Robert Anton Wilson, Sci-Fi authour, legend, creator of the hilarious conspiracy cult novel The Illuminatus Trilogy and countless other novels, texts, treatises on future science, media, human psychology, esoterics, politics, conspiracies etc. presented in a breathtakingly amusing and absurdist format. This grand man, who has inspired a whole generation with his cross-referential and multilayered literary crusade now in an 2.5 hours mindblowing spoken word-performance!

 

Interview with RAW by Mr. Greg

 

What current trend in popular culture do you find most interesting?

 

The fact that Internet continues to grow faster and faster all the time. I read about 5 years ago that the number of users was doubling every eight months; it must be doubling even faster now. Friends in the computer business tell me there are now 80 million [80,000,000] websites, and that must be doubling faster, too. I think this represents something much, much bigger than the Industrial Revolution of the 18th-19th centuries. I incline to believe it's the biggest evolutionary event since life migrated from the sea to the land.

 

Why?

 

Many reasons. One, Internet has what’s called redundancy of control" in Information Theory. That means radical decentralization of power and communication, and it also means average increase in "IQ" (the ability to decode signals.) Because of this, all attempts to censor or monopolize the Net or the Web will fail. This means we (all of us: the whole human race eventually) will finally have real freedom of speech, a free marketplace of ideas. This must eventually destroy all tyrannies and most major forms of economic corruption.  Second, as an inter-active media of information and entertainment, Internet tends to raise the overall intelligence of its users, not just the “IQ.” In newspapers, even in TV – in all previous media – you made relatively few choices and have relatively few options. On Internet, your options grow wider all the time and you become aware of multitudes of choices every minute you are online. We are being forced to become more self-aware and self-responsible and that means we have to remedy any defects in our intelligence to enjoy and benefit from what the Net offers us. Thirdly, the ultimate result of world-wide Internet access must be what Buckminster Fuller called de-sovereignization, the end of traditional politics and traditional nationalisms. Since I regard politics and nationalisms as the causes of 99 percent of the misery on this planet, I eagerly look forward to their collapse, the sooner the better.

 

As an author, what new developments in physics or science do you find most exciting?

 

Well, I suppose genetic engineering and nanotechnology. I know all about the downside of both of them, and the hell they can cause while they "belong" to multinational criminals or corporations concerned only with profits. But molecular engineering has an upside, too. It can Iiteral1y make everything "cheap as dirt," and give us (all of us: all Earthians) an abundance and a super­abundance. All we have to do is take the control away nom the bandit/banker elite and use these technologies to "advantage all without disadvantaging any." How can we get the control away nom the elite, you ask? I don't know, but I'm working on it. I don't have all the answers. I only have parts of some of the answers.

 

In regards to personal privacy, what do you perceive currently as the greatest threat to it? Its greatest defender?

 

The greatest threat is centralized power, which always wants to know more about us so it can control us better. Whether this power is wielded by the puppet governments set up to distract and amuse us, or by the corporations who really run the world, I always regard it as nefarious. [As Lord Acton said, "All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." That rule is as universal as gravity.] I regard the computer hackers as our greatest defenders: by turning the tables, and increasingly making the power elites as visible to us as we are to them, these hackers are accelerating our evolution out of the old reptile parts of the brain, the part that still governs the elites who govern the world, and into the forebrain and truly human mentatation.

 

What individuals - scientists, politicians, artists, authors, etc. ­do you find most intriguing and contributing most greatly to contemporary thought and culture? Please elaborate.

 

Buckminister Fuller, because he gave us the most comprehensive (omni-inclusive) scientific philosophy of the 20th Century, and showed us, with concrete inventions, how to use that philosophy "to advantage all without disadvantaging any." All the philosophers of the quantum revolution – especially Bell, Schroedinger, Bohr, Bohm, Bridgman, Walker, and Wheeler - because they not only created a non-aristotelian epistemology useful for all the other sciences, too, our also, usually unconsciously, gave us in that non-­aristotelian system, the keys to multi-culturalism, i.e. the doorway to understanding non-European systems, such as those of Aftica and the Orient. Joyce, Pound and Picasso because they introduced that kind of multi-culturalism or neurological relativism into our literature and art. Timothy Leary and Wilhelm Reich, because their ideas were so revolutionary that they actually got thrown in jail for them - the one sure sign that a scientist has discovered something new and important. The Dalai Lama, because he's the only religious leader ahoof on this planet who doesn't sound at least half cracked.

 

In Stockholm. what is your intended agenda?

 

As much plain blunt truth as I can get away with, until the police shut me up.

 

 

 

Interviewed by Mr. Greg, August 1999

Associate Editor, The Kerouae Connection

Article restored from <http://www.luger.se/spokenword99/raw.asp>