Jeff Riggenbach interviews Timothy Leary

Jeff Riggenbach

Reason magazine has a 1977 interview with Timothy Leary. It was carried out by Jeff Riggenbach, a libertarian who was interested in some of the same revisionist historians that interested Robert Anton Wilson (see this earlier post.)

This is from the period when Leary was claiming that Bob Dylan is a pernicious  influence on the nation's youth, and it's interesting to see how Leary responds when Riggenbach presses him:

LEARY: Well, sure that's a metaphor. And anytime I use a metaphor, it's a risky operation. Metaphors are like forward passes. Anytime I say anything in terms of symbols I expect I'm wrong half the time, or wait long enough and I'll be right, or if you're right now you'll be wrong or left tomorrow—maybe left. So I won't defend that metaphor. But it got you thinking.

REASON: It certainly did.

LEARY: And I see ideas not as heavy, static concepts, but as electric charges and if someone can prove me wrong I'm the first one to be delighted because that means some signal I sent out got whacked back and jolted me. That's what I want you to do.

Here is my Riggenbach obituary. 

Jeff Riggenbach has died

 

Jeff Riggenbach

I am sorry to have to report that Libertarian writer Jeff Riggenbach has died. He was 74 when he died on Jan. 25, according to an obituary posted at the Mises Institute. Here is another obit. I expect to see more as the news moves through libertarian websites. 

Because of his connections to Robert Anton Wilson, I have written about Riggenbach on this blog. He did a nice podcast on RAW that you can still listen to, as part of a series of podcasts he did on major libertarian thinkers. 

And if you are interested in the revisionist antiwar historians that RAW wrote about, you will want to read Riggebach's book, Why American History is Not What They Say. I did a blog post about the book after I read it, with links for getting a free and cheap ebooks of the title. 

The links on those two earlier blog post still seem to work, as far as I can tell. 

If I can find a detailed obituary, I will post a link here. The Von Mises bio says that Riggenbach was a former radio personality working in "classical and all-news radio in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Houston," so some of you may have heard him on the radio, and RAW may have heard him, too. 

Jeff Riggenbach's revisionist history

In the Lewis Shiner interview, Robert Anton Wilson talks about his interest in revisionist, antiwar historians:

I'd also like to write a book about Pearl Harbor. The revisionist historians have been thoroughly slandered and are mostly out of print. I wouldn't be adding much original; I think everything worth saying has been said by Charles Beard and Harry Elmer Barnes and James J. Martin and a few others. But their books are out of print or hard to find. My book would be just one more effort against what Barnes called "the historical blackout." One more effort to put the facts on record.

That's a book that RAW never got around to. But in a sense, Jeff Riggenbach did the job for him by penning a book, Why American History is Not What They Say, which I just finished reading.

It's a book about the revisionist approach to American history, and there is a great deal of information about Beard and Barnes and Martin and about Gore Vidal's historical novels, which fit into that tradition. That's the first and major part of the book. The book has a second section offering a libertarian history of the U.S., which reclaims the term "liberal" for libertarians (who are essentially classical liberals), and there's a final section on rival accounts of U.S. history from Howard Zinn and others.

You can download a free copy of the book from the Von Mises Institute.  I chose to purchase the modestly-priced Kindle version to stave off possible attacks of guilt.

Riggenbach also did a long podcast series on libertarian writers and thinkers. I blogged about the Robert Anton Wilson episode here. 

Who said this?

Here's a quote from a 1977 interview, in Reason magazine, from a self-style libertarian ("At a political level I'm very much a libertarian.") See if you can guess who said this:

"The great enemy is gravity. The way out is levity. And we are physically and biologically going to do everything we can to leave this planet and we're going to live forever ... or die trying."

If you guess Robert Anton Wilson, you're wrong. It's Jeff Riggenbach's interview with Timothy Leary, which ran in Reason's April 1977 issue. But it sure sound like statements Wilson made many times, and for me it underscores the influence Leary had on Wilson's thought.

Jesse Walker kindly supplied me with a copy of the interview. When I remarked on the above passage, Walker responded, "A fair amount of Wilson's writing amounts to popularizing Leary's ideas (often explaining them better than Leary does). On the other hand, I suspect that with a lot of Leary's post-prison political commentary, the influence went in the other direction."

I still don't know a lot about Leary, but did he notice, perhaps, that when he got into trouble over drugs, it was the libertarians who sided with him against the state?

Riggenbach recently posted an article about Leary and Thomas Szasz.

About the Leary interview, Riggenbach wrote, "When this interview ran in Reason in April of 1977, it created a bit of controversy within the libertarian movement and got Leary invited to deliver the keynote speech at the 1977 national convention of the Libertarian Party, which was held in San Francisco over Labor Day weekend of that year. I was asked to introduce Leary to the assembled multitude, which I did. Leary stressed his personal commitment to libertarian ideas once again.

"He seems to have still felt that way a decade later. For in 1988, he held a fundraiser in Los Angeles for LP presidential candidate Ron Paul. And in 1993, only a few years before his death, when he wrote an Introduction to a new edition of his 1968 book The Politics of Ecstasy, he listed 'libertarianism' as one suggested name for what he called the 'new, post-political society' that he believed 'the Sixties revolution created — and continues to create' in this country. In the original edition of the book, the word "libertarian" hadn't appeared — but then, it was rather infrequently used in the America of 1968."