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Robert Anton Wilson "is" one who is not "is." Perhaps we may describehim as a psychedelic philosopher, a postmodern trickster, an intellectualcomedian, a twister ripping through the psyche. He first came toprominence as an editor of Playboy in the 1960s. During that time of

magick he got involved with the Discordians, a "new religion disguised asa complicated joke," or "a complicated joke disguised as a new religion."Along with Robert Shea, he co-authored the Illuminatus! trilogy of novels,a work of mind-bending (fiction?) that weaved together multiple conspiracytheories and elevated Discordianism to true cult status. A close friend of

Timothy Leary, he shared Dr. Leary's passions for radical psychology andfuturism. His book Prometheus Rising melded model agnosticism to Leary's8-circuit model of the brain to create a system that taught people how todeconstruct dogmatic personal belief systems. His numerous other booksexplored topics such as quantum mechanics, alternate universes, non-

Aristotelian logic systems, sex magick, Wilhelm Reich, J ames Joyce andOrson Welles. His model agnostic approach to inquiry makes him a uniquewriter, one of few who can slip seamlessly from rationalist scientificthinking to non-materialist metaphysical speculation.

While he has struggled with post-polio syndrome in recent years, heremains active in propagating his various passions. Lance Bauscher, CodyMcClintock and Robert Dofflemyer's 2003 film Maybe Logic explored andpresented Wilsonian concepts wrapped in subtle yet explosive color andrhythm, a fitting tribute to his ideas. This project spun off into the Maybe

Logic Academy, a learning institute that is"grounded in the philosophy and perspective of maybe logic, an approachwhich emphasizes the fallibility and relativity of perception and tends toapproach information and observations with questions, probabilities andmultiple perspectives rather than absolute truths." New FalconPublications will soon be releasing his new book Email To The Universe.

(Editor's note: This interview was conducted in two parts, in August 2004and March 2005.)

You have a new book coming out called "Tale of the Tribe." What's that allabout?

I changed the title to EMAIL TO THE UNIVERSE. It's about James Joyce,Daoism, Internet and Aleister Crowley, plus my usual craziness.

It seems a lot of your writings have really connected with people, andperhaps even influenced their thinking and activities. Because of this effect

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on your fan base, some have suggested you to be a "cult figure." To make aclever little RAW-like slide here, this seems appropriate, given your earlyparticipation in the Discordian Society and your many writings on theIlluminati (a secret cult that may or may not exist.) Surfing the web onemay find Discordian groups and references to Eris, golden apples, the Law

of the Fives, the number 23, as well as other related ideas. Memes you sentout into the world twenty, thirty years ago continue to thrive and flourish.How do you feel about this legacy of having seeded such a diversity ofeclectic memes?

It's both pleasing and flattering, of course, but I'll feel much happier whenMaybe Logic, the Snafu Law and the Cosmic Schmuck Law get seeded justas widely, or even more widely.

Let's seed them more widely right here! Can you explain to our readers

what (Maybe Logic, the Snafu Law and the Cosmic Schmuck Law) are?

Maybe Logic is a label that got stuck on my ideas by filmmaker LanceBauscher. I decided it fits. I certainly recognize the central importance inmy thinking -- or in my stumbling and fumbling efforts to think -- of non-Aristotelian systems. That includes von Neumann's three-valued logic[true, false, maybe], Rappoport's four-valued logic [true, false,indeterminate, meaningless], Korzybski's multi-valued logic [degrees ofprobability.] and also Mahayana Buddhist paradoxical logic [it "is" A. it"is" not A, it "is" both A and not A, it "is" neither A nor not A]. But, as an

extraordinarily stupid fellow, I can't use such systems until I reduce them toterms a simple mind like mine can handle, so I just preach that we'd allthink and act more sanely if we had to use "maybe" a lot more often. Canyou imagine a world with Jerry Falwell hollering "Maybe Jesus 'was' theson of God and maybe he hates Gay people as much as I do" -- or everytower in Islam resounding with "There 'is' no God except maybe Allah andmaybe Mohammed is his prophet"?

The Snafu law holds that, the greater your power to punish, the less factualfeedback you will receive. If you can fire people for telling you what youdon't want to hear, you will only hear what you want. This law seems toapply to all authoritarian contraptions, especially governments andcorporations. Concretely, I suspect Bozo knows factually less about theworld than any dogcatcher in Biloxi. The Cosmic Schmuck law holds that[1] the more often you suspect you may be thinking or acting like a CosmicSchmuck, the less of a Cosmic Schmuck you will become, year by year,and [2] if you never suspect you might think or act like a Cosmic Schmuck,you will remain a Cosmic Schmuck for life.

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Can E-prime revolutionize the English language?

I sure hope so, but it needs help, like more computers online and more pot.LOTS more pot.

What is the purpose of your Maybe Logic Academy, and who else isinvolved? Just what the heck is going on there?

I want to use Internet to accelerate human evolution by replacing faith-based decisions with research-based decisions. The others have similar orcompatible goals. Our class leaders include R.U. Sirius, cyber-philosopher;Patricia Monaghan, goddess researcher; Alan Clements, Buddhist monkand activist; Peter Caroll, mathematician and inventor of Chaos magick;Douglas Rushkoff, media maven; and others will join up soon.

You've written extensively on (and found new applications for) variousscientific theories, particularly in the field of quantum mechanics. Y etyou've maintained a critical distance from the scientific establishment, akind of heretical voice and a sceptic of scepticism. You often cite Dr.Wilhelm Reich's story as an example of authority run amok. The USgovernment destroyed much of Dr. Reich's controversial work, andnobody, particularly fellow scientists, stepped forward in protest ordefence. Science is supposed to be about innovation, yet few scientistsseem able to revise their pet theories once they've been accepted. I think

this is why many found it shocking when Stephen Hawking recentlystepped out and said, "I was wrong about black holes." Nobody is used torespected figures revising or chucking out their strongly-held beliefs. Whatis the importance of heresy, scepticism and unorthodox ideation to theadvancement of science?

Let me differentiate between scientific method and the neurology of theindividual scientist. Scientific method has always depended on feedback[or flip-flopping as the Tsarists call it]; I therefore consider it the highestform of group intelligence thus far evolved on this backward planet. Theindividual scientist seems a different animal entirely. The ones I've metseem as passionate, and hence as egotistic and prejudiced, as painters,ballerinas or even, God save the mark, novelists. My hope lies in thefeedback system itself, not in any alleged saintliness of the individuals inthe system.

You're a self-described model agnostic, and you've deconstructed allmanner of belief systems (BS) in your books. In Prometheus Rising, you

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encouraged people to consciously enter as many different reality tunnels aspossible, to examine their beliefs from multiple viewpoints. Human cultureis filled with people zealously attached to various orthodoxies andideologies. The clash of fundamental belief systems has often provendestructive to humankind. What will it take to shake people from their

dogmas?

In a word, Internet. Ever since I read Wiener's Cybernetics: Control andCommunication in the Animal and the Machine back in 1948 I've thoughtof "intelligence" as a function of feedback. The more feedback, the higherthe measurable "intelligence," and the less feedback, the less "intelligence."As the computer gave birth to the Net and the Web, feedback has increasedexponentially. As R.U. Sirius wrote recently, "The rise of the Net and theWeb represents a victory for the counterculture and the subculture. Thenext generation, raised on the Net as their primary medium, won't even

know what consensus reality is." In other words, feedback and MaybeLogic form a circle that spins faster and faster. The Tsarists fear and hate it-- they call it "flip-flopping" -- but it characterizes all high intelligencesystems, electronic or protoplasmic.

I agree that the internet seems to be a product of such an acceleratedfeedback system. This is something we can witness with every singleonline interaction. Now, there has been a lot of talk post-9.11 of anominous totalitarian spectre looming over us, that Orwell's Big Brother isfinally here. There are conspiriologists who believe that the internet, having

risen from the Pentagon, has never been anything more than a BigBrotherist plot, and that folks like RU Sirius, John Perry Barlow and otherInformation Age philosophers are dupes (un)knowingly(?) providing alibertarian faade for this vast conspiracy. What if the internet is nothingmore than the latest Tsarist method of control and information gathering?

Well, then we're sunk, ain't we? Fortunately, there exists no logical orfactual reason to believe that paranoid fantasy, and it is directlycontradicted by the hard mathematics of Wiener and Shannon on"redundance of control" in feedback systems. What Juang Jou said of theuniverse 2400 years ago is even more true of the 4,285,199,774 computerURLs online today - [21 August 2004] -"there is no governor anywhere."

Speaking of 9.11 and the Pentagon, the day after the airplane split a hole inthe side of the building, I immediately thought of yours and Robert Shea'sIlluminatus! novel. In it, the five-sided Pentagon imprisons a supernaturalbeast called Yog Sothoth. If this ghoul were to escape, humankind wouldwitness the immanentization of eschaton. This seems to be as apt a

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metaphor for the current millenarian cultural climate as I've ever seen. So,in a sense, did Yog Sothoth bust out on that day?

Let's not take metaphors too literally. I'll admit Bozo has a lot in commonwith Yog Sothoth, and that he even has the same initials as GWB666 in

Schrdinger's Cat, but I regard those as accidental hits. I don't think ofmyself as a sleeping prophet.

How close are we to immanentizing eschaton?

It got immanentized 5 years ago when the Supremes called off the electionand appointed GWB --the Great Wild Beast-- to the white house.

You wrote a compelling piece following the 2000 US presidential election,in which you pointed out one of those obvious things that most people

missed: while 50% of eligible voters split their votes between Bush andGore, the other 50% consciously chose to vote for Nobody. (I've actuallybeen arguing that, since children, prisoners, aliens and otherdisenfranchised people were unable to vote, Bush only really got a mandatefrom about 14% of the American people. So much for "half the country"supporting him, as the media played it.) You've also theorized that anefarious, neo-autocratic "Tsarist Occupation Government" (TSOG)controls the apparatus of the State. Screw the old Democrat versusRepublican debate. Tell me, how do you think both Nobody and the TSOGwill fare in the upcoming presidential election?

I assume most intelligent people will continue to vote for Nobody, and themoron majority will split their votes about evenly, depending on which ofthe two multi-millionaire Skull-and-Bones-men has the most sex appeal. Itdoesn't really seem to matter: if the people marginally prefer the "wrong"candidate, the Supreme Court will assuredly "correct" them again. The

TSOG seems a comfortable disease, like death by sleeping sickness. After7000 years of Authoritarian Patriarchy, most people accept Tsarism and, inAmerica, resent that pesky constitution imposed on them by a fewintellectual freemasons.

This statement recalls Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism. It seems thatthere is massive, widespread public mistrust and disgust in politics andgovernment, not only in the USA but in many parts of the world. Why arecitizens so loyal to systems and leaders they admittedly have no respectfor?

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Raymond Chandler, who served as a lieutenant of infantry in World War I,pointed out the same paradox on a smaller scale: in charging an enemy,troops are statistically safer if scattered broadly, but they all show atendency to bunch together near the lieutenant, thereby increasing theirrisk. This seems a hardwired [even premammalian] vertebrate program. On

top of that we've got the 7000+ years of authoritarian conditioningdocumented by Reich. Seems rather bleak, doesn't it? My optimism rests onthe fact that, historically, in emergency, people often mutate inunpredictable and creative ways. As John Adams said, the AmericanRevolution took place "in the minds of the people in the 15 years before thefirst shot was fired." I suspect a similar revolution is occurring in the mindsof educated people worldwide.

Across the post-election landscape, there has been much talk of a "dividedAmerica," with pundits drawing a hard line between "blue states" and "red

states." Is this line illusory?

I suspect all lines exist only in our minds -- especially political lines.Universe seems more like waltzing chaos than like an account book.

Are we living in Phillip K. Dick's Rome?

Well, Phil certainly lived there. I feel more like I live in Tsarist Russia.Sometimes I think of myself as the last Decembrist - and if that seemsobscure or too kooky, just set your search engine for "Decembrists +

Illuminati" and grok in their fullness the URLs that come up. Anyway, wecertainly don't live in a constitutional democracy. I feel almost99.999999999999999999999999999999% sure about that.

When I've been severely depressed, or severely stoned, I've been able toactually *feel* Dick's Rome, not just grok it as an intellectual concept. Forme this reality tunnel is filled with emotion, paranoia, delusion,synchronicity, symbology, metaphor, heightened awareness. Does it evergo beyond theory for you? Do you *feel* Tsarist Russia?

Frequently--- especially when I test my Buddhist detachment by trying tolisten to "our" leaders without growling or cussing under my breath. I feellike the Decembrists, very poignantly. But I also identify a lot the foundersof this moribund Republic. They knew the Constitution alone could notrestrain the power lusts of Certain Types and warned that we neededeternal vigilance - - but they could only give us the Constitution, not thevigilance. Alas!

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It would seem, then, that democracy is a cloak for autocracy. Has that allit's ever been? Or is history cycling backwards, have we collectivelybetrayed the Enlightenment?

First, my passion turns toward CONSTITUTIONAL democracy, not just

"democracy" in general, which I fear as much as our founders did. I wantLIMITS on government, clearly defined and virtually "graven in stone." As

John Adams wrote "My credo is that despotism or absolute power is thesame in a majority of a popular assembly, an aristocratic council, anoligarchical junta or a single emperor --equally arbitrary, bloody and inevery respect diabolical." I agree totally. Yeah, I think we have lost a lot oflight lately - and by "we" I mean both the suidaen politicos and the masses.

You've had to fight for your right to use marijuana medicinally. How didyou become an activist?

I've "activized" for various causes since 1959, because I have that sort oftemperament. I got involved actively in the medicinal marijuana cause longbefore my post-polio symptoms made medical pot necessary in my owncase. Now, stuck in a wheelchair most of the day, I feel not just activatedbut super-activated. I supported a wife and four kids most of my life. I have35 books in print. NEW SCIENTIST called my CAT trilogy "the mostscientific of all science-fiction novels." Now, at 73, I'm treated like a childby the TSOG -- and so is my doctor, a fully qualified M.D. Only the Tsarknows what's best for me, medically, and he knows without doing a

medical examination even, just by consulting some faith-basedorganizations... To quote George Carlin "stunningly, STUNNINGLY, fullof shit." If you'd like the view of research-based organizations seehttp://www.medical-marijuana-testimonials.org/

You recently founded the Guns & Dope Party to combat the excesses ofTsarism. What are some of the central tenets of your party's platform?

1. Guns for those who want them; no guns forced on those who don'twant them [Quakers, Amish, pacifists in general etc.]

2. Drugs for those who want them; no drugs forced on those who don'twant them [Christian Scientists, herbalists, homeopaths etc]

3. Bipedal unity -- equal rights for ostriches4. Voluntary taxation: you pay for government programs you want; you

don't pay a penny for any programs you don't want.

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Do you feel that Temporary Autonomous Zones or Pirate Utopias have thepotential to be free havens from the TSOG?

Temporarily. Only Internet creates the real possibility of a GlobalAutonomous Zone. I think all problems have gotten solved and will get

solved by [a] more information and [b] more rapid and ubiquitoustransmission of information

The concept of Conspiracy has loomed large in your writings for decades.What fascinates you most about the concept of conspiracy theory?

My major interest remains, as I said, in the area of non-Aristotelian logics,and around 1969 Bob Shea and I got the idea of writing a funny novelapplying Maybe Logic to the arena of conspiriology. The result,ILLUMINATUS. went so far outside consensus reality-tunnels that it took

us five years to get it published, and now, for 30 years, I keep receivingfeedback from two groups who cannot handle the concept of "maybe" atall, at all. The first group believes fervently, beyond all doubt, that Iendorsed the craziest ideas I've discussed and hence regards me as adangerous nut. The second group has an equally ardent belief that I workfor the CIA's disinformation bureau and want to make all conspiracytheories look equally crazy. I've written dozens of books on other subjects,but those two gangs continually provoke my stoned-out sense of humor, soI continually surrender to the temptation to have a little more fun withthem......

Conspiriology is really big these days. Why do you feel people are sodrawn to leftfield speculative ideas?

As an admitted Cosmic Schmuck, I don't claim to "know" the answer tothat -- or anything else -- but I do have certain persistent suspicions. Isuspect, for instance, that "the Establishment" -- i.e. the TSOG and thecorporate media -- have told so many outrageous lies that nobody reallyfully trusts them anymore. The weapons of mass destruction in Iraq stillremain hidden from human perception. After that lie collapsed, the TSOGdid not merely appear full of shit; it appeared, to quote Carlin again, thatseems STUNNINGLY full of shit. So naturally a market has grown forexplanations of what the hell really motivates Bozo and his gang. I regardmy job as applying the same scathing criticism to all models that try toimply the model-maker really knows more than me and doesn't just guess,and speculate, and grope in the dark, like I admit I do

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You are well known for your work exploring speculative theories andesoterica. In books like Sex and Drugs and the Cosmic Trigger series, youwrote of experimentation with occult magick. Reflecting upon yournumerous forays into these strange worlds where Science fears to tread,what are the most interesting "secrets" you discovered?

The same that I simultaneously discovered in Buddhism and quantumphysics: namely, the alleged "wall" between "me" and "the world" does notexist at all. Clearing thought and language of that fictitious split addsimmeasurably to clarity. Oh, yes, and it improves your sense of humor, too!

Let's wrap it up with a little humor. Can you tell me a good joke?

Three guys are drinking and arguing in a bar. "I tell you it should be spelledW-O-O-O-M," the first says dogmatically.

"And I still say W-H-O-O-M sounds right," the second counters."No, no, no," says the third. 'It's definitely W-H-O-M-B-B.""You've all got it wrong," offers a gynecologist at the next table. "It's W-O-M-B."

They stare at her coldly. "Madam," the first says, "it's obvious that you'venever heard an elephant fart."