Saturday links

Michael Johnson thinks about what his "self" is.

Nick Herbert recommends a book on quantum mechanics.

PQ on a documentary about a Finnegans Wake reading group.

CATO event with Jesse Walker, N.Y. Times writer Sam Tanenhaus (formerly editor of the book section) and Gene Healy. I'm hoping it will become available as a podcast.

Monument to god of chaos appears in front of Oklahoma restaurant.

"The CIA operates under orders from British intelligence and was created by British intelligence in 1947."

Photo of John Lilly, Richard Alpert, Nina Graboi and Robert Anton Wilson, at Timothy Leary's funeral.  (Posted by Roman Tsivkin.)

"Obama has an excellent option. It’s called 'don’t bomb Syria.' Don’t fire cruise missiles at Syria either." (Matthew Yglesias, at Slate.)

I will be on vacation for a few days. The blog will go on, but interactions with other blogs and on Twitter may or may not suffer.

Lisa Tuttle's fantasy top 10

The Guardian ran Lisa Tuttle's list of the top ten "mould-breaking fantasy novels" and I duly noted that one of my favorite books, Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, made the list at No. 2.

One of Robert Anton Wilson's favorites also made the list: The Magus by John Fowles. (Wilson mentions it, for example, near the beginning of this interview.)

But I'm also posting about here because I noticed that another book Tuttle mentioned, John Crowley's Aegypt, sounded like a book RAW fans would be interested in. Tuttle's description: "A fantasy of history, concerned with occult practices, memory palaces, John Dee, etc, yet utterly grounded in real places and times in our world. Pierce Moffett, a child of the 60s in New York, investigates his suspicion that the world might have split at some point in the past, creating more than one true history."

(I should note for clarity that The Book Formerly Known as Aegypt is now known as The Solitudes and is the first book in the Aegypt tetralogy.)

Since I've never gotten around to trying Crowley, I turned for help to two literary mavens (and RAW fans) on Twitter, Ted Hand and Roman Tsivkin. (Sorry about some of the repetition below. Twitter makes it extremely difficult to copy conversations.)

@t3dy @Zenjew Have you guys read John Crowley's "Aegypt" novels? If so, what did you think of them?

   — Tom Jackson (@jacksontom) August 29, 2013

@jacksontom @t3dy Crowley's hard to pin down as a writer. Sometimes superb, but sometimes the reader--this reader, in any case--nods off.

             — Roman Tsivkin (@Zenjew) August 29, 2013

I just have trouble reading novels. Most of my reading time is spent sampling from hundreds of nonfictions. @Zenjew @jacksontom

            — Ted Hand (@t3dy) August 30, 2013

@zenjew @t3dy Feels like I should try him -- he sounds like someone I would like.

           — Tom Jackson (@jacksontom) August 30, 2013

Think of it as a prequel to "Historical illuminatus" @jacksontom @Zenjew

— Ted Hand (@t3dy) August 30, 2013

@jacksontom @t3dy Do give Crowley a spin, Tom. Very PKD-ish gnostic themes in the Aegypt novels. I keep meaning to finish reading them.

— Roman Tsivkin (@Zenjew) August 30, 2013

Speaking of RAW-related, I read Antoine Faivre, "Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition" great one on illuminati esotericism. @jacksontom @Zenjew

            — Ted Hand (@t3dy) August 30, 2013

Free issue of New York Review of SF

I subscribe to very few periodicals these days — I concentrate on reading books, and there's so much free stuff on the Internet -- but I do take the New York Review of Science Fiction.

The magazine has passed into the hands of Kevin Maroney, who is doing a good job and has taken it through the process of converting from an electronic to a digital publication.

The latest issue, No. 300, has been released as a free issue, so you can download a copy for  yourself and decide whether to join me in subscribing to it. The issue has a nice mixture of features, including a piece on Gene Wolfe by Kim Stanley Robinson. I have read a big pile of books by both authors, and my interview with KSR ran in NYRSF many years ago.

(Hat tip: Arthur Hlavaty, one of the editors at NYRSF).

NYRSF, by the way, was founded by David Hartwell, one of RAW's editors.

Ready for some good news?

As the U.S. apparently prepares to jump into yet another Mideast war, would you like some good news?

Bryan Caplan, a libertarian economist and blogger (and a pacifist), points out in his post, "Peace on Earth is Almost Here," that despite all of the bloodshed in North Africa and Asia, much of the rest of the world is peaceful. Caplan writes, "If you don't feel grateful, you should.  Yes, things could get worse.  At some point, they almost certainly will for a spell.  But the utopian dream of peace on earth now looks amazingly realistic.  Who knows?  We might abolish war before we get driverless cars!"

Meanwhile, Reason's writers continue their apparently quixotic quest to keep the U.S. from intervening in a civil war on the same side as Al Qaeda. For example, here are Peter Suderman's "8 Reasons Not to Go to War in Syria," and Jesse Walker's "The 'Experts' Who Want a War With Syria."

Over at Dangerous Minds, leftist Richard Metzger reacts to all this by complaining that Timothy Leary once supported Ron Paul. (Mysteriously, Leary lent his support to one of the few politicians who was then ready to call for an end to the war on drugs. Leary biographers are still puzzling over the strange episode.) Whatever you think of Ron Paul, his antiwar credentials are pretty solid. I think Dangerous Minds is a fine blog, but Metzger's timing seems a little off this time.

Spying on the U.N.

I just finished reading Matthew Aid's history of the NSA, The Secret Sentry. The George W. Bush administration and its top officials do not come off especially well in the book.

The book discusses how Dubya reacted the leader of the United Nations didn't get behind America's planned invasion of Iraq in 2003:

"NSA and Britain's GCHQ began intercepting all of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's telephone calls and emails, and a special eavesdropping device was surreptitiously planted inside Annan's office suite on the thirty-eighth floor of the U.N. headquarters building in New York City; it recorded all of the conversations held in his office. The U.S. and British governments were both concerned that Annan was personally opposed to the United Nations' approving a resolution calling for war with Iraq."

Thanks heavens we got rid of that Republican asshole Bush.

Oh, wait.

Oz Fritz on Aleister Crowley

Oz Fritz has begun a new series of posts on Aleister Crowley.

You could read the first post for sentences like these:

"The first time I read Magick in Theory and Practice sometime in the early '80's, I turned it into a Magical Retirement, that is to say, I dropped out of all the conventional social games and spent a week concentrating on reading and digesting the book and doing some spiritual practices. I rented a room above a dive bar, The St. Regis Hotel in downtown Calgary, Alberta and fasted from food, drugs and alcohol. After morning yoga, I'd walk around downtown Calgary and find somewhere interesting outdoors to read the book."

Or you could read it for the Joey Ramone anecdote. Or for the way Oz relates Crowley to Bucky Fuller. But my takeaway was Oz's explanation for what "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" really means.

I'm looking forward to the follow-ups.

RAW on Abbie Hoffman

Robert Anton Wilson said some harsh things about Abbie Hoffman; in Schroedinger's Cat, Markoff Chaney, harassing Frank Dashwood, envisions "a new letterhead that would say FRATERNAL ORDER OF HATE GROUPS and have Robert Welch, Abby Hoffman, Anita Bryant, and George Wallace listed as officers."

Wilson apparently came to regret being so hard on Hoffman; in a comment to my August 22 post, Jesse Walker wrote, quoting an email RAW sent to Walker in 2004, "I softened my view after details of his illness came forth. Before that, I considered him nasty and mean. After, I decided my few meetings with him probably came in depressive valleys of his bipolar cycle and I had non-semantically thought I 'knew' him.... See my Cosmic Shmuck law; it's very important to me these days to remember my Cosmic Schmuckhood. Wish I had met Abbie once on one of his peaks... Met Anita toward the end of her life & liked her a lot."

Did the U.S. government hack Tor?

On Twitter, Julian Sanchez suggests, "What if people decided on principle to deprive NSA of as much data as possible, even at the cost of convenience? Always use Tor, even though it's slower. Encrypt even trivial emails. Stop using PSTN. Always use OTR. Stop using PRISM search engines. It would be a mild pain in the ass. And after a week or two you probably wouldn't notice the difference."

This is likely good advice, although I wonder if a really determined NSA probe would be able to get all of your information. I noticed, for example, a ProPublica story about an attack on Tor.

In this cautiously-worded report, ProPublica raises the issue of whether the U.S. government was responsible for a malware attack on Windows machines running the Tor Browser Bundle, a popular way to use Tor. The author says that the evidence is interesting, but not conclusive.

ProPublica has a lot of good NSA coverage and it has a good apps to read its stories on your table, mobile phone, etc.

'Robert Anton Wilson & Operation Mindfuck'

The Disinformation web site, as you may already have noticed, has published an excerpt from Jesse Walker's The United States of Paranoia, "Robert Anton Wilson & Operation Mindfuck." The posting has been getting publicized by the various RAW sites, but I wanted to post, too, to make sure no one missed it.

'Cosmic Schmucks' and a little RAW skepticism

Michael Johnson wrote a piece about Robert Anton Wilson's "Cosmic Schmuck" principle back in July 2012, and now he's followed it up with a sequel posting. Some key sentences in the new piece:

I think Robert Anton Wilson wanted much more of all of that (deliberation, negotiation, collaboration, compromise, playfulness) in his thinking that actuated the Cosmic Schmuck Principle. Why? Well, for one: the need to be "right" all the time seems linked with being repressive and Authoritarian. RAW used a term he attributed to Mike Hoy: "Correct Answer Machine": this is an assumption deeply embedded in out culture, so we take it in, seemingly, with mother's milk: that we must have The One True Answer to any question, as if there were a little machine in our brains that always knew the "correct" answer to everything. Wilson thought this was basically the same as an ideology, but an authoritarian one, almost always based on Aristotelian two-value logic, with no room for the Excluded Middle. Wilson called it "robot circuits in our brains." (see Email To The Universe, p.135)

The whole piece is good, and see also his responses in the comments.

In a somewhat similar vein, Jesse Walker and I Tweeted back and forth after yesterday's piece. After I posted a link to the "Anarchism and Crime" article, Jesse Tweeted, "I am extremely dubious about that Swedish rape statistic." ("We would not have so many rapists and other violent nuisances if our society were not, in some way, training them from birth onward to behave like that. For instance, Sweden has only a few rapes per year; the United States has one every seven minutes.")

I looked it up, and this is what Wikipedia has to say (noting that it's talking about current statistics, not 1970s ones):

Sweden has the highest incidence of reported rapes in Europe and one of the highest in the world. According to a 2009 study, there were 46 incidents of rape per 100,000 residents. This figure is twice that of the UK which reports 23 cases, and four times that of the other Nordic countries, Germany and France. The figure is up to 20 times the figure for certain countries in southern and eastern Europe.[80]

By 2010, The Swedish police recorded the highest number of offences - about 63 per 100,000 inhabitants - of any force in Europe, in 2010. The second-highest in the world.[81]

The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention claims that it is not "possible to evaluate and compare the actual levels of violent crimes... between countries", but that in any case the high numbers are explained by a broader legal definition of rape than in other countries, and an effort to register all suspected and repeated rapes. It asserts that comparisons based on victim surveys place Sweden at an average level among European nations.[82]

Jesse then Tweeted, "Sometimes Wilson's skepticism failed him. I've heard an early talk where he claimed that cancer was absent among the Eskimos." I replied, "A fair criticism. He probably should have treated many of Tim Leary's claims with more skepticism."

Now, obviously I'm a huge RAW fan and Walker is too (more on that tomorrow), but we can treat Wilson as a human being and separate the wheat from the chaff. See the back and forth in the comments to Michael's new post that I just referenced.

'Anarchism and Crime' by Wilson and Shea

(This article ran in Green Egg. I could not find a date, so all I can say is it was in the 1970s. It reads like one of the missing appendices for Illuminatus!, but I can't think of anyone I could ask to test my theory. My thanks to Mike Gathers for making it available to everyone. -- Tom.)

Anarchism and Crime
By Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea

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 Presidents, and can never be successfully resisted in the courts because they own the judges, too.

Second, the next level of crime, the so-called Syndicate or Mafia, is also in cahoots with big government and big business, and only token arrests and light sentences are ever imposed on "gangland leaders" -- usually rebels who have become unpopular with the higher-level mobsters. In every big city, the links between the mayor's office and the Mob are well-known and often "exposed" in the press, but no reforms are permanent and never can be under this system. The links between the national Mob and the national government are less well publicized, but books like The Politics of Opium in Southeast Asia, the recent Harpers magazine issue on the CIA and heroin, etc., show that the heroin syndicate could not operate without high-level Federal protection.

Finally, the small-time free-lance criminal -- the rapist and sneak thief -- can be arrested and prosecuted in this system; but is he, usually? In New York, in 1972, there were 300,000 burglaries but only 20,000 arrests for burglary. The police are too busy protecting the high-level criminals -- as we will explain -- to have the manpower to really battle the small independents.

Do you deny this? Well, of course, you have been trained by the State-run schools and the mass media to deny it,  do you believe your own denial? How safe do you feel in a large American city, especially after  dark? Do you honestly think the government can and will protect you?

IS MORE LAW THE ANSWER?

Many admit that they are frightened and appalled by modern American  life, but they think the answer is more laws, tougher laws, an evolution toward the total Police State.

This is, of course, the natural direction of government. The more honest (and misguided) a politician happens to be, the more laws he will write -- to prove to himself that he is "working" for the people. Obviously, every time the legislature meets, the honest politicians will introduce more laws, to show how hard they're working. Eventually, nothing will remain that is not covered by some law or other. Everything not compulsory will be forbidden, and everything not forbidden will be compulsory.

Stop and ask yourself if you really want that kind of Nazi- or Communist-style tyranny.

Now, even if we (or most of us) do want it -- to be protected from criminals -- and even if we escalate our progress and pass a billion new laws a year, arriving at Total Law in say five or ten years, what then? How will such a system be enforced? Kinsey estimated that to enforce our sex laws alone, 95 percent of the population would have to become either police or jail-guards -- except that they would all be in jail themselves. This is already impossible, but suppose we tried to enforce the anti-drug and anti-gambling laws, also? We would all spend our lives in Federal prisons, spending part of the day guarding others and part of the day being guarded by them.

This is absurd, but within the framework of government and law, how can we stop short of such a total prison-society?

And remember: each step in this direction -- each new law, and each new bureaucracy to enforce the new laws -- raises your tax burden. Already, you are working from January 1 to May 23 for the Federal government, to pay your IRS bill for the year. For a few months thereafter, you are working to pay nuisance taxes, state taxes, and various other concealed taxes on every item you buy, every movie you see, every drink you take. Already, it would probably be cheaper to just let yourself be robbed every week by a casual sneak-thief. Government may be more genteel than a mugger (occasionally) but it usually ends up taking more of one's money.

THE FUNCTION OF LAW

There are three kinds of laws on the books today, and to understand them is to understand the State.

The first kind of law declares the State's power over you. It says: we may rob you of this much per year (taxation), we may enslave you for this period of time (the draft), we may do this and that and the other thing to you, and you cannot resist because we are your Masters. This is the earliest kind of law and was originally imposed on conquered people by conquerors. No attempt to justify it has ever been convincing to anyone bold enough to question it in the first place. It is based on mere Force; its only argument is the gun.

The second kind of law is coercive morality. This makes the State into an armed clergyman. It says you can enjoy yourself this way, but not that way; you can smoke this, but not that; you can drink this, but not that. Thou Shalt Not Play Parchesi On The Night of the Full Moon. Thou shalt not gamble on Sunday. Thou shalt not make love to  your wife the way you and she both like, but the way the legislators like. Four million arrests a year, and an incredible expenditure of time and manpower and money, go into enforcing these laws.

These are the laws that establish crimes without victims. These are the laws that everybody occasionally violates and some people violate constantly. Their only justification, as with the first type of laws, is sheer brute force. That is, without force, a man who believed in, say, the Seventh Day Adventist vegetarian diet would still obey that diet's rules; with force, the Adventists, if they get into government, can make all of us obey it. The day is not distant when pot-smokers will take over, and if they are vengeful, anti-booze laws will come back on the books. This stupid bullying can go on forever, each group getting its turn to impose its own prejudices on others. Anarchists say: stop it now, get off your neighbor's back, get him off your back, and let everybody enjoy his or her own lifestyle.

Finally, there is the third class of laws -- the class that every decent person wishes society would live by. No killing. No stealing. No rape. No fraud. Anarchists, just like you, would like to see these laws really functioning. We just don't believe that government can do that job. We think government is, always has been, and always will be preoccupied with the first two kinds of law. Read on and we will explain this.

THE NATURE OF GOVERNMENT

Government was instituted to guarantee that property would remain stolen. The chief function of every cop, every judge, every bureaucrat is to see that property remains stolen.

The first kings were conquerors. They stole the land by shot and shell, period. Then, they settled down to rob the survivors at a certain rate per year, called taxation. Next, they divided up the land among their relatives or officers in the army, who all became lords-of-the-land, landlords, and were empowered to rob the citizens at a certain other rate per year, called rent. When science and industry appeared, other satraps and sycophants of the royal families received charters to monopolize the resources and means of production, and to rob at a certain rate per year, called capital interest or profit. When banks were formed to circulate the medium of exchange (money), other charters were handed out to others in the bandit-gang,  who became bank directors with a license to rob at another rate per year, called money interest or economic interest.

It soon became evident that those not in the gang, the majority of the population, were inclined to rob back as much as they could. The Robin Hood hero appears in all societies at this point, and most of us still admire him, although shamefacedly, since the schools and mass media tell us not to. (Still,  who doesn't heroize Jesse James or John Dillinger a little?)

Anarchists say that the first crime was the crime of the conquerors/governors, who seized a whole land, cut it up among themselves, and proceeded to rob all of us forever by taxation, rent, corporative profit, money interest, and various sub-classes of the same basic fraud. Anarchists say that the Earth belongs to its inhabitants, not to this small "owning" and "governing" class of less than 1 percent of the population.

Anarchists say that the way to stop crime is to stop the primordial crime, the State, and administer the land through voluntary associations (syndicates) of all the people.

Anarchists say that if people could work for themselves -- if they received the full product of their labor through a syndicate of fellow-workers -- almost all motivation for crime would disappear. If you didn't have to pay taxes and rent, starting tomorrow, your purchasing power would be more than doubled. If other forms of exploitation and robbery, through the financial-interest system, were also abolished, your purchasing power would more than quadruple. How much envy, how much worry about money, how much irrational fear, ulcers, nightmares, headaches and other motivations to cheat a little or steal a little would survive after this simple economic justice was achieved?

THE OTHER CRIMINALS

"But, but -- how about the violent criminal types? How about the thrill-killers, the nuts, the psychopaths or sociopaths or sadists? How about those who simply enjoy being evil and destructive?"

We are not evading that question. It is absolutely necessary, however, to put it in perspective by explaining the Major Economic Crime of capitalist government (and feudal and other governments) and how other, lesser crimes mostly derive from that primordial injustice.

Now, after economic justice is achieved and voluntary associations of all sorts (labor unions, credit unions, consumer-owned co-ops, people-owned insurance companies, rural communes, tribes, any type of free human grouping) have taken over the functions of government, some persons, due to sickness or perversity or one damn thing or another, will still make trouble. Rape. Pilfering. Attempts to defraud. How will anarchists deal with these remaining no-goodniks?

EDUCATION AND THE FAMILY

The first step in solving any social problem, like any medical problem, is prevention. Other remedies are necessary only when prevention fails.

Anarchists claim that the violent-nut-type of human being is produced by our current methods of child-rearing. This claim is hardly radical or extreme: every psychiatrist, every sociologist, every anthropologist, in one way or another, admits that this grave charge is true. We would not have so many rapists and other violent nuisances if our society were not, in some way, training them from birth onward to behave like that. For instance, Sweden has only a few rapes per year; the United States has one every seven minutes. One rape every seven minutes is not natural male behavior (whatever Womens Lib may say); it is a function of the sexual misery in this society.

Anarchists believe that the repressive, authoritarian, coercive, brutal and degrading practices currently used in the family and the school are only necessary to condition the young human to live in a government-run society. Children must be beaten or otherwise terrorized and bullied in the home and the school in order that they may "adjust" to the terror and brutality of government as they mature. In short, a State-run society must be repressive because repression is the essence of the State.

Libertarian, free-form families and schools -- the open family, the Summerhill school, the free association of men, women and children without authoritarian control -- will not produce the deformed, mentally twisted, violent and "mean" and "crazy" types so common in our authoritarian society. So anarchists aim, first of all, to prevent violent criminals by changing the child-rearing methods that produce them.

THE DEMONIAC OR MONSTER

There still remains the inexplicable criminal -- the guy who enjoys harming others for reasons nobody today can understand. The superstitious say he is possessed by demons; the naturalists imply that maybe he has bad genes or is a throwback to an earlier stage of evolution. Whatever the explanation, he will appear, presumably, in anarchist societies, as he has appeared in all other societies, even after economic injustice and mind-warping education are abolished.

Human-centered societies (as distinguished from governmental or property-centered societies) have dealing with this problem for thousands of years. Tribes, clans, bands, free communes, have existed outside, before and alongside the States which get all the attention from historians. Anthropologists have investigated these free human groupings and have found a variety of methods of dealing with "demoniacs," many of them as good or better than the State's traditional jails, tortures or executions.

Ostracism should not be underestimated. One critic of anarchism, George Orwell, actually complained that ostracism was so cruel that most people would rather fall afoul of government and go to jail than be the sole ostracized person in an anarchist community.

Exile, widely used by governments before jail became popular, is also effective. At least, it solves the problem for the community that uses it (while, alas, passing the problem on to the unlucky community that next gets the offensive nut.)


The Quakers have widely practiced a form of moral forgiveness which sounds impractical to most of us, but which is murderously effective. Bertrand Russell was so impressed with this that he suggested it as a fit punishment for Stalin. Until you have seen a group of Quakers reciting somebody's sins in public, weeping over them loudly, and then forgiving and praying for the culprit, you can't imagine how much psychological impulse-to-change this generates.

Many anarchists believe the private defense groups are legitimate; some even are willing to allow  such groups to use traditional Vigilante methods. Clarence Lee Schwartz, an American anarchist who observed this system first-hand in the old West, thought it both more humane and more effective at peace-keeping than the government law system back East. Other anarchists fear this as the possible source of a new State.

Most anarchists believe that criminals should not be caged under any circumstances, due to the overwhelming evidence that every prisoner comes out of a cage worse than he goes into it. Others believe, however, that punishment in a form of indemnification is compatible with libertarian ideas and should be rigorously enforced by anarchist syndicates. Under the indemnity system, every criminal must pay in cash or work or some needed good to compensate his victims (or their survivors). This certainly does the victims more good than having the criminal put in a cage and fed at community expense, to say the least of it; and is probably just as discouraging or more discouraging to every nut with even the remnant of an ability to forsee the probable results of his actions.

Finally, we must mention miscellaneous solutions. Just as crime in an economically just and free community will be freaky and sporadic (rather than the steady hour-after-hour terror that it is in this mad, unequal and unfree society), the remedies will also be individualized and peculiar to each situation. In some cases, undoubtedly, an anarchist community will decide the "criminal" was right and the community was wrong; for this reason, anarchists do not believe in unalterable laws, but only in general policies.

The acme of anarchist theory is the principle of non-invasiveness or non-coercion -- Mind Your Own Business -- and those found to be violating this will  be given, usually, some method of compensating those whose lives they have damaged. If they refuse, methods like the boycott-ostracism-exile or general cold shoulder need not always be deliberately organized against them. The good sense, the social bonds, and the sense of humor of the organic community will find some way to make them known that human tolerance, even under anarchy, is not infinite. In the Old West, men booted through town with a skunk tied around their necks, and then shoved onto the  highway, often became valuable, co-operative and productive citizens in the next town, after some time to figure the likelihood of a repetition of that public amusement if they were to try similar modes of behavior again.

Various links

Hello Robert Anton Wilson Kitty. Yours for $123. (Via Roman Tsivkin).

At Salon, Laura Miller reviews Jesse Walker's The United States of Paranoia, out today. It's an interesting review, and Miller talks quite a bit about Robert Anton Wilson, e.g., "Although conspiracies do exist, we need to be vigilant against our propensity to find them whether they are there or not. The most sensible outlook would appear to be that of Robert Anton Wilson, who concluded that 'powerful people' could well be 'engaged in criminal plots' but who found it unlikely that 'the conspirators were capable of carrying out those plots competently'.” 

Some of what has been reported about Michael Hastings' death apparently is false.

But it's still pretty mysterious.

Tyler Cowen on the Nick Turse Vietnam book.

Why did the libertarian cross the road? (Via Kevin Carson.)

Jesse Walker on his new book

Tomorrow marks the publication of Jesse Walker's new book, The United States of Paranoia, which traces the history of conspiracy theories in the U.S. I was allowed to read an advance copy of the book and it's very good. It will interest (1) Folks who want to think about conspiracy theories and what they sometimes say about us; (2) Anyone interested in U.S. history who wants to read a book that isn't about the same old stuff (3) People who like  interesting nonfiction in general. Far from being a hobby of people on the fringe, conspiracy theories are at the core of the country's history and always have been, Jesse argues.

Oh, yeah, it also will interest (4) Robert Anton Wilson fans, and not just because the entire book is about conspiracy theories. As this blog concerns Robert Anton Wilson and Wilson's interests, I should point out that Jesse's book contains a chapter, "Operation Mindfuck," that will tell you much that you didn't know before about Discordianism, Kerry Thornley, RAW etc.

The Los Angeles Times reviewed Walker's book on Thursday and called it "an oddly entertaining exploration of the roots of 'paranoid' thinking across several centuries of American history.

"It's all too rare to come upon a writer willing to attack the sacred cows of the right and left with equal amounts of intelligence and flair. Walker is, thankfully, that kind of writer and a tireless and thorough researcher to boot," LA Times reviewer Hector Tobar wrote. "He also states an obvious fact many skeptics are unwilling to accept: Behind just about every conspiracy theory there is also, more often than not, a grain of truth."

Jesse Walker

I  asked Jesse for a new interview (I first spoke to him here) and asked him about his book, including what he hopes people will learn from  it and what really happened to JFK in Dallas. I'm going to cross post this to my blog at work, but the complete interview, featuring "RAW material," is what you are about to read.

Jesse has several speaking appearances set up to promote the book; you can read about them here.  In addition, Jesse will be at the Cato Institute on Sept. 11. The C-SPAN interview is here. For more events, follow Jesse's Twitter feed.

What do you hope people will learn after reading The United States of Paranoia?

WALKER: I hope they'll learn that conspiracy theories are not some new invention: that they've always been with us and that they aren't going away. I hope they'll learn that there isn't a single all-purpose political or psychological explanation for why such stories take hold. I hope they'll learn that the American establishment is prone to conspiracy thinking, no less than its critics on the left and the right are. I hope they'll learn that these stories have something to teach us even when they're entirely false—that a conspiracy theory doesn't take hold with a lot of people unless it speaks to their anxieties or experiences.

And I hope that as they read about the things our ancestors believed, they'll feel a little shock of recognition. The fears and folklore of modern times can sound a lot like the fears and folklore of earlier generations. We're not as unique as we think.

It seems to me we are living in very paranoid times, akin to what the country went through in the 1970s. Do you think the timing of your book turned out to be good, perhaps by accident?

WALKER: Many people have said this to me. But as I say in the book, "it is always a paranoid time." If this had come out last year, people would have looked around at all the election-year conspiracy chatter and told me how well-timed the book was. If it had come out the year before that, people would have pointed to the birthers or to the conspiracy theories about the death of bin Laden.

Do you hope some of your readers will become more tolerant? Much of the book seems to argue for tolerance of other peoples' conspiracy theories, or at least an effort to understand where they are coming from. 

WALKER:Well, I'm all for debunking claims that aren't true, and that includes untrue claims about conspiracies. But I do hope the debunkers will approach their task with a little humility, an awareness that they're capable of believing dubious tales too.

One chapter of your book traces the effects of 1970s paranoia on popular culture, including conspiracy movies. Do you expect a new wave of paranoid surveillance movies in reaction to the NSA scandal?

WALKER:If we do get them, I hope they're as good as the '70s movies were.

Is there anything interesting you learned about Robert Anton Wilson by speaking to his daughter, Christina Pearson, that didn't make it into the book?

WALKER:There's a lot. Actually, one of my regrets about the book is that I have so much material about Wilson -- from that interview and from other sources -- that I didn't use. I could have made that chapter three times as long, and it would have been interesting, but it would have stopped being a segment in a book about American paranoia and started being a biography of Robert Anton Wilson. And while that's a book that absolutely needs to be written someday, it isn't the book I wrote this time.

When I talked with Christina, the portrait of her dad that emerged was one of a devoted husband who was a loving but neglectful parent. Someone who in some ways was a classic absent-minded professor: capable of sharp intellectual insights but unsure what to do when a light bulb broke. Someone who spent half his life striving to establish himself as a writer, who finally had a breakthrough with Illuminatus!, and who promptly had his world fall apart again when one of his daughters was murdered and his son went mad. And someone who was, despite everything that went badly in his life, fundamentally an optimist. "He thought he was going to live forever," Christina told me. "When did he stop thinking that?" I asked. "About 48 hours before he died."

Pearson is best known for founding the Trichotillomania Learning Center and in her official biography she refers to her "chaotic and unstable" childhood. Did she relate her condition to growing up in Chicago in the days of the counterculture and government surveillance?

WALKER:This is what she told me: "At 13, I just started pulling out my hair. And people say, 'Oh, it's because you had a crazy childhood.' But I know people who don't have crazy childhoods and they do the same thing."

So, what do you think happened to JFK in Dallas?

Walker: Contrary to what you may have read in the Weekly World News, he died.