Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. Blog, Internet resources, online reading groups, articles and interviews, Illuminatus! info.

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

When RAW met Ayn Rand

Dangerous Minds, the popular lefty/pop culture blog, unearths this encounter between Robert Anton Wilson and Ayn Rand from the pages of Cosmic Trigger Volume II.

I like Jesse Walker's observation about followers of the two writers: " I've joked that the great invisible divide in the libertarian movement is between the people who were transformed by reading ATLAS SHRUGGED in high school and people who were transformed by reading ILLUMINATUS! I never went through a Rand phase, so you can put me firmly in the ILLUMINATUS! camp."

Also, I'm always glad to slip in a reference to Cosmic Trigger, Volume II: Down to Earth, as I think it is an underrated gem. The first Cosmic Trigger book has many fans, but I think the second one is as good a book as RAW ever wrote.