deserve this, but I also have severe leg problems and I don’t deserve them either.” His last posting on his website said: “I look forward without dogmatic optimism but without dread. I love you all and I deeply implore you to keep the lasagna flying.”

He married the writer Arlen Riley in 1958; she died in 1999. He is survived by a son and two daughters; a third daughter was killed in 1976 during a robbery.

John Higgs writes: When I visited Robert Anton Wilson in December 2004, he looked frail. From photographs I was expecting a stocky, round-faced man, but the Bob I met was thinner in the face, which gave his ever-smiling eyes more prominence. His white beard had grown long and gave him the look of a Taoist sage. His voice was weak but this did not matter, for his mind was sharp and witty and what he said was worth listening to.

In conversation, you realised how liberating his brand of agnosticism is. By not believing in anything he was free to examine everything. To Bob, everything was interesting. This openness was life-affirming because he did not shut himself off from the good and the humour in things. His pleasure in wild ideas may have sidelined him as a contemporary thinker, but his approach was an antidote to fundamentalism. For Bob, fixed belief was intellectual suicide, and the framing of an argument into only two competing sides was absurd. He is gone but, I think, there is still much we will learn from him.

· Robert Anton Wilson, writer, born January 18 1932; died January 11 2007

Yes, I’ve decided to write about it here, because I think it’s raised a number of extremely interesting issues and because it gives us some measure of where we’re at in terms of multiculturalism and race relations in this country: the signs are good, the public have shown they cannot tolerate this kind of racist bullying — at least when it is in full public view. For me the most interstesing aspect of the whole furore has been the level of hysteria and almost visceral anger within the Asian community.

The thing is that the seemingly inordinate response amongst many young Brits of Asian origin to the whole Shilpa Shetty/CBB racism row becomes far more understandable when you realise the extent to which the events in the program have brought back recollections of past insecurities and instances of racist bullying.

In contemporary Britain we seem to have reached a point where young Asians as a whole feel much more confident about identifying themselves as both Asian and British, without having to compromise on their Asian identities in order to better “fit in” – something that was undeniably not the case in the recent past. There’s been a sea change in the last few years: Asian music, fashion, cinema, and culture in general has started to become fashionable and therefore to gain more recognition within the wider mainstream — which I suppose might be perceived as a sort of belated vindication and cultural validation by many Asians given the intolerant attitudes of just a few years ago.

Indeed there was a time when a sizeable percentage of the wider British community resented the presence of Asians in this country, and weren’t afraid to manifest their hostility openly and overtly through racism, poisonous name calling and acts of discrimination. In that kind of antagonistic climate, at a time when the sense that many Asians now have of a shared-dual identity that encompasses two cultures was still in the process of being forged, it was obviously much harder to visibly assert those things that made you different within the wider cultural context — especially when that difference was constantly being used as the basis for racial abuse. The reaction of many first generation immigrants was just to keep their heads down and react passively to the abuse they received: they probably felt they had more to lose than the generations to come would. Understandably though this passivity fuelled a sense of resentment amongst the second and third generations, at what was often seen as a subservient and deferential attitude.

At the same time in playgrounds across the land, differences of skin colour, accent, general appearance and cultural background of young Asian kids were being incessantly exploited and set upon by schoolyard bullies — major visible differences were and probably still are perceived as points of vulnerability that bullies use as opportunities to humiliate their victims — something which obviously affected the Asian sense of identity in this country, especially when we were told to “go home”. In this context “Paki” also became a particularly vicious though common term of abuse. Used to signify backwardness and the supposedly uncivilised and primitive nature of life on the subcontinent, it was also often a prelude to threats or actual physical violence, which is why a lot of Asians wince when they hear it.

Predictably, many second and third generation kids themselves started to poke fun at some of the newly arrived immigrants from the sub-continent, at their accents, clothing, etc.

To put a personal slant on this, I remember being the only brown kid in my primary school in the 1980s, and, although I wasn’t physically bullied — though there was racist taunting — I was left out of every group of kids and purposefully not included because of the colour of my skin. I don’t have very happy memories of that time, and feel extremely ashamed at all the attempts I tried to make to ingratiate myself with others in the face of all their resistance. My mum told me later that many of the parents of the kids in the small town where I went to school resented the fact that my dad owned a shop in that town. God knows the kinds of things they were telling their children about our family.

At secondary school things were different, the school I went to was near the centre of Glasgow for a start — and not located in a godforsaken forlorn small town that had been rendered completely desolate by the loss of the Clyde shipping industry like my Primary school was — and so there were a lot of Pakistani/Indian kids attending. But I remember one instance that has stuck with me from those days. There had been a TV program on the night before called Karachi Cops, and I recall one of the white kids in my year expressing his amazement at the fact that people in Pakistan lived in cities with apartment blocks; whereas he’d thought they’d all be living in mud huts. (Of course I discovered about the Indus Valley civilisation and Harrapa a few years later, which would have meant that while all of Scotland was living in caves and wearing Ox-skins and possibly getting raped by marauding Vikings, there were actual cities with irrigation and many of the accoutrements that we associate with civilisation in what is now Pakistan).

So now here we are, it’s 2007, and this major Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty – who I’d never heard of but then I only know of Amitabh, Shah Rukh and Aishwarya to look at — arrives in Britain to take part in a reality TV show, moreover one that specialises in making capital out of its participants humiliating themselves and in using psychological manipulation as a catalyst to provoke ratings boosting conflict – now, that should have raised a flag right there. Shetty is impossibly glamorous, indeed possessed of an amazing beauty, has a black belt in karate, and is able to speak 6 languages, so by rights she shouldn’t be on this show alongside the usual array of no-talent, non-entities, wannabes and second cousins to wannabes, that populate these so called reality shows.

But she is on the show, and since it is (for the UK) fairly high profile, she becomes, potentially, a symbol of great pride for many young British Asians, representing as she does the prestige and glamour of Indian and South Asian culture and exemplifying an ideal of Indian beauty and grace. So what happens? This great Indian star is subject to a program of bullying by three of her fellow housemates — and to accentuate this great humiliation, these three happen to indeed be the customary reality TV shower. One of them, the ring leader, is incredibly ugly, porcine in her appearance, comes from a resolutely deprived background and a broken home (something which many commentators are fond of flagging up) and is almost absurdly thick. Like the other three she has no talent to speak of whatever and her fame seems to derive from her canny ability to win the public’s favour and sympathy.

Shetty, whose English is impeccable, has her accent made fun of by people whose command of the English language verges on the pitiful, she’s called a dog, and her “Indian” habits are constantly the subject of mockery as her tormentors huddle up into groups and whisper things about her and generally exclude her.

Now obviously the associations for a lot of young Asians watching that are going to be very painful: once again certain aspects of Asian culture are being used as points of vulnerability. It almost doesn’t matter if Shetty herself feels the abuse she’s receiving is racist or not, to many Asians who will be referencing their previous (and in some cases continuing) experiences when trying to relate to the situation it seems unmistakeably so.

I just read on Media Underground that the great Robert Anton Wilson passed away yesterday. Writer, futurist, self-styled guerilla ontologist, and renowned wit, Wilson, had been desperately ill of late and had come perilously close to death on previous occasions. He (and his family) had also to reckon with not being able to meet the financial costs of his healthcare; though thankfully his fans rallied to his aid en masse and, through their donations, were able to make his last few months and his passing more comfortable — as well as to show their appreciation for Wilson’s gargantuan talent and his crazy, relentlessly iconoclastic wisdom. I’m guessing his death will be deeply felt by what’s left of the counterculture and by those interested in free thought, but that he will continue to be overlooked by the wider mainstream. Not really surprising when you consider how subversive his writings were, to the extent that appropriation by a cultural mainstream so warped by corporate propaganda was nigh on impossible.

Wilson has been a profound influence on me in the past few years. Indeed I believe his writings have helped me to better adjust myself to an insane, chaotic cosmos, as well as making me a much cleverer person (relatively speaking) than I would otherwise have been. The only other contemporary figure who’s had anything like as deep influence on me is Noam Chomsky — although Chomsky has nowhere near as many good jokes in his books as Wilson put in his. So I have a lot of gratitude to offer Wilson, a man who was once described completely justifiably by Brian Aldiss as a genius with a capital Gee!, and who was and remains through his written works a consummate sceptic (and indeed a sceptical sceptic who was sceptical of his own and other’s scepticism).

Wilson is probably most well known as co-author (with the late Robert Shea) of the epochal countercultural phenomenon Illuminatus! A work which Timothy Leary (a close associate of Wilson’s) claimed was more important than Joyce’s Ulysses or Finnegan’s Wake, and which is notorious for its wildly convoluted plot which manages to feature every major contemporary conspiracy theory going at some point, as well as some particularly inspired conspiracies Wilson and Shea themselves invented for the occasion.

Wilson recognised the seductive nature of conspiracy theory as an alternative to prevailing orthodox historical narratives and exploited it in order to undermine his readers’ notions of reality, in fact, to encourage them to see these as constituting merely one reality tunnel among many. Similarly Wilson made widespread reference and discussion of the theories of quantum physics, fuzzy logic, Korzybski’s work in general semantics, Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals and Aleister Crowley’s magickal ideas, in order to introduce and reinforce his multi-model approach to self-orientation and self-development with respect to what is ultimately a fundamentally chaotic and fuzzy reality — and most importantly to have fun in the process. Wilson used various strategies and models to discuss reality but was clear that he never saw these as anything other than as helpful models and strategies — in other words, “the map is not the territory”, “the menu is not the meal”.

He encouraged his readers to adopt this multi-perspectival approach and to cultivate an appreciation of just how perception and belief is conditioned as well as the strategies by which individuals could transcend and understand at least aspects of this conditioning – and in so doing use their brains for fun and profit — through a number of masterpieces, not least Prometheus Rising (PR). In PR, Wilson used Timothy Leary’s Eight Circuit Model of Consciousness to model the different kinds of conditioning human beings received at different stages of their development and in different societies, as well as to suggest a framework for the further evolution of personal consciousness, one which incorporated concepts and conscious alteration practises from yoga, zen, Sufism, the teachings of Gurdjieff and Crowley, and even Christian Science. PR is perhaps the ideal introduction to Wilson’s work and was the book I myself was recommended by several of the chatters at disinfo.com.

The fact is that Wilson opened a whole new world for me, offering accessible perspectives on the very difficult and sometimes obscure themes that writers/philosophers such as Joyce, Nietzsche, Pound, Reich, de Sade dealt in, setting me on an intellectual path which I would likely not have taken otherwise (though one that hasn’t been without its blind alleys). Actually I think the main thing for me was not just that Wilson inspired me into reading some pretty heavy books, it’s that he gave me the confidence to do it, he gave me a way in. His books though full of deep and powerful ideas, were always beautifully written, perspicuous, full of clarity and an infectious intellectual curiosity – in short a real pleasure to read. And – yes this last statement is clichéd as fuck, but — that’s why his work will continue to inspire the curious for decades, maybe generations, to come.

RIP RAW