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Thursday, July 29, 2010

Jim Henley on the "low road" vs. the "high road"

I have tried to avoid linking to anything that doesn't have a direct bearing on learning more about Robert Anton Wilson.

However, I am breaking that rule today to link to this posting by blogger Jim Henley which is the best defense of the utility of nonviolence that I've seen in a long time. It's one of Henley's best posts, but I also link to it because I think RAW would have loved it. Do you agree, Wilson scholars?

Henley, along with Thoreau, blog for Unqualified Offerings. Henley is a disgruntled libertarian who has become a liberal; Thoreau still self-identifies as a libertarian, but is mostly interested in the "left" side of the movement (i.e., his main concerns are peace and civil liberties, including ending the war on drugs.) So the blog's stances are very close to the political views that Wilson expressed.

1 comment:

michael said...

I agree in thinking that Henley's views seem extraordinarily isomorphic to Robert Anton Wilson's. There was a time when RAW would address this high-road/low road thingumbob w/in context of Wilhelm Reich's biosociological "sexual repression" and the mass psychology of fascism (for details as to what relative degree RAW saw validity in particular aspects of Reich's thought, see the long preface to his play _Wilhelm Reich In Hell_); later in life he still seemed to see Reich as still valid, but employed more barbed satire directed towards the mainsteam media, banks, both political parties, and fundamentalists of any sort, anywhere. For a quite gonzo take on where RAW stood on the political spectrum, see "Left and Right: A Non-Euclidean Perspective," from _Email To The Universe_.

Based on RAW's use of Rattray-Taylor's ideas of relatively oral-matrist vs anal-patrist kulchs throughout history (see esp _Ishtar Rising_), I think RAW would've followed quite intently George Lakoff's cognitive science ideas about political metaphors about "Family" that seem deeply embedded in each of us and explain why we shudder that people could actually applaud/defend the actions of someone like Dick Cheney...but this is only conjecture on my part, because Lakoff's cog-sci and later neuro-science of political thought arrived while RAW was winding down during the late 1990s.

Thanks for turning me on to Henley!