Because anarchists aim at the abolition of government, the first question they are usually asked is, "What about murderers, thieves, rapists? The government protects us from them. Would you just let them run wild?"
The answer, first of all, is that government does not protect us. Its claims are a total imposture, like the fraud of a primitive shaman who claims to bring rain and warns everybody, "If you abolish me, it will never rain again." Thus, the major crimes are all legal; the thieves who have stolen the land and the natural resources from under our feet operate with a government franchise. These huge banks, corporations and land monopolies finance both political parties, train the corporation lawyers who become Congressmen or P... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Wilson describes himself as a “guerrilla ontologist,” signifying his intent to ATTACK language and knowledge the way terrorists ATTACK their targets: to jump out from the shadows for an unprovoked ATTACK, then slink back and hide behind a hearty belly-laugh. — Robert Sheaffer, The Skeptical Inquirer, Summer 1990
Dublin, 1986.
I had given a talk to the Irish Science-Fiction Society and the question period began.
“Do you believe in UFOs?” somebody asked.
“Yes, of course,” I answered.
The questioner, who looked quite young, then burst into a long speech, “proving” at least to his own satisfaction that all UFOs “really are” sun-dogs or hea... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) They’re out there, moving stealthily in the darkness. The Black Magicians. The Occult Terrorists. Satanists. Mansonoids. Mindwarpers. Cattle Mutilators. “Night’s Black Agents,” as the Bard called them.
They’re calling down curses on their enemies. Sticking pins in Voodoo dolls. Summoning the mighty devil Choronzon to fall upon the Earth and afflict it with madness. Chanting to invoke the 777 servitors of Beelzebub and Set...
Well, yes. But let’s not lose our heads about it.
The first and most important thing to learn about evil is that it generally exists only in your own alarmed imagination. To a considerable portion of our fellow citizens, the acme of evil is pornography: Marilyn Ch... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Everybody has their own special nightmare, their private version of living in a Kafka novel. Some worry that they might fall through a timewarp and land in the hands of the Gestapo or the KGB. Others live in perpetual anxiety about an IRS audit. In New York and New Jersey, most people have an acute terror about accidentally saying or doing something that annoys the Mafia. Californians dread losing their temper and thereby appearing “unmellow,” which they evidently believe might lead to their getting deported back to the U.S. mainland.
I, too, have always had a personal horror: the concept of becoming hospitalized while in the United States and thus falling into the hands of the American Medical Association. Fortunately, a... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Robert Anton Wilson, who along with Robert Shea wrote the Illuminatus trilogy, is the creator of yet another cult. The really neat part is that this is a cult of hard-core libertarian-anarchist-occult-mind expansionists whose demand for the Illuminatus books is making SF retail history. Walk into your corner bookstore and chances are excellent the books have been back-ordered. Borrow a copy or wait in line if you must — it’s worth it. The trilogy is truly mind-boggling, outrageous, and curiously familiar. With this in mind we set out to interview one of its authors, Robert Anton Wilson (hereafter R.A.W.)
Interviewing him by mail was an exciting, albeit frustrating job. His provocative answers triggered seemingly never-end... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Can we actually “know” the universe? My God, it’s hard enough finding your way around in Chinatown.
Woody Allen
Last week, I happened to see two TV shows about “cults” — “Scientology” and “Heaven’s Gate” on A&E’s Investigative Reports — and they got me thinking. Each show had at least one galoot remarking that the line between “cult” and “religion” seems fuzzy at best, but each show also had a majority of folks who were quite sure they could distinguish a “cult” from a “religion” by the institution’s degree of “mind control” or “brainwashing.” I think both groups we... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) ...so sore mennes eyes were blinded Where covetousnesse of filthie gaine is more than reason minded.
— Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Golding translation)
A friend of mine told me a story recently that makes a good introduction to a column about economics. It seems that my friend was in the men’s room at his place of business, voiding his bladder energetically, when the President of his firm walked in and took a stance at the next urinal. A strange thing thereupon happened to my friend: his urine ceased spurting, even though he could still feel the pressure of an incompletely emptied bladder.
The reader may want to accuse me of surrealist symbolism, a dirty mind or a perverted sense of humor, but I can think of ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Our esteemed editor, Bob Banner, has invited me to contribute an article on whether my politics are “left” or “right,” evidently because some flatlanders insist on classifying me as Leftist and others, equally Euclidean, argue that I am obviously some variety of Rightist.
Naturally, this debate intrigues me. The Poet prayed that some power “would the giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us”; but every published writer has that dubious privilege. I have been called a “sexist” (by Arlene Meyers) and a “male feminist ... a simpering pussy-whipped wimp” (by L.A. Rollins), “one of the major thinkers of the modern age” (by Barbara Marx Hubbard) and “stupi... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The laws of God, the laws of Man,
He may keep who will, and can;
Not I: let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me.
— A.E. Housman
Political Myth and Self-Hypnosis
A rose by any other name
Would never, never smell the same
And cunning is the nose that knows
An onion that’s been called a rose.
— Wendell Johnson, Your Most Enchanted Listener
Nobody ever wins a debate with an editor in his own magazine, for the same reason that nobody has ever persuaded the Pope of his own fallibility.
Three years ago, Loompanics published The Myth of Natural Rights by L.A. Rollins. In 1985, the New Libertarian magazine (1515 W. MacArthur Blvd, #19, Costa Mesa, CA 92... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) In my previous two columns, I have presented the case for the ultimate skepticism (i.e. solipsism) as strongly as I could, indicated that it not only can be defended on rigidly logical grounds (cf. Hume, David, works of), but also that is seemingly confirmed empirically by the practice of silent-level meditation.
Of course, I am not a solipsist. Having fathered four children in this highly competitive society, I have had to confront the nitty-gritty gut-level reality of the iron laws of economics in a manner and with a persistance that makes me as much of a believer in “external reality” as any Marxist or Objectivist could wish.
I have even been on Welfare twice in my 45 years, for over a year each time. (It is a m... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Beatniks, swingers, and hippies all over the world are banding together to create a society where anything — but anything goes.
Eight years ago, an ex-Air Force officer named John Presmont was sitting in his room on East 31st Street in New York City when a voice spoke to him and told him he would be the founder of the next great world religion. Presmont, after leaving the Air Force with an honorable discharge, had become, by the age of 38, what nice people call a ‘bohemian’ or ‘beatnik’. At the time the Voice spoke to him, he had been reading the Koran and smoking marijuana rather heavily for 6 weeks. For several months before that, he had been laboriously plowing through all the scriptures of the great ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The late Laurance Labadie once told me a parable about a king who decided that everytime he met somebody he would kick them in the butt, just to emphasize his power. My memory may have elaborated this yarn a bit over the years, but basically it continues as follows: since this maniac wore a crown and had an army, people soon learned to tolerate being kicked fairly often, and even began to accept it philosophically or stoically, as they accept taxation and other impositions of kings and governors. They even learned to bend over as soon as they saw the king coming.
Eventually, the king died and his successor naturally continued the tradition and kicked anybody he chanced to meet. Centuries passed, and, in the usual course of things, th... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Frank, the Hip San Francisco Disc Jockey, has finally cajoled his luscious wife (played by Marilyn Chambers, the Ivory Soap advertising angel) to join him on the swinging Bay Area orgy circuit. Remember? 1973? The Resurrection of Eve, the most elegantly arty (and frequently revived) porn epic to date? One panting-gasping-bongo-orchestrated reel too late, Frank is aghast by Eve’s suddenly awakened passions, especially for black young males with jumbo-sized prongs, “The way it used to be…” he starts to complain. And she tells him all. Everything. What’s really coming down. The straight scoop from Evolutionary Central, in just three little words: “It’s over Frank.” As the film ends, porn has at ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Those who believe in, and seriously advocate and practice, sexual freedom are, and always have been, a minority. If there is one generalization that truly applies to the majority of men and women in all civilizations, everywhere, it is that they fear sexual freedom more than anything else, more then death itself, even. This is the crucial mystery of human nature and, quite properly, it has been the area of most intense investigation by depth psychologists from Freud and Reich to Marcuse and Brown.
A. S. Neill, the founder of the Summerhill school, was once asked where in the civilized world a man could practice homosexuality without fear of legal persecution. Neill replied that he knew of no such place, adding that he didn’t ev... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) “Teach? At Harvard? It cannot be done.”
— Henry Adams
In my youth, because I was a wicked sinner, God punished me by condemning me to one-and-a-half years in a School of Education. (Never mind which one it was; I have no desire to single it out for special blame. Escapees from other Schools of Education assure me that they are all equally squalid.)
Basically, I learned three things at that institution. The first was that it is possible to sleep all through the average education course (or to bring a book on some interesting subject and read it) and still pass the final examination easily.
The second and third things that I learned were that all modern educators agree that education should consist... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)