Prometheus Rising (30 page)

imbeciles and parasites" who will flee the doomed cities and try

to steal your crops.

Mr. Saxon believed that these are
objective predictions
based

on hard
"laws"
of sociology and economics which he learned

from the writings of Ms. Ayn Rand. He did not believe that this

apocalyptical reality tunnel in which he lives is in any way an

artistic creation
expressing his own emotional anxieties and

hostilities.

John White believes that the earth will shift on its axis some

time before 1999. There will be "massive loss of life" and civilization

will be almost totally destroyed. The only hope you

have, he says, is to retreat to a farm (a la Mr. Saxon) where you

will probably be wiped out anyway but have some advantage

over city-people in that you won't have tall buildings falling on

you when the Pole Shift sets off earthquakes everywhere.

Mr. White believes that these are
objective
predictions based

on eternal
"laws"
of
karma
which he learned from various

occultists and gurus. He does not believe that the apocalyptical

reality-tunnel in which he lives is in any way an
artistic creation

expressing his own emotional anxieties and hostilities.

Mr. White also believes that many UFOs are actually demons,

and that after the Pole Shift kills us off, most of us will go to

"Hell," which is not eternal, fortunately, but only "timeless."

If we confront the world without ideas we see only a muddle,

the formless void that existed before "God" (intellect) started to

create a universe (a system) in Genesis.

Once we become the "image of God" by making our own

universe, we have a model of the muddle. The model is very

Prometheus Rising 237

convenient—we could not be human without it—but it is also

very misleading whenever we forget that we have created it.

None of the reality-models discussed in this chapter, however

bizarre they may seem to some readers, are any more arbitrary

than the official reality-model known as consensus-reality, which

is a statistical average and not nearly consensual as it seems.

Travel 100 miles in any direction, and the consensus begins to

crumble. Travel 1000 miles and very little consensus is left...

"The peoples of the earth are islands," said the late Clement

Atlee, "shouting at each other over oceans of misunderstanding."

Each island is a separate reality-tunnel created by (a) our culture,

(b) our sub-culture and (c) by the myth-maker or
artist
in each of

us who is the adamantine individuality that makes you and me

unique human selves not replicable units like the ants in a hive.

Robert Anton Wilson is the author of
Cosmic Trigger, Schrodinger's

Cat, Sex & Drugs
and several other books. Like Mr.

Saxon and Mr. White, Wilson does not get reviewed in the

Liberal magazines that decide which authors are important, but

he has a wide readership among science-fiction fans, political

Libertarians and veterans of the Consciousness Revolution.

Wilson believes that life extension techniques and intelligence

raising drugs will be discovered in this decade, and will be

widely available by 2010. Less radical than Dr. Silverstein,

Wilson does not expect immortality to be achieved until the

middle of the next century—but he expects life-extension drugs

will keep him around until then.

Wilson expects most of humanity will have migrated off

Earth into space cities by 2028. He expects that with higher

intelligence and longer lives than past humanity, these postterrestrials

will gradually become Superhuman by comparison

with our historical average.

Wilson believes that these are good guesses based on scientific

probabilities, but he does not think there are any hard

economic or karmic
laws
guaranteeing them. He recognizes that

this reality-tunnel was generated by his own brain, that he is the

artist
who created it, and that it expresses his own hopes and

desires, as well as scientific probabilities. It is, he knows, the

reality-tunnel that keeps him happy, creative, busy and full of

zest for life.

Prometheus Rising

He doesn't think it is any crazier than anybody else's realitytunnel,

and he claims it is a lot more fun than any other.

EXERCIZES

1 . Using the four circuit model, try to guess which specific

imprints created Mr. Saxon's reality-tunnel.

2. Apply the same analysis to Mr. White and Mr. Wilson.

3. Apply the same analysis to Jesus, Hitler, Walt Whitman

and your own father and mother.

4. Write a criticism of this chapter from the viewpoint of

Christian Fundamentalism.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

THE SNAFU PRINCIPLE

...the peculiar nature of the game...makes it impossible for

[participants] to stop the game once it is under way. Such situations

we label
games without end.

—
Watzlawick, Beavin, Jackson,

Pragmatics of Human Communication

239

COMMUNICATION IS ONLY POSSIBLE BETWEEN EQUALS

DOMINANCE

"HERRENMORAL"

This is second-circuit neuro-politics.

They shall come to know good.—

James Joyce,
Finnegans Wake

240

Mammalian sociobiology, rooted in the antique neural circuits of

the old brain, contains many factors opposing the evolution of

domesticated primates into true freedom and objective intelligence.

The chief of these "reactionary" factors was described in my

novel
Illuminatus!
as the Snafu Principle or Celine's Law. It

holds that
communication is only possible between equals.

This was an over-simplification for fictional (satirical) purposes.

More precisely, this proposed "law" would read:

Adequate communication flows freely between equals. Communication

between non-equals is warped and distorted by

second-circuit Domination and Submission rituals perpetuating

communication jam and a Game Without End.

Political power, as a typical alpha male once said, grows out

of the barrel of a gun. This is metaphorically as well as literally

true. The "gun" may be symbolic and fairly abstract, consisting

of ritualized social expectations ("Don't talk back to your

father") or concrete in a non-violent but deadly way, e.g., the

capacity to remove bio-survival necessities by cutting off the

ticket supply in a Capitalist society ("One more word and I'll fire

you, Bumstead!").

Under the primate second-circuit socio-biological rules,

everybody tends to lie a little, to flatter or to evade displeasure,

when exchanging signals with those above them in the packhierarchy.

Every authoritarian structure can be visualized as a pyramid

with an eye on the top. This is the typical flow-chart of any

government, any corporation, any Army, any bureaucracy, any

mammalian pack. On each rung, participants bear
a burden of

nescience
in relation to those above them. That is, they must be

very, very careful that the natural sensory activities of being

conscious organisms—the acts of seeing, hearing, smelling,

drawing inferences from perception, etc.—are
in accord with the

reality-tunnel of those above them.
This is absolutely vital; pack

status (and "job security") depends on it. It is much less

important—a luxury that can easily be discarded—that these

perceptions be
in accord with objective fact.

For instance, in the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, the agent had

to develop a capacity to see godless communists everywhere.

Any agent whose perceptions indicated that there were actually

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242 Prometheus Rising

very few godless communists in this country at that time would

experience
cognitive dissonance—
his or her reality-tunnel was at

variance with the "official" reality-tunnel of the pyramid. To talk

about such perceptions at all would be to invite suspicions of

eccentricity, intellectual wiseacreing or of being oneself a

godless communist.

The same would apply to a Dominican inquisitor in the middle

ages who lacked the capacity to "see" witches everywhere. In

such authoritarian situations, it is important to see what the Top

Dogs (alpha males) see; it is inconvenient, and possibly dangerous

to see what is objectively happening.

But this leads to an equal and opposite
burden of omniscience

upon those at the top, in the eye of the pyramid. All that is

forbidden to those at the bottom—the conscious activities of

perception and evaluation—is demanded of the Power Elite, the

master class.
They must attempt to do the seeing, hearing,

smelling, etc. and all the thinking and evaluating
for the whole

pyramid.

But a man with a gun (the power to punish) is told only what

the target thinks will not cause him to pull the trigger (write the

pink slip, order the court-martial). The elite, with their
burden of

omniscience,
face the underlings, with their
burden of nescience,

and receive only the feedback consistent with their own preconceived

notions and reality-tunnels. The burden of omniscience

becomes, over time, another and more complex burden of

nescience. Nobody really knows anything anymore, or if they do,

they are careful to hide the fact. The burden of nescience

becomes omnipresent. More and more of sensory experience

becomes unspeakable.

As Paul Watzlawick notes, that which is objectively repressed

(unspeakable) soon becomes subjectively repressed (unthinkable).

Nobody likes to feel like a coward and a liar constantly.
It

is easier to cease to notice where the official tunnel-reality

differs from existential fact.
Thus SNAFU accelerates and
rigiditus

bureaucraticus
sets in—the last stage before all brain activity

ceases and the pyramid is clinically dead as an intellectual entity.

We also propose that "national security" is another semantic

spook, an Empedoclean knot; that the search for national security

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is the chief cause of national insecurity and a potent anti-intelligence

mechanism.

As Leary writes:

Secrecy is the original sin. Fig leaf in the Garden of Eden. The

basic crime against love... The purpose of life is to receive,

synthesize and transmit energy. Communication fusion is the

goal of life. Any star can tell you that. Communication is love.

Secrecy, withholding the signal, hoarding, hiding, covering up

the light is motivated by shame and fear.

As so often happens, the right wing is half right for the

wrong reasons. They say primly: if you have done nothing

wrong, you have no fear of being bugged. Exactly. But the

logic goes both ways. Then FBI files, CIA dossiers, White

House conversations should be open to all. Let everything

hang open. Let government be totally visible. The last, the

very last people to hide their actions should be the police and

the government.

What my eminent colleague states so poetically can be stated

more functionally as follows:

Every secret police agency must be monitored by an elite

corps or secret-police-of-the-second-order. This is because

(a) infiltration of the secret police, for purposes of subversion,

will always be a prime goal of both internal subversives and

hostile foreign powers and (b) secret police agencies acquire

fantastic capacities to blackmail and intimidate others, in and out

of government. Stalin executed three chiefs of the secret police

in a row because of this danger. As Nixon so wistfully said in a

Watergate transcript,

Well, Hoover performed. He would have fought. That was the

point. He would have defied a few people. He would have

scared them to death.
He had a file on everybody.
[Italics

added.]

Thus, those who employ secret police agencies
must
monitor

them, to be sure they are not acquiring too much power.

Here a sinister infinite regress enters the game. Any elite

second order police must be, also, subject to infiltration, or to