Robert Anton Wilson

The future is up for grabs. It belongs to any and all who will take the risk and accept the responsibility of consciously creating the future they want.

In almost all other professions a man must be able to observe carefully and report accurately what he has seen. Those qualifications are unnecessary for journalists, however, since their job is to write sensational stories that sell newspapers.

These ideas can be made more concrete with a parable, which I borrow from John Fowles__ wonderful novel, The Magus.Conchis, the principle character in the novel, _ds himself Mayor of his hometown in Greece when the Nazi occupation begins. One day, three Communistpartisans who recently killed some German soldiers are caught. The Nazi commandant gives Conchis, as Mayor, a choice _ either Conchis will execute the three partisans himself to set an example of loyalty to the new regime, or the Nazis will execute every male in the town.Should Conchis act as a collaborator with the Nazis and take on himself thedirect guilt of killing three men? Or should he refuse and, by default, be responsible for the killing of over 300 men?I often use this moral riddle to determine the degree to which people are hypnotized by Ideology. The totally hypnotized, of course, have an answer at once; they know beyond doubt what is correct, because they have memorized the Rule Book. It doesn__ matter whose Rule Book they rely on _ Ayn Rand__ or Joan Baez__ or the Pope__ or Lenin__ or Elephant Doody Comix _ the hypnosis is indicated by lack of pause for thought, feeling and evaluation. The response is immediate because it is because mechanical. Those who are not totally hypnotized__hose who have some awareness of concrete events of sensory space-time, outside their heads_ _d the problem terrible and terrifying and admit they don__ know any 'correct' answer.I don__ know the 'correct' answer either, and I doubt that there is one. Theuniverse may not contain 'right' and 'wrong' answers to everything just because Ideologists want to have 'right' and 'wrong' answers in all cases, anymore than it provides hot and cold running water before humans start tinkering with it. I feel sure that, for those awakened from hypnosis, every hour of every day presents choices that are just as puzzling (although fortunately not as monstrous) as this parable. That is why it appears a terrible burden to be aware of who you are, where you are, and what is going on around you, and why most people would prefer to retreat into Ideology, abstraction, myth and self-hypnosis.To come out of our heads, then, also means to come to our senses, literally__o live with awareness of the bottle of beer on the table and the bleeding body in the street. Without polemic intent, I think this involves waking from hypnosis in a very literal sense. Only one individual can do it at a time, and nobody else can do it for you. You have to do it all alone.

How do you get free of the damnable books of Romance when everybody else is still living in them?

Taxation is robbery based on monopoly of weapons

Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history.

Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.

We look for the Secret - the Philosopher's Stone, the Elixir of the Wise, Supreme Enlightenment, 'God' or whatever...and all the time it is carrying us about...It is the human nervous system itself.

...reality is always plural and mutable.

...when dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity ceases.

...an optimistic mind-set finds dozens of possible solutions for every problem that the pessimist regards as incurable.

belief is the death of intelligence.

It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.

But they can rule by fraud, and by fraud eventually acquire access to the tools they need to finish the job of killing off the Constitution.''What sort of tools?''More stringent security measures. Universal electronic surveillance. No-knock laws. Stop and frisk laws. Government inspection of first-class mail. Automatic fingerprinting, photographing, blood tests, and urinalysis of any person arrested before he is charged with a crime. A law making it unlawful to resist even unlawful arrest. Laws establishing detention camps for potential subversives. Gun control laws. Restrictions on travel. The assassinations, you see, establish the need for such laws in the public mind. Instead of realizing that there is a conspiracy, conducted by a handful of men, the people reason__r are manipulated into reasoning__hat the entire population must have its freedom restricted in order to protect the leaders. The people agree that they themselves can't be trusted.

Having a spine is overrated. If everybody squealed and ran away, there'd be no more wars.

I'm sorry There are some jokes you cannot understand until you have been a fool many, many years and thought yourself finally cured and then found out that you had just become a different kind of fool.

The longer one is alone, the easier it is to hear the song of the earth.

Belief in the traditional sense, or certitude, or dogma, amounts to the grandiose delusion, "My current model" -- or grid, or map, or reality-tunnel -- "contains the whole universe and will never need to be revised." In terms of the history of science and knowledge in general, this appears absurd and arrogant to me, and I am perpetually astonished that so many people still manage to live with such a medieval attitude.