Never has there been a society in greater need of Robert Anton Wilson than our own, right now.
As Bob would no doubt be explaining to us, our problem is not that we don’t know what to believe, whom to trust, or how to respond; it’s that we think we do. We are certain what the words and pictures on our screens mean, whom they indict, whom they absolve, and which side’s story they tell. It’s not only a dangerous way to live; it’s entirely less fun.
It’s amusing to me now that I was nervous the first time I met Robert Anton Wilson back in the early nineties. To me, he was not only a counterculture legend—the author of Cosmic Trigger and The Illuminatus! Trilogy, initiator of Operation Mindfuck and Pope of the Discordian Church—but an authority figure and role model. I was on my very first book tour, gushing with my optimistic appraisals of the early Cyberdelic movement, when I noticed him sitting in the front row. I had modeled my talks after Bob’s style of lateral thinking, comparing and contrasting perspectives while never quite committing to one. It was the space between them, the ambiguity itself, that mattered. But now that I was in front of RAW Himself, I became obsessed with the possibility that I was doing it wrong. The Master was in the house.
He invited me back to his apartment for a beer, and I remember waiting for his pronouncement. His words of wisdom. But he was just Bob. Everything was surprisingly low stakes. He had no pronouncements on what I was saying. There was no right or wrong. He simply enjoyed the spirit of inquiry. The questions, the wonder, the confusion, and the enthusiastic pursuit of doubt.
As a role model, Bob offered neither the certainty of today’s alt-right’s non-castrated male authority figures, nor the self-assuredness of the technocratic left’s new deals. He may have been amused by the playful ingenuity of the meme wars and fake news but would have shrugged sadly at the belligerent intentionality fueling it all. He modeled uncertainty as a form of play.
I have often worried about whether Operation Mindfuck worked too well. He and his colleagues’ effort to destabilize America’s consensus reality in the 1960s through pranks and confusion. Levitate the Pentagon. Publish conspiracy stories about Jackie Kennedy walking in on Lyndon Johnson sexually abusing the exit wound in JFK’s head when his body was being transported back to Washington, DC.
Operation Mindfuck sought to suggest that anything anyone in the counterculture was doing at any time might just be part of an elaborate prank. This put outsiders in a difficult position: The only safe assumption was that anything a hippie was doing was part of Operation Mindfuck—some sort of trick or game. But because this could only lead to paranoia, one had to assume that whatever they were doing was probably harmless. They were, after all, just pranks. For their part, the counterculture agitators hoped the assumption that they were just jesters would keep them safe from any real persecution.
For Bob, though, Operation Mindfuck was less a means to an end than an end in itself. It was a way of training people to embrace just how weird and irresolvable things are. Like Art Bell’s interviews with UFO abductees and Sasquatch witnesses on his Coast-to-Coast late night radio show, Bob’s inquiries were less conspiracy theory than conspiracy hypothesis. The point was never to figure out what was actually true, but to experience the state of mind engendered by one belief or another. The beliefs themselves—the various scenarios about aliens, magical numbers, global cabals—were less important than the way they created new lenses and mindsets through which to understand the world.
Most importantly, none of them are true. Or all of them are true. Or some may be more true than others, depending on the circumstances or even the believer. The creative, magical potentials unleashed by conspiratorial musing was the very opposite of the self-righteous certainty and call-to-arms asserted by today’s fake news mongers.
Our young INCELs’ incapacity for ambiguity and their desperate need for a male authority to follow are precisely what RAW’s rite of passage was intended to redirect. Our well-meaning social justice warrior’s demand for identity confirmation through the invention of new nouns would be understood by Bob as a naive faith in the map to define the territory.
But the path of resolute ambiguity—life after passing through the Chapel Perilous—isn’t easy. Being that open, being willing to suppose almost anything, and then being willing to let go of that supposition is a tough life path. Especially when there’s a real life with money woes, health concerns, family troubles, and downright tragedy to navigate at the same time.
Yet Bob sure tried. And while he may not ever wish to be considered a role model, he did demonstrate how to hang onto a fluid sense of reality while simultaneously confronting greater challenges than any of us should ever have to face. It can be done.
Here’s how.
Douglas Rushkoff
New York, 2/23/2023