http://www.eden.com/~magical/48/raw.html
Magical Blend Magazine
Issue #48
Playing Kickball With Chaos
Robert Anton Wilson interviewed by Faustin Bray
Champion of the underdog and self-appointed caretaker of conspiracy
theories, with a deep philanthropic twist, Robert Anton Wilson has
amused, bemused and infused readers with his witticisms and ponderings
for almost thirty years. He is that rarest of creatures - a futurist with
a sense of humor. Cantankerous? Yes. Ornery? Certainly. But while others
have fallen into jaded cynicism, Wilson's passion for learning has kept
his wit razor sharp and ready to parry.
Chaos and Beyond is Robert Anton Wilson's latest book. A collection of
essays and stories from the magazine, Trajectories, the cast of
characters the book presents is pure Wilson: Dee Scott Appel, Barbara
Marx Hubbard, Timothy Leary, Linus Pauling, Robert Newport, Edward
Kellogg III, Peter Russel, George Carlin and even Ed McMahon.
A prolific writer who takes delight in turning a mirror on society so
that it can, for a moment, see itself and hopefully learn something,
Wilson detests political correctness as just another form of fascism.
Refusing to pull his punches, he can be, as his initials indicate, RAW.
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People seem quick to agree that the world is becoming more and more
chaotic, but what they mean when they use the word is not always clear.
Robert Anton Wilson: What I'm talking about is the upsurge of the totally
unpredictable, a system that may be determinist but still can't be
predicted until after you see what it's done. A mathematician named
Theodore Gordon did a paper about three years ago showing that chaos
increases where information flow increases. This is something I've been
writing about for years, the fact that information is increasing faster
all the time. For example, in the 1,500 years between Christ and Leonardo
da Vinci, we had one doubling. Now information is doubling every eighteen
months. That means there is more and more chaos. Coming out of this chaos
are some astounding things: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of
Nelson Mandela to the presidency of South Africa, treaties being worked
on between the Israelis and the PLO, and the IRA and the British
government . All of these things were totally unpredictable before they
happened.
Those represent the sunny side of chaos. What about the dark side?
Robert Anton Wilson: One example that I give is the McMartin pre-school
satanism case, where over a hundred teachers and clergymen were accused
of running a satanic, child pornography ring. After prolonged
investigation, no evidence of a pornography ring was ever discovered, no
evidence of satanism was discovered. Out of a hundred accused teachers,
the police indicted seven, dropped charges against five and ultimately
brought only two to trial. The jury refused to convict even those two. It
seems to have been total hysteria, but there are still people down there
who say "no smoke without fire, it couldn't all have been hysteria;
somebody must have been guilty of something." But it's the classic case,
just like Salem all over, and there have been thirty-three other cases,
not as well publicized. I caught a sociologist in Chaos and Beyond who
studied thirty-three of these panics of that sort coming out of nowhere,
people just going nuts all at once. It happens. Look at Nazi Germany.
It's incredible. You change society rapidly enough, and make people
uncertain enough, and some of them will jump on to the craziest damn
belief systems. That's part of the chaos we're going through, too. Beside
the satanic hysteria, there's the UFO abductions. Thousands of people
have claimed they have been abducted and sexually molested by little Grey
buggers from outer space. The idea seems to be that these characters get
into some particularly vicious neurochemicals every so often. Then, about
the time they're really zonked on them, one of them says, "Hey, I got a
great idea. Let's get in the flying saucer and zoom a couple of billion
light years over to Earth and have another go at Whitley Strieber's ass.
And there's poor Whitley suffering again, and nobody takes him seriously.
I'm sorry, but I'm one of the guys who thinks he's having terrible
experiences, but I don't take them literally. That's part of a
sociological trajectory, too. There's more and more of these UFO
abduction cases reported.
What are the signs of chaos and why do you think it's happening now?
Robert Anton Wilson: Information is doubling faster than ever before and
the amount of available energy is higher than ever before. The social
systems existing on the planet are all inadequate to manage the kind of
technology and the kind of energy economy we've got now. Radical changes
are needed. And naturally you've got a variety of people of varying
degrees of sanity and rationality, with different programs about what
needs to be done. But everybody knows that something needs to be done.
What do you think of your role in terms of gathering all of the
information that you do? What is it you're serving in our culture at this
time?
Robert Anton Wilson: I picked up the phrase "guerrilla ontology" from
somebody in the physics/consciousness research group back in the
seventies. I forget who invented it-Jack Sarfati, Nick Herbert, Fritjof
Capra, Saul Paul- Sirag, Fred Wolf, Elizabeth Rausher I forget who the
hell came up with the term "guerilla ontology," but I liked it a lot and
I've been using it to describe my own activities. It has a distinct
family resemblance to deconstructionism, except the deconstructionists
only seem to want to deconstruct Western civilization. I'm interested in
deconstructing the rigid thought patterns that keep us from achieving our
full potential and unleashing the full creativity of the human race for
solving it's problems, instead of just bitching about them.
A lot of people feel this is a crescendo moment, that we are on the
threshold of a meta-jump. Colin Wilson talks about it, so does Barbara
Marx Hubbard. It's the idea of co-evolution into a great expansion of
evolutionary overmind. It's something that's going to step us up to
another level. What do you think?
Robert Anton Wilson: I've always had a strong intuition that all of this
that's been going on, from the first unicellular organisms up to the
present, is not all a bad joke intended to end up in catastrophe.
It's going to higher and higher levels.
What would be a good way for people to look at the chaos that's going on
now in terms of information overload?
Robert Anton Wilson: What I try to get at in all of my books, and
especially in this one, is the notion that we cannot solve our problems
by looking around to find out who's to blame for them and punishing them.
This has been tried throughout history, and it's never produced any
worthwhile results. It's led to a lot of what subsequent generations
regarded as senseless persecutions. A little while ago, before the tape
started, you were wondering whether it was warm milk or cold milk that
increases your tryptophan. This is the first generation in human history
where a large percentage of the population have talked about how to
change their brain chemistry to function better. It's no accident that
we've got this incredibly brutal and stupid war on drugs, because
obviously a lot of people are going to be experimenting with things the
government doesn't think it's safe to let us experiment with. I'm
sixty-two, and I keep waiting for the day when the government thinks I'm
old enough to make up my own mind about issues like this. But I guess
I'll have to keep waiting. They've already taken my tryptophan. Now
they're trying to take away my vitamin C.
One of the things that strikes me about Chaos and Beyond is the sense of
information overload it provokes.
Robert Anton Wilson: I would say the book contains as much information as
I could pack into one volume. The idea was to hit the reader with so much
information that they would experience, in reading the book, what
information explosion and chaos mean. We haven't changed much genetically
since the last Ice Age, but we are changing culturally. We have more and
more information. We're creating all sorts of different types of cultures
after a hundred thousand years or so of a hunter- gatherer society. We
mutated into cities and then into the Industrial Revolution, and now
we're going in a dozen different directions, including outer space. We're
creating what Teilhard de Chardin called the "noosphere"-a mind world
that's totally our own product. And yet the mind world does change the
material world, because every time a part of the mind world is
sufficiently accurate, it can be duplicated in the material world, and
we've got a new tool, a new machine, a new technology that will do things
we couldn't do before.
Robert Anton Wilson's Chaos and Beyond, The Best of Trajectories is
available for $14.95.
Write to P.O. Box 700305, San Jose, California 95170.
Faustin Bray regularly contributes to Magical Blend with pieces generated
in the Association for Cultural Evolution and SOUND PHOTOSYNTHESIS. SOUND
PHOTOSYNTHESIS has recent audio/videos and books. For more information
write P.O. Box 2111, Mill Valley, CA 94942 or call (415) 383-6712.
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