Program Notes
Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson
[NOTE: All quotations below are by Robert Anton Wilson.]
“Most people are living in a world they can’t understand. And when people can’t understand something they tend to go for sinister explanations of it.”
“I prefer to think that, at minimum, there are about 24 conspiracies afoot… . I cannot find any proof of any conspiracy that really existed, that was brought into court and convicted, that lasted more than ten years before everybody double-crossed everybody else, and the conspiracy fell apart.”
“He [John von Newman] realized that most of our perceptions are in the ‘maybe’ mode. They’re not yes or no, they’re not true or false, they’re just ‘maybes’. I think ‘maybe logic’ is probably the greatest invention of the 20th century.”
“I regard religion and patriotism as the two major mental illnesses afflicting this planet.”
“The CIA/Tsarist/Nazi Alliance began to me to seem more and more the key to everything that’s been crazy and bizarre and incomprehensible about American foreign policy in the last fifty years. I think the central thinking of the ruling class of the United States is basically within the Tsarist paradigm.”
“Patriotism is loyalty to a gene pool.”
“I would say faith is the chief fomenter of war in the whole history of the world. Even in comparatively secular societies it becomes an article of faith that the government is justified. The other side is all wrong. We’re all right. And nobody’s supposed to think about the question at all. That becomes despicable. I believe we should think about the despicable.”
“It absolutely stops thinking entirely if you’ve got enough faith.”
” ‘Faith is believing what you know aint so’. That’s why they put lightening rods on their churches.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
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And today we’re going to hear from somebody I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And today we’re going to hear from somebody for the first time here in the salon.
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Over the past couple of years, quite a few of our fellow salonners have requested that I play something by Robert Anton Wilson,
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whose books have been read by most of us.
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And if you haven’t read any of Bob’s books, well, I don’t really know where to start with recommendations for sure you can’t go wrong with the Illuminatus Trilogy
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which he co-authored with Robert Shea
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then there’s also Prometheus Rising and Cosmic Trigger
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along with a couple of other dozens that you might find interesting
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and fun to read
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it was the late comedian George Carlin who once said
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I have learned more from Bob than from any other source It was the late comedian George Carlin who once said,
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I have learned more from Bob than from any other source.
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He continues to produce intelligent, cranky, inspired thought.
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Although I never had the pleasure of meeting Bob myself,
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I have several friends who knew him quite well,
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and I’ve never heard a single bad word about him.
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A couple of weeks ago, I played a talk that Timothy Leary gave when Bob was in the audience,
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and they exchanged a few words during the presentation.
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And that caused me to remember that about a year ago, my friend and fellow salonner, E-Rock X1,
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sent me some recordings of talks that Bob gave, and he sent them in case I ever wanted to podcast them.
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Well, needless to say, it’s taken me quite a while to get to them, but even us procrastinators
00:01:51 ►
get a few things done if we live long enough.
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And so today we’ll be hearing a couple of short interviews that Robert Anton Wilson
00:01:59 ►
gave about a, well, the first one was maybe a decade ago, and the other one was not all
00:02:04 ►
that long ago.
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The first piece I’m going to play is an interview he gave about his book,
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Everything is Under Control, Conspiracies, Cults, and Cover-Ups,
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which was first published in 1998, I think.
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And since conspiracy theories are so popular these days,
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I thought that you might enjoy hearing what one of the great conspiracy theory novelists has to say about them. Conspiracy Theories Robert Anton Wilson. Bob, thanks very much for being here tonight.
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Oh, it’s a pleasure.
00:03:07 ►
Good.
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Now, your latest book is entitled Everything is Under Control.
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It’s a conspiracy encyclopedia, is that correct?
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It’s not exactly an encyclopedia.
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It’s more a crestomathy.
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If we did an encyclopedia of all the conspiracy theories around in this country today,
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it would be at least as long as the Britannica, 22 volumes minimum.
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This is a Christomathy.
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It’s some of the wilder and weirder.
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It does cover a lot, though, I must say, as much as one book can.
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How did you choose from among the millions of conspiracy theories
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that are current these days?
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How did you choose which ones to include in the encyclopedia?
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Well, there were a couple of criteria.
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I wanted to put in the weirdestcyclopedia well a couple of criteria i want to put in the weirdest craziest
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goofiest ones and i also want to put in the most plausible ones so that the reader would
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be constantly alternating between laughing out loud at this nonsense and wondering hey some of
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this might be true which is the ideal state for a reader to be in i think never knowing whether it’s truth or fiction factor or factor reality
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well again conspiracy is is an extremely hot topic these days conspiracy theories abound
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the x files is extremely popular on television uh but i know that you’ve been following conspiracy
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theories for most of your career uh including as far back as 25 years ago with the Illuminatus
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trilogy that you co-authored with Bob Shea.
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What got you involved in the interest in conspiracy theories in the first place?
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Well, actually, that gets into the new book, too, how it all started.
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It started with a fellow I used to know named Kerry Thornley, who was one of the co-creators of the only religion
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I’ve ever been able to really enjoy, the Discordian religion, which is based on worship of Ares,
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the goddess of chaos, confusion, discord, bureaucracy, and international relations,
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the five levels of chaos in the world.
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The argument for the existence of Harris is very simple.
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If Harris doesn’t exist, who put all this chaos here? Nobody can answer. Anyway, Kerry
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got indicted by Jim Garrison as one of the Kennedy assassination team. And Kerry thought
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at the time, and all of us who knew him thought that Garrison was just off his head or an
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unscrupulous demagogue.
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And then, to our great astonishment, a couple of years later,
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Kerry announced that he thought it was true, that while he was in the Marines,
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he thinks he remembers that he volunteered for an experiment,
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and he thinks they gave him drugs and brainwashed him
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and turned him into a zombie like the Manchurian candidate.
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So he was part of the Kennedy assassination, but he didn’t know it.
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I mean, he has some memories come back now and then…
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Was he one of the fake Oswalds that were…
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That was one of the theories Garrison promoted.
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Kerry met a guy in a bar in New Orleans who he thinks was E. Howard Hunt, who told him
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he was writing a book called Hitler Was a Good Guy.
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He doesn’t remember anything else of that conversation.
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He met David Ferry once, another of the leading suspects.
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He doesn’t remember that conversation.
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He was living two blocks from Oswald, whom he knew in the Marines,
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and he never met him all those months.
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They were living two blocks apart.
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So Kerry thinks his memory has been tampered with.
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And at one point he thought I was his CIA babysitter then you really involve the conspiracy theory
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when you’ve got a friend who’s accused of being an assassin
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and he’s accusing you of being the CIA mastermind
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so you can’t ignore the subject after that
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that’s how I came to write Illuminatus
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and after that I can never completely although I’ve written on dozens of other subjects
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And I hate to be identified with conspiracy theory because I have so many other things
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I think are more important that I’ve written about but I can’t leave it alone entirely because every week in the mail I get
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Tons of stuff by people who’ve read Illuminatus and want me to be informed about the latest conspiracy that they’ve just discovered.
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So I can’t get out of the conspiracy field entirely.
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What is it about the human psyche that seems to be drawn towards these conspiracy theories?
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Is this some love of the unknown or some idea that there may be forces out there that are
00:07:18 ►
controlling our destiny?
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Well, I think there are three factors.
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A, nobody likes to take the blame for their own problems, so they look for somebody else to blame.
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And if you can find a big enough group, you’ve explained everything in your life that doesn’t work.
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That’s the parental conspiracy theory.
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It’s not your fault.
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It’s the fault of your parents.
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It’s the Jesuits, the Freemasons, the Jews, the Bilderbergers, the Council on Foreign Relations.
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You’ve got a lot of white choice to pick who to blame.
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Rich white men.
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Yeah, as long as you don’t have to blame yourself.
00:07:55 ►
That’s one motive.
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And another motive is that we are living in very weird times.
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The world is changing faster and faster, i think is due to the uh acceleration
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of information flow in the modern information is increasing and the transmission of information is
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going faster and faster due to internet and the whole computer revolution which means that most
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people living in a world they can’t understand and when people can’t understand something they
00:08:23 ►
tend to go for sinister explanations
00:08:25 ►
of it.
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Somebody is manipulating things in a way I don’t like.
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That’s the way people feel when things change too fast and they can’t understand it.
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And the third reason is, of course, that there are lots of conspiracies around.
00:08:37 ►
You’re supposed to be a nut if you think about conspiracies, unless you’re a district attorney.
00:08:41 ►
Then you can bring in 20 people into the court and charge them under the RICO law with conspiracy, even if they never met one another.
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And, I mean, the government does recognize conspiracies.
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Every government does.
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There are laws against conspiracy.
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And conspiracies do exist.
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The question is, do any really big ones exist, such as the ones imagined in the more extravagant
00:09:03 ►
conspiracy theories.
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Now, it’s interesting that you should bring up that this may be a modern phenomenon because if you go back through history, as you do in the encyclopedia,
00:09:13 ►
there have always been conspiracy theories.
00:09:17 ►
Was it Ishmael Reed, the novelist, who said the history of the world
00:09:21 ►
is the history of the war between secret societies?
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Yes, I like that quote quite a bit because there’s a certain element of truth in it but it’s just bizarre
00:09:29 ►
enough to make people sit up and say what you know uh actually there’s this parallel between
00:09:35 ►
the present condition and the condition around the year 1000. or the other millennium madness yeah
00:09:42 ►
most people think the christian calendar is the true calendar.
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I spent a whole year dating all my letters with 11 different dates,
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just to remind all my correspondents that there’s more than one calendar.
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The millennium is like 600 years away in the Discordian calendar,
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and it’s about 900 years away in the Mayan calendar.
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And they’ve already had seven millennium changes in the Chinese calendar.
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Yes, and most people are thinking in terms of the generally accepted calendar,
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which happens to be a Christian calendar,
00:10:16 ►
which is kind of odd since this is not a Christian country.
00:10:20 ►
Well, let’s go into that.
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You’ve mentioned this before, and I’m fascinated by your theory.
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It makes more sense than any other political theory I’ve heard ever.
00:10:31 ►
Let’s go into this a little. What do you mean, sir, that this is not a Christian country?
00:10:35 ►
Well, for instance, the Constitution never mentions God or Jesus or the Christian religion.
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It grants absolute freedom for anybody to pick whatever religion they want.
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It mentions nature and nature’s God.
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That’s in the Declaration of Independence.
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Oh, okay, all right.
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And nature’s God was a term used by the philosophers of the 18th century
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to signify an abstract deity who created the world,
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but has nothing in common with the Christian God, the Jewish God, the Muslim God,
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the Hindu gods,
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or any other religious figure.
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This was a philosophical concept that Jefferson invoked,
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not a deity that people tried to bribe, get favors from.
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The deists, who were the dominant party behind our Constitution,
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the deists believed there was a God, but God did not do favors and could not be bribed,
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which knocks
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the bottom out of all organized religion, because all organized religion consists of
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techniques of how to bribe, cajole, or otherwise get favors out of the deity.
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Sounds like Jim Morrison’s line, you cannot petition the Lord with a prayer.
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Well, that’s exactly what all the founding fathers thought I forgot what
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I was going to add thoughts to ask another question off sorry I should I
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shouldn’t have interrupted you this is not a Christian country and I know you
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had more oh George Washington for instance never used the word God in any
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of his public speeches or any of his private writings he did use the word
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Providence which is a concept that deists share with the Orthodox. But when Washington used the word providence, he had to use a
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pronoun afterwards. He always varied between he, she, and it, just to show that
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he didn’t believe in any anthropomorphic. The idea of a God with a penis has
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always seemed hilarious to me. And now that the feminists are trying to give me,
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offering us a God with a vagina, that seems equally ridiculous. I’m more inclined to the yet school of thought. Any cosmic mind
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has got to be an it. I can’t imagine it being a sexual creature. But if God is sexual, what
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kind of sex life does God have?
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Pretty barren, I would imagine, if there’s no goddess around to take care of him. Now,
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let’s backtrack for just a second.
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If this is not a Christian country, we can kind of indicate that the founders of the country were all Masons.
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So this is more of a Masonic country.
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Most of them were Masons.
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Yeah, well, the Constitution has a lot in common with the rules of a Masonic lodge, actually.
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Doesn’t that get right back to the conspiracy theory of a secret society?
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A lot of right-wingers think we have been run by a Masonic conspiracy.
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One of the theories I trace through this whole book has many variations.
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The theory that the French Revolution was a Masonic conspiracy.
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There are various Masonic lodges that are blamed by different conspiracy theorists.
00:13:23 ►
Some think it’s Masonry in general. Some think it’s masonry in general.
00:13:25 ►
Some think it’s just the Grand Orient Lodge of Egyptian Freemasonry. Some want to blame
00:13:30 ►
the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland. It depends on where you’re looking, what part of the
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political spectrum you’re looking from, which masons you’re most afraid of. I’ve got a lot
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of friends who are masons, so I’m not afraid of any of them.
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Well, you don’t seem to be afraid of much of anything.
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For a person who’s an expert in conspiracies, you’re probably the least paranoid person I’ve ever met.
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You have all the data but none of the fear that most everybody else who’s involved in conspiracy theories…
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Well, my belief is I don’t believe in one big conspiracy that runs everything.
00:14:03 ►
That seems absurd to me, and there’s so much evidence against it.
00:14:08 ►
I have more sympathy for theories like Carl Oglesby’s Yankee and Cowboy War,
00:14:14 ►
where the ruling class is split and at war with itself,
00:14:18 ►
or the A.L. Bionic theory, where the British royal family and the Vatican
00:14:22 ►
have been fighting for 300 years,
00:14:23 ►
and everything else is the result of the two major conspiracies of the British royal family and the Vatican have been fighting for 300 years, and everything else is the result of the two major conspiracies of the British royal family and the Vatican.
00:14:30 ►
But even that seems oversimplified.
00:14:32 ►
I prefer to think there’s, at minimum, at any given time, there’s about 24 conspiracies afoot.
00:14:37 ►
Carl Oglesby, the historian, once said,
00:14:40 ►
a multitude of conspiracies contend in the night.
00:14:43 ►
And as far as I have been able to discover
00:14:45 ►
in all my years of being involved
00:14:46 ►
more or less unwillingly in this field,
00:14:50 ►
I cannot find any proof of any conspiracy
00:14:53 ►
that really existed,
00:14:55 ►
was really brought into court and convicted
00:14:56 ►
that lasted more than ten years
00:14:58 ►
before everybody double-crossed everybody else
00:15:00 ►
and the conspiracy fell apart.
00:15:02 ►
It’s more of a conspiracy of stupidity, it seems like, is running
00:15:06 ►
the planet. I think that is
00:15:08 ►
the strongest conspiracy on the planet,
00:15:10 ►
the conspiracy of the stupid, to
00:15:12 ►
prevent schools from educating their children
00:15:14 ►
because they want their children to be as dumb as they
00:15:16 ►
are, to prevent television from putting anything
00:15:18 ►
intelligent on as much as possible.
00:15:21 ►
Well, with the exception of this
00:15:22 ►
half hour, of course. Well, of course.
00:15:24 ►
The present company exploded. Well well you’re half right but now are there are there uh
00:15:32 ►
since you’ve done massive research on the numerous conspiracy theories are there
00:15:38 ►
certain hallmarks of a good conspiracy are there certain things that they the best conspiracies have in common like shadowy historical roots or a conspiracy to control one
00:15:52 ►
particular aspect of life what I have noticed I thought to pick a favor it
00:15:57 ►
depends on whether it would whether I whether you want the craziest one of the
00:16:01 ►
most plausible if they have anything in common. Well, yeah, when you get into the more science fiction type conspiracy theories,
00:16:10 ►
there are more X-Files type theories around than they’ve done on X-Files itself.
00:16:17 ►
There are so many conspiracy theories about various aliens meddling with us.
00:16:28 ►
theories about various aliens meddling with us. This goes back to Charles Fort in the 1920s.
00:16:33 ►
He wrote a couple of books on that theme. There’s all sorts of ideas about who it is, whether they come from Sirius, whether they’re reticuli, whether they’re greys or some other types.
00:16:39 ►
Or all of the above. And when you get into that literature enough, you find out that it’s the most science fiction and futuristic theories
00:16:47 ►
are curiously the most medieval.
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What it comes down to is a battle between good and evil
00:16:52 ►
on a cosmological level with the earth.
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There’s just one part of the major.
00:16:57 ►
It goes back before Christianity to Zarathustra,
00:17:01 ►
who had the Ahriman and Mazda,
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these two gods who are in perpetual war with
00:17:05 ►
each other.
00:17:07 ►
And in Christianity, they made the good one God and the bad one the devil.
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But in Zarathustrianism, you’re never quite sure who’s the good one or the bad one.
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You got to make a choice, but you don’t know who you’re choosing correctly.
00:17:21 ►
You don’t know who’s going to win, which I find more interesting.
00:17:24 ►
It is. It is. choosing correctly you know who’s going to win which i find more interesting it is it is it’s
00:17:26 ►
more existentialist if you recognize your own uncertainty well is there a possibility then that
00:17:31 ►
some of these science fictional conspiracies the philip k dick type conspiracies the x-file type
00:17:36 ►
conspiracies that are floating around now are uh an upcoming mythology somehow more related to
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uh the the ex the emergence of a new mythology in the
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human mind than they are to actual physical events that are taking place on
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earth with physical aliens and physical UFOs well they’re definitely mythology
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in the Jungian sense I don’t mean to say that they’re all false I don’t know
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enough to say anything is all false some of them are so absurd that I can reject them,
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but some of them are more plausible than others.
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But they make a mythology in the sense that they give you a cosmic theory
00:18:12 ►
that explains everything and gives you a place in the universe and so on.
00:18:17 ►
Carl Jung spotted that way back in the 40s.
00:18:20 ►
He wrote, 52 I think it was, not the 40s.
00:18:23 ►
He wrote a book called Flying Saucers,
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a modern myth of things seen in the skies,
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in which he predicted this would be the major religion
00:18:30 ►
of the second half of the 20th century.
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And we’re more and more moving toward that.
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More and more the extraterrestrials are replacing angels and demons.
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There are good extraterrestrials and bad extraterrestrials.
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And let me tell you, we’ve got the incubi and succubi back, too.
00:18:45 ►
In the Middle Ages, they had these sex demons
00:18:47 ►
that attacked people in their sleep.
00:18:49 ►
Now they’re extraterrestrials instead of being demons,
00:18:51 ►
but they’re still attacking people in their sleep.
00:18:53 ►
Still absconding with them, mating with them,
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probing them, and doing…
00:18:58 ►
Yeah, there’s some place in a galaxy far, far away,
00:19:01 ►
according to this school of thought,
00:19:03 ►
where whenever they’re really high on some really vicious kind of chemical,
00:19:08 ►
they suddenly all say, let’s go down to Earth and have a go at somebody.
00:19:11 ►
Somebody’s butt again.
00:19:12 ►
Take on Whitley Strieber again.
00:19:14 ►
It was fun.
00:19:17 ►
Didn’t Jacques Vallée, the French writer,
00:19:22 ►
do a whole book about the correspondences
00:19:25 ►
between the hallmarks of UFO sightings and sightings of the Holy Virgin Mary?
00:19:33 ►
Yes, there’s a whole bunch of parallels.
00:19:36 ►
Fatima, the miracles at Fatima, which included light brighter than the sun,
00:19:42 ►
which plunged toward the earth, and strange sounds in the sky, music and
00:19:47 ►
music coming from the heavens and whatnot. It would be a UFO sighting if the kids didn’t say they saw
00:19:53 ►
the Virgin Mary. So maybe UFOs are just the modern minds way of attaching some kind of explanation to some experiences beyond explanation.
00:20:05 ►
Yeah, I personally believe very strongly in UFOs
00:20:10 ►
because, well, I see three or four of them every week.
00:20:14 ►
It’s like a therapy that you don’t know the name of.
00:20:16 ►
Yeah, I told that to a friend of mine.
00:20:18 ►
He really looked like, oh, my God, you really have gone crazy at last.
00:20:22 ►
But what I mean is the sky is full of things that I can’t identify.
00:20:25 ►
I don’t know what they are.
00:20:27 ►
But not only that, but there are unfoes, too, unidentified and unflying objects.
00:20:33 ►
I see them all the time.
00:20:35 ►
In the garden.
00:20:36 ►
That could be because I had a lot of training in general semantics,
00:20:38 ►
and I’m not quick to identify things.
00:20:43 ►
All my identifications are tentative.
00:20:46 ►
This sounds like
00:20:47 ►
George C. Scott and Dr. Strangelove.
00:20:49 ►
Just like going to all factor-ins, sir.
00:20:52 ►
Well, do you have a…
00:20:53 ►
Is there one or more conspiracies
00:20:55 ►
that really appeal to you
00:20:58 ►
that tickle you beyond all fancy
00:21:00 ►
that
00:21:01 ►
either are so absurd
00:21:04 ►
that they just make you laugh out loud
00:21:06 ►
or so realistic that they might actually have a chance to be true?
00:21:11 ►
Well, there are quite a few that amuse me.
00:21:14 ►
What comes to mind right off the top of my head is
00:21:17 ►
Lyndon LaRouche has come up with some of the most wonderful conspiracy theories of all.
00:21:22 ►
But my favorite, I think, is the little pamphlet he wrote about Henry Kissinger called Kissinger the politics of faggotry which
00:21:29 ►
shows just how far out LaRouche is he prefers the word faggot to gay because
00:21:35 ►
he knows it’s more insulting somebody who writes like that you know he’s not
00:21:38 ►
trying to convince everybody he just wants to have a small cult of true
00:21:42 ►
believers we said that’s what his style sounds like to me.
00:21:47 ►
This is his wife slugged one of LaRouche’s
00:21:50 ►
disciples for tracking them through an airport, yelling at her, your husband,
00:21:53 ►
your husband goes for little boys, you know, your husband goes for little boys.
00:21:57 ►
Because
00:21:58 ►
she decked him.
00:22:01 ►
Well, the conspiracy of everything is under control.
00:22:04 ►
The conspiracy of the encyclopedia, the conspiracy of, pardon me, the
00:22:06 ►
encyclopedia of conspiracy theories is due out in bookstores in July?
00:22:10 ►
That’s right.
00:22:11 ►
That’s correct.
00:22:12 ►
And what are you working on now?
00:22:13 ►
I know most of your fans are clamoring for more fiction.
00:22:16 ►
Well, I’m working on a rewrite of the New Inquisition, and I’m also working on a rewrite
00:22:22 ►
of what used to be Playboy’s Book of Forbidden Words,
00:22:25 ►
which Playboy doesn’t have the rights to anymore.
00:22:28 ►
It’s going to be published by Ho House here in San Jose.
00:22:32 ►
I’m familiar with them.
00:22:33 ►
You’re familiar with Ho House?
00:22:34 ►
Yeah, it’s named after Uncle Ho.
00:22:36 ►
Yeah, the Chinese god of laughter.
00:22:38 ►
That’s right.
00:22:39 ►
Or Ho Chi Minh.
00:22:40 ►
Well, one of them.
00:22:42 ►
Some wise oriental sage.
00:22:48 ►
Just because it sounds like an old joke about new orleans just because yeah it takes a whole different meaning in new orleans the old joke
00:22:52 ►
about new orleans is anybody gets any man who gets off the train there has one thought in mind
00:22:57 ►
do i check into the hotel first or do i go to the whole house right away but uh my one of the ones that really fascinates me is the Howard hunt
00:23:08 ►
Richard Nixon flight 553 Bay of Pigs mystery oh that’s right I was supposed
00:23:13 ►
to mention that and I forgot so please do go on well in the Watergate tapes
00:23:19 ►
Nixon tells Dean hunt wants a million dollars and Dean tells
00:23:26 ►
Nixon that Hunt wants a million dollars
00:23:28 ►
and Nixon says well I can get a million dollars
00:23:30 ►
oh I know this quote
00:23:31 ►
I can do it, we could get a million dollars
00:23:33 ►
we could do it, we could do it
00:23:35 ►
it wouldn’t be easy, but we could do it
00:23:38 ►
and then he goes on and says
00:23:40 ►
Hunt might spill the whole bay of pigs thing
00:23:42 ►
and then later he said
00:23:44 ►
that to Haldeman in another tape he said Hunt is threatening to spill the whole Bay of Pigs thing. And then later he said that to Haldeman in another tape.
00:23:45 ►
He said, Hunt is threatening to spill the whole Bay of Pigs thing.
00:23:49 ►
Now, I wrote a book many years ago in which I asked the question,
00:23:52 ►
what Bay of Pigs thing hadn’t come out by 1974
00:23:55 ►
that Nixon was willing to pay a million dollars to cover up?
00:23:59 ►
Well, it seems that Ehrlichman in his book about the Watergate scandals
00:24:04 ►
and A.J.
00:24:06 ►
Webberman, who has the biggest and best JFK assassination site on the web, it’s a hard
00:24:12 ►
one to read.
00:24:13 ►
You’ve got to scroll down each page before you can get to the next.
00:24:15 ►
Very old-fashioned, but it’s got more data in it than any other.
00:24:19 ►
Webberman has done a lot of research on that, too, and it seems that Nixon had a code he
00:24:23 ►
used for certain subjects, and the whole Bay of Pigs thing was his code for the Kennedy assassination.
00:24:31 ►
And if that’s true, if Ehrlichman is telling the truth and Webberman has got the backup
00:24:36 ►
evidence correct, then Hunt was threatening to reveal something about the Kennedy assassination
00:24:42 ►
that Nixon was willing to pay a million dollars to cover up.
00:24:45 ►
This is the kind of theory that I find remotely plausible
00:24:47 ►
and not totally crazy
00:24:48 ►
because Nixon did start paying the money to Hunt
00:24:52 ►
and Hunt’s wife was carrying some of it
00:24:54 ►
when she was on a plane that crashed
00:24:55 ►
under very mysterious circumstances, Flight 553.
00:24:59 ►
And because these are people who wouldn’t involve themselves
00:25:02 ►
in flights of fancy,
00:25:03 ►
this is something concrete that they’re talking about, too.
00:25:06 ►
Well, Nixon’s willing to pay a million dollars to cover it up.
00:25:08 ►
It means something.
00:25:09 ►
Yes.
00:25:09 ►
And Flight 553, the pilot who eerily enough was named Captain Whitehouse,
00:25:16 ►
he had a lot of cyanide in his bloodstream,
00:25:20 ►
which is the explanation, the official explanations of that are it was gas released when the plane crashed,
00:25:27 ►
but the critics claim that you couldn’t get that much cyanide from that,
00:25:32 ►
it would have to be put into him and his drink or something like that.
00:25:36 ►
But the Spotlight magazine printed the photographs of the three tramps with Howard Hunt in an attempt to the photographs of the three tramps with
00:25:45 ►
howard hunt and attempt to show one of the three tramps on the grassy nose
00:25:48 ►
behind the fence on the grassy nose and he sued them for libel
00:25:52 ►
and he lost
00:25:54 ►
the jury not only found spotlight innocent but uh… one of the
00:25:58 ►
former jury told the press afterwards that the defense council uh…
00:26:02 ►
mark lane
00:26:04 ►
by the way she said said, Mr. Lane wanted
00:26:05 ►
us to believe the government shot the president.
00:26:08 ►
As we examined all the evidence, we came to the conclusion the government did shoot the
00:26:12 ►
president.
00:26:12 ►
Was there anybody looking into these things besides yourself?
00:26:16 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:26:16 ►
There’s the Assassination Investigation Committee in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
00:26:20 ►
They are very well informed about all this.
00:26:24 ►
They got a list of over 100 people connected with the Kennedy assassination who also died
00:26:28 ►
under very mysterious circumstances, like Albert Guy Bogard.
00:26:35 ►
Albert Guy Bogard was an automobile salesman who said Harvey Oswald came in, took a car
00:26:41 ►
for a test drive, went 70 miles an hour on the freeway and gave him a lot of anti pro-soviet pro-soviet propaganda and
00:26:49 ►
said he was coming into a lot of money now Oswald did not drive maybe it was
00:26:54 ►
Kerry Thornley maybe it was Kerry it was well he’s called the second Oswald
00:27:00 ►
the guy in that story who appears several times around Dallas in mysterious
00:27:04 ►
context but Albert Guy Bogart after telling that story, who appears several times around Dallas in mysterious context.
00:27:05 ►
But Albert Guy Bogart, after telling that story, he was found dead in a cemetery, shot
00:27:09 ►
through the head, pronounced suicide.
00:27:12 ►
There’s so many people who committed suicide.
00:27:14 ►
Under mysterious non-suicidal circumstances.
00:27:17 ►
George DeMorenchild, who was a friend of Oswald’s, even though he was a CIA operative and very
00:27:22 ►
anti-Soviet, when he was subpoenaed by the House Select Committee on Assassinations,
00:27:26 ►
he was found dead and pronounced a suicide,
00:27:29 ►
although his wife refused to accept that.
00:27:32 ►
Sam Giancana, who’s suspected by a lot of people,
00:27:35 ►
think the mafia were involved.
00:27:36 ►
As soon as he got a subpoena from the House Select Committee on Assassinations,
00:27:41 ►
he was shot through the mouth.
00:27:43 ►
The mafia calls that sasso and bocca.
00:27:46 ►
That’s punishment for suspected informers.
00:27:48 ►
Johnny Roselli, when he got his subpoena, he disappeared and showed up floating in a
00:27:52 ►
barrel in the Gulf of Mexico.
00:27:54 ►
I could go on and on.
00:27:56 ►
Cambridge, like I said, this group in Cambridge has over a hundred cases like that.
00:27:59 ►
It does make you wonder.
00:28:01 ►
Yeah, but unfortunately we’re almost out of time, so we can’t go through all hundred of
00:28:04 ►
them, but… I don’t know
00:28:05 ►
all the hundred.
00:28:10 ►
So there you go.
00:28:11 ►
If you want to spend the rest of your life
00:28:14 ►
chasing down leads in the
00:28:15 ►
never-ending story of the Kennedy assassination,
00:28:18 ►
you can begin by
00:28:20 ►
tracking down the mysterious deaths
00:28:22 ►
of the hundred or so people who
00:28:23 ►
may have somehow been involved in that murder,
00:28:26 ►
but who met a similar fate not long after.
00:28:30 ►
For my part, however, I’ve decided to move on, since basically we’re never going to know the whole story.
00:28:37 ►
The only thing I know for sure is that the official story that includes a magic bullet that changed its direction several times
00:28:43 ►
seems to be seriously lacking to me.
00:28:46 ►
But you’re going to have to decide that on your own
00:28:48 ►
because I think there are more productive things to spend time on here in the salon.
00:28:53 ►
The second interview I want to play for you right now
00:28:56 ►
is one that Bob gave at a time when he must have been on a book tour
00:28:59 ►
promoting his book, T-SOG, The Thing That Ate the Constitution.
00:29:05 ►
This was one of the last books he wrote and was published late in 2002.
00:29:11 ►
TSOG, by the way, stands for Tsarist Occupational Government,
00:29:15 ►
which is how he viewed the people who have taken over the reins of power in Washington, D.C.
00:29:21 ►
And I don’t think he was too far off the mark there.
00:29:24 ►
In fact, he hit the nail on the head from my point of view.
00:29:29 ►
So let’s begin with Robert Anton Wilson talking about maybe logic, or maybe logic, or maybe
00:29:37 ►
logic, depending on how you view it and want to say it.
00:29:42 ►
depending on how you view it and want to say it.
00:29:53 ►
Maybe Logic was invented by John von Neumann in 1933.
00:29:58 ►
Von Neumann is the unappreciated genius of modern science.
00:30:00 ►
Scientists appreciate him,
00:30:03 ►
but the general public I don’t think has ever heard of him.
00:30:06 ►
He wrote one of the best books on quantum mechanics.
00:30:08 ►
He was one of the pioneers of programmable
00:30:09 ►
computers. We wouldn’t have internet without
00:30:11 ►
him. Anyway, maybe logic
00:30:14 ►
is one of his major inventions.
00:30:17 ►
Instead of dividing
00:30:18 ►
everything into true and false, like
00:30:19 ►
Aristotle, which
00:30:22 ►
only applies in the abstract. Aristotelian
00:30:24 ►
logic only applies if you ignore the sensory, sensual, space-time continuum in which we live.
00:30:30 ►
If you take into context we live in a real universe, which we’re touching things, bumping into things,
00:30:37 ►
kissing things, loving things, hating things, throwing rocks at things, and so on,
00:30:42 ►
you realize that most of our perceptions are in the maybe mode.
00:30:45 ►
They’re not yes or no.
00:30:47 ►
They’re not true or false.
00:30:48 ►
They’re just maybes.
00:30:49 ►
I think maybe logic is probably the greatest invention of the 20th century,
00:30:57 ►
although, of course, von Neumann had a lot of competition.
00:30:59 ►
Kaczynski offered an infinite value of logic
00:31:02 ►
in which between yes and no, you’ve got an infinite series of maybes.
00:31:07 ►
Anatole Rappaport invented a four-valued logic,
00:31:11 ►
true, false, indeterminate, and meaningless.
00:31:14 ►
Indeterminate is something which in principle
00:31:16 ►
we might be able to test someday,
00:31:18 ►
but right now we can’t.
00:31:20 ►
We don’t have the technology to test it.
00:31:22 ►
Like how much life is there in the universe?
00:31:24 ►
We just don’t know.
00:31:25 ►
That’s indeterminate.
00:31:27 ►
Meaningless are propositions that can never be tested
00:31:30 ►
because they’re defined so they can’t be tested.
00:31:33 ►
Such as round squares eat red cabbage.
00:31:36 ►
First you’ve got to find a round square
00:31:38 ►
before you can even begin to observe its eating habits.
00:31:41 ►
And since you can’t find a round square,
00:31:43 ►
there’s no way of ever testing that.
00:31:45 ►
Another one is the Catholic doctrine
00:31:47 ►
that after a priest pronounces the right formula
00:31:49 ►
over a piece of bread,
00:31:51 ►
it becomes the body of a Jew who died 2,000 years ago.
00:31:54 ►
It’s cannibalism.
00:31:55 ►
It’s good for you.
00:31:56 ►
You should eat the body of the dead Jew
00:31:58 ►
and it’ll make you feel good.
00:32:00 ►
I don’t know.
00:32:00 ►
Catholics are not particularly fond of Jews.
00:32:02 ►
I don’t know why they like that one so much,
00:32:04 ►
but they like eating him anyway.
00:32:06 ►
Everybody else thinks they’re just eating bread.
00:32:08 ►
They think they’re eating a human being.
00:32:10 ►
They think they’re Hannibal Lecter.
00:32:11 ►
We think they’re nuts.
00:32:12 ►
I don’t know.
00:32:13 ►
But that’s an example of a meaningless statement.
00:32:16 ►
It can’t be proven or disproven.
00:32:17 ►
If they want to think they’re cannibals, let them think that we can’t disprove.
00:32:21 ►
We’re not going to bother arguing about it.
00:32:22 ►
It’s meaningless, like the round squares.
00:32:20 ►
You can’t disprove.
00:32:22 ►
We’re not going to bother arguing about it.
00:32:24 ►
It’s meaningless, like the round squares.
00:32:30 ►
Now the Vice President, Richard Cheney, has given us another three-valued logic,
00:32:32 ►
true, false, and despicable.
00:32:35 ►
The true statements are the ones the government makes.
00:32:39 ►
The false statements are the ones the enemies abroad make.
00:32:42 ►
And the despicable statements are the ones that we’re not supposed to think about at all.
00:32:48 ►
I’m not sure he thinks he can stop us from thinking about it,
00:32:50 ►
but he wants to stop us from talking about it anyway.
00:32:54 ►
I heard him on CNN a week or so ago.
00:32:58 ►
He was asked about criticisms of the Bush administration.
00:33:00 ►
He described them as despicable.
00:33:02 ►
Yes is what you can prove.
00:33:03 ►
No is what you can disprove.
00:33:05 ►
Despicable is what you can’t even test.
00:33:06 ►
You’re not allowed to test it.
00:33:10 ►
It’s the modern equivalent of the Catholic term heretical.
00:33:14 ►
You’re not supposed to think about it.
00:33:18 ►
I’m proud to say this book consists almost 100% of despicable statements.
00:33:21 ►
Nobody is supposed to be thinking about these things.
00:33:26 ►
I don’t believe there should be anything we’re not allowed to think about.
00:33:31 ►
Your new book, Sog,
00:33:32 ►
seems your most political work to date.
00:33:35 ►
Why did you wait until now to write such a book?
00:33:38 ►
Well, I think there’s an undertone of satire
00:33:42 ►
on religion and patriotism
00:33:44 ►
in everything I’ve written.ire on religion and patriotism in everything I’ve written.
00:33:45 ►
I regard religion and patriotism as the two major mental illnesses afflicting this planet.
00:33:52 ►
And there’s an undertone.
00:33:53 ►
It’s a theme in all of my books.
00:33:55 ►
But I guess it got more focused during the Clinton years
00:33:59 ►
because I made the mistake of voting, which I usually never do,
00:34:06 ►
but somehow Clinton inspired a faith in me.
00:34:09 ►
He pressed the right buttons.
00:34:11 ►
He used the right words.
00:34:12 ►
He used a lot of terminology from cybernetics and social science.
00:34:16 ►
He showed he was educated.
00:34:18 ►
I thought, gee, this guy is smart enough.
00:34:19 ►
He might actually do some good.
00:34:21 ►
And then he turned out to be as bad as any of the others and worse than most of them.
00:34:21 ►
might actually do some good.
00:34:24 ►
Then he turned out to be as bad as any of the others and worse than most of them.
00:34:30 ►
And then it’s followed by the crookedest election in American history,
00:34:32 ►
the crookedest presidential election.
00:34:35 ►
Anyway, we’ve had crooked elections all over the country repeatedly.
00:34:38 ►
This is the crookedest presidential election ever. And then we get this unexpected, unprovoked attack,
00:34:44 ►
which was warned of by the French, the Philippines, FBI agents,
00:34:48 ►
and about three officers.
00:34:50 ►
Everybody knew about it except Dubya, it seems.
00:34:52 ►
Dubya was the only one who was out.
00:34:54 ►
He didn’t know what was going to happen.
00:34:56 ►
But curiously, he was out of the White House
00:34:58 ►
while the plane was headed towards the White House.
00:35:00 ►
Isn’t that an odd coincidence?
00:35:02 ►
My God, what wonderful luck he has.
00:35:04 ►
Maybe he did read those reports after all.
00:35:07 ►
Maybe he can read. Who knows?
00:35:10 ►
I think the combination of the crooked election and the new Pearl Harbor,
00:35:15 ►
which looks as fake to me as the first Pearl Harbor.
00:35:18 ►
I was working on another book and I couldn’t get anywhere with it
00:35:21 ►
because I kept taking time off to work on this book,
00:35:24 ►
which I was going to write later
00:35:25 ►
finally this book got finished and the other one still wasn’t
00:35:28 ►
because I feel
00:35:29 ►
I never felt so optimistic
00:35:32 ►
about our potentials
00:35:33 ►
as I do right now with all the scientific
00:35:35 ►
breakthroughs that are occurring
00:35:37 ►
I never felt so angry about the way we’re not using
00:35:40 ►
our potentials
00:35:42 ►
to quote Ezra Brown
00:35:43 ►
it’s like being in the middle of a rainstorm
00:35:46 ►
and seeing people running around with
00:35:48 ►
spoons saying, we can’t get any water,
00:35:50 ►
we can’t get any water, we’ve got to kill one another
00:35:52 ►
over the water. None of them realize that it’s
00:35:54 ►
pouring down.
00:35:56 ►
To give everybody on the planet clean
00:35:58 ►
drinking water would cost about $7 million.
00:36:01 ►
We can afford to
00:36:02 ►
give $3 billion a year to Israel
00:36:04 ►
to kill arrows. We can afford $ seven million to give everybody clean drinking water. If
00:36:07 ►
everybody had clean drinking water, that would cut down on the spread of AIDS for
00:36:11 ►
one thing. It would also cut down on the amount of anger against the white world
00:36:16 ►
on the part of the three-quarters of the planet, which is non-white. Just clean
00:36:21 ►
drinking water. Then we gave people adequate medical care.
00:36:28 ►
You know, it’s not true that terrorists hate us because of our freedom.
00:36:31 ►
We don’t have much freedom for them to hate in the first place.
00:36:34 ►
And in the second place, they hate us for abusing them,
00:36:36 ►
for stealing their natural resources,
00:36:40 ►
for enslaving them, for making war on them,
00:36:42 ►
for dumping napalm on them from the air, for bombing them,
00:36:44 ►
for generally treating
00:36:45 ►
the third world like, well
00:36:47 ►
most Americans
00:36:50 ►
have a dim sense of how badly
00:36:52 ►
we treated the aborigines of this
00:36:53 ►
continent and how badly off they still
00:36:56 ►
are on their reservation, we have a dim
00:36:58 ►
sense of guilt about that
00:36:59 ►
but 9 out of 10 Americans have no idea that
00:37:02 ►
we’ve been doing that to the rest of the world too
00:37:03 ►
for the last hundred years.
00:37:05 ►
All the aboriginal, tribal, and some of the comparatively advanced cultures,
00:37:11 ►
they’ve all been overrun by American industry, backed by American soldiers with American guns,
00:37:16 ►
shooting at anybody who resists them.
00:37:18 ►
We’ve been invading third world countries since 1898 or so.
00:37:23 ►
Hell, if you include the first mexican war in 1848 we’ve been invading
00:37:27 ►
the rest of the world for over 150 years and my god why are they fighting back they must hate our
00:37:34 ►
freedom how can how can people be so stupid as to believe that they hate us because we’ve been
00:37:38 ►
attacking them and robbing them for 150 years that’s why they hate us who the hell can hate
00:37:43 ►
somebody else for their freedom?
00:37:45 ►
They have more freedom than I have in Amsterdam.
00:37:47 ►
I don’t hate them for that. I envy them for it.
00:37:49 ►
I’d like to go live in Amsterdam if I was still healthy enough to make a move,
00:37:53 ►
or that’s what I would move to Amsterdam.
00:37:58 ►
SOG is an abbreviation I invented for Tsarist occupation government because I discovered that everything I objected to in the United States government
00:38:10 ►
seems to trace back to James Jesus Angleton of the CIA or J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI.
00:38:18 ►
And leaving Hoover aside for the moment, Angleton had a definite alliance with czarist groups in Soviet Russia who were trying to overthrow the Soviet system
00:38:27 ►
and with the Nazi general Reinhardt Gehlen.
00:38:32 ►
And the CIA-czarist-Nazi alliance began
00:38:36 ►
to seem to me more and more the key to everything that’s been
00:38:39 ►
crazy and bizarre and incomprehensible about American
00:38:43 ►
foreign policy in the last 50 years.
00:38:47 ►
I think the central thinking of the ruling class of the United States basically is within the czarist paradigm.
00:38:56 ►
They don’t say so, but that’s the way they act.
00:38:58 ►
I’m not thinking they’re more and more saying, we’ve even got a czar, haven’t we? We’ve got a czar and the czar, last I heard, was threatening
00:39:07 ►
to close down all the medical treatments
00:39:11 ►
he doesn’t approve of, which sounds like Ivan the Terrible or Peter
00:39:15 ►
the Great or one of those nuts out of the Dark Ages.
00:39:22 ►
As far as I’m concerned, the
00:39:23 ►
Inquisition never ended
00:39:25 ►
the Catholic Church
00:39:27 ►
officially ended the burning at the stake
00:39:29 ►
epic in 1819
00:39:32 ►
the Inquisition still exists
00:39:33 ►
it’s called the Holy Order for the Doctrine of the Faith
00:39:36 ►
all they can do is throw you out of the church
00:39:38 ►
nowadays
00:39:38 ►
they can’t burn you at the stake anymore
00:39:41 ►
but the Inquisition is still very alive there
00:39:43 ►
and now the United States government has its own Inquisition is still very alive there. And now the United States government
00:39:45 ►
has its own Inquisition.
00:39:47 ►
If you have any despicable ideas,
00:39:49 ►
God knows what’s going to happen to you.
00:39:51 ►
And I’ve got more despicable ideas than anyone.
00:39:55 ►
The FDA and the DEA,
00:39:57 ►
between them,
00:39:58 ►
have taken away most of the freedoms
00:40:01 ►
that are most precious to us.
00:40:04 ►
The destruction of the First Amendment by the Supreme Court
00:40:07 ►
is the major visible horror
00:40:11 ►
because the Constitution says quite simply,
00:40:13 ►
Congress shall make no laws abridging freedom of speech and of the press.
00:40:18 ►
Every year, the Supreme Court sits down and decides
00:40:20 ►
whether a given law abridging freedom of speech and of the press
00:40:23 ►
is constitutional or not.
00:40:25 ►
And sometimes they decide it is constitutional, even though the Constitution says no laws.
00:40:31 ►
I agree with Justice Hugo Black.
00:40:33 ►
No laws means no laws.
00:40:35 ►
It doesn’t mean some laws.
00:40:36 ►
But beyond that major abomination, the FDA and the DEA have closed down the Tenth Amendment,
00:40:42 ►
the FDA and the DEA have closed down the 10th Amendment
00:40:44 ►
which says all powers not delegated
00:40:46 ►
to the federal government are reserved
00:40:47 ►
to the states or to the people
00:40:50 ►
I think that ambiguity
00:40:52 ►
was deliberate whether it’s the states or the people
00:40:54 ►
they want to give a chance for the
00:40:55 ►
popular vote to overrule the state legislature
00:40:58 ►
through the initiative of the state legislature
00:41:00 ►
to overrule the people
00:41:02 ►
if the people were too wacko at that time
00:41:04 ►
they wanted to balance power every way they could legislature to overrule the people if the people were too wacko at that time they want they want
00:41:05 ►
to balance power every way they could now neither the states nor the people have any power over the
00:41:11 ►
most important factors of their life namely their medical care there’s 10 states that have legalized
00:41:17 ►
medical marijuana the federal government will pay any attention when it gets to 20 states will they
00:41:21 ►
pay attention when it gets to 30 the government announced that it doesn’t matter what the people vote for in the referendum.
00:41:28 ►
It doesn’t matter what the state legislatures enact.
00:41:31 ►
The states and the people both have no medical rights whatsoever.
00:41:33 ►
The government determines what’s permissible and what’s not permissible.
00:41:36 ►
That’s the Inquisition all over again.
00:41:38 ►
They don’t even have to go to court and prove their case.
00:41:40 ►
The Inquisition had to haul you in and give you a trial.
00:41:43 ►
They don’t even do that.
00:41:44 ►
They just announce, this is despicable.
00:41:45 ►
You can’t think about it.
00:41:46 ►
You can’t do it.
00:41:47 ►
And if the people vote for it,
00:41:48 ►
well, fuck the people.
00:41:49 ►
We don’t believe in democracy
00:41:50 ►
anymore anyway.
00:41:51 ►
Haven’t you noticed?
00:41:52 ►
They hate us for our freedom
00:41:53 ►
because we don’t have any.
00:41:58 ►
Is patriotism possible
00:42:00 ►
with maybe logic?
00:42:02 ►
I don’t see how.
00:42:04 ►
Patriotism is an identification
00:42:06 ►
of a given gene pool.
00:42:10 ►
I think it has decreased over the centuries
00:42:12 ►
because most countries are combinations of gene pools.
00:42:16 ►
Where you have one gene pool dominating a country,
00:42:19 ►
you still have really fanatical patriotism.
00:42:22 ►
It’s loyalty to the gene pool.
00:42:25 ►
As Haldane said, evolution has programmed us
00:42:28 ►
so that we’ll die for a brother and risk our life for a cousin.
00:42:33 ►
And beyond that, who will risk his life for a stranger?
00:42:36 ►
Very few will.
00:42:37 ►
Some will, but they’re rare.
00:42:39 ►
So it’s patriotism, gene pool loyalty is sort of built into us.
00:42:45 ►
But most countries are combinations of gene pools,
00:42:48 ►
most of which don’t like each other very much.
00:42:51 ►
They’re in competition or have prejudices against each other.
00:42:55 ►
They’re economically competing.
00:42:57 ►
They’re religiously different and so on.
00:43:00 ►
And so patriotism gets more and more attenuated.
00:43:03 ►
It only comes to the service in a really virulent and obnoxious form
00:43:08 ►
when everybody feels equally under attack, which is what the terrorists want.
00:43:13 ►
They don’t mind unifying us as long as we’re all unified in the same terror.
00:43:18 ►
We’re afraid of them.
00:43:19 ►
So they don’t mind the fact that’s bringing us closer together.
00:43:22 ►
So it’s only bringing us closer together temporarily.
00:43:25 ►
In the Revolutionary War, there were black regiments.
00:43:28 ►
As soon as the war was over, they were re-enslaved.
00:43:33 ►
And you get what I mean.
00:43:36 ►
Everybody in this country, almost everybody is unified.
00:43:40 ►
Right now, they feel unified.
00:43:42 ►
But that doesn’t end the fact that the rich are mostly white males
00:43:46 ►
and the poor are mostly black females
00:43:47 ►
that doesn’t change that fact for instance
00:43:50 ►
what is patriotism?
00:43:53 ►
I think it’s a ridiculous superstition
00:43:56 ►
but to put the best face on it
00:43:58 ►
it’s loyalty to that which you admire
00:44:00 ►
most in your own country
00:44:02 ►
well what I admire most
00:44:04 ►
in our country is the founding fathers and the Bill of Rights
00:44:10 ►
and the gradual extension of the suffrage.
00:44:14 ►
So it includes almost everybody.
00:44:16 ►
Too bad we don’t have candidates to vote for.
00:44:19 ►
There’s a lot I admire in this country, but it exists elsewhere in the world too,
00:44:23 ►
not just in this country, but it exists elsewhere in the world, too, not just in this country.
00:44:26 ►
So it’s patriotic in the sense that it’s very much in favor of the Constitution.
00:44:32 ►
Of course, not all of the Constitution.
00:44:35 ►
I think it has defects, like the slavery business, for instance.
00:44:40 ►
I don’t want to restore that.
00:44:42 ►
But I just think the Constitution is one of the better political systems devised by humanity,
00:44:48 ►
and it’s one that has strong roots in this country.
00:44:52 ►
And it still exists.
00:44:53 ►
You can look in the back of the dictionary, and there it is.
00:44:55 ►
It has nothing to do with the way our government actually operates, but it’s in print.
00:44:59 ►
It’s in the back of damn near every dictionary.
00:45:02 ►
You can find it in many school rooms hanging on the wall
00:45:05 ►
so to the extent that it exists it’s an ideal that people can more or less recognize
00:45:11 ►
if SOG has no other effect than people reread the constitution and start thinking about it
00:45:15 ►
i’ll be satisfied why does faith get such a bad name in SOG
00:45:21 ►
well it requires faith to decide that something is despicable
00:45:26 ►
rather than checking it doesn’t it i i think faith is the mental health problem number one
00:45:32 ►
on this planet what’s going on right now the latest crusade after a thousand years or more
00:45:39 ►
or less after the crusades began we’re in another Crusade because people who have faith in Christianity
00:45:46 ►
and people who have faith in Islam have an equal and opposite faith that the other people
00:45:50 ►
are all wrong. If they don’t share our religion, there’s something wrong with them. If they
00:45:54 ►
have dark skin, that’s another thing that’s wrong with them. And on the other hand, they
00:45:59 ►
have the belief that you don’t belong to Islam. You’re wrong. And if you keep attacking Islam
00:46:03 ►
repeatedly over a thousand years,
00:46:05 ►
you’re very, very wrong.
00:46:06 ►
They were going to blow the shit out of you.
00:46:09 ►
And all of this results from faith.
00:46:12 ►
Like Israel, for instance,
00:46:13 ►
the conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis,
00:46:17 ►
if they all became atheists overnight,
00:46:19 ►
imagine there was a bolt of thunder and they all suddenly woke up
00:46:23 ►
and realized they don’t know anything, they’re just guessing.
00:46:27 ►
They can negotiate an agreement satisfactorily to both sides within about two weeks.
00:46:34 ►
The reason they can’t do that at present is because each one of them has a sacred scripture
00:46:38 ►
that says you’ve got a right to fight for this land and God is on your side to go on fighting
00:46:42 ►
and God will take care of you.
00:46:44 ►
As long as people have that kind of faith, they’re never going go on fighting and God will take care of you. As long as people
00:46:45 ►
have that kind of faith they’re never going to stop fighting and killing each other. Mencken said
00:46:50 ►
religion is the chief fomentor of hatred in the history of the world. I would say faith is the
00:46:55 ►
chief fomentor of war in the whole history of the world. Even in comparatively secular societies it
00:47:01 ►
becomes an article of faith that the government is justified, the other side is all wrong, we’re all right,
00:47:07 ►
and nobody’s supposed to think about the question at all.
00:47:09 ►
That becomes despicable.
00:47:11 ►
I believe we should think about the despicable.
00:47:15 ►
That which is labeled heretical, despicable, blasphemous, outrageous,
00:47:19 ►
those are the things we should think about most.
00:47:21 ►
Those are the most important issues confronting us, in my mind.
00:47:21 ►
we should think about most.
00:47:24 ►
Those are the most important issues confronting us, in my mind.
00:47:31 ►
Who do you think most enthusiastically encourages faith in American society today?
00:47:37 ►
Well, organized religion and the politicians, and of course the advertisers.
00:47:39 ►
Advertisers never ask you to have faith,
00:47:43 ►
but they try to condition you to react below the level of reason.
00:47:45 ►
They’re working on conditioned reflexes.
00:47:49 ►
Religion and politics work on conditioned reflexes plus faith.
00:47:54 ►
If the avatars could figure out a way to get you to have faith in them, nobody quite feels about the ITEC the way they feel about,
00:47:59 ►
the way some people feel about Scientology or the Islam
00:48:03 ►
or the Catholic Church or George W. Bush.
00:48:07 ►
But if the advertisers could work out a gimmick that would persuade us that it’s necessary to have faith in them,
00:48:14 ►
they would do it, of course, because faith really reinforces conditioned reflexes very well.
00:48:20 ►
It absolutely stops thinking entirely if you have enough faith.
00:48:24 ►
absolutely stops thinking entirely if you have enough faith.
00:48:29 ►
People who have been governed by faith throughout most of history,
00:48:33 ►
the people, it seems the world is divided into three groups,
00:48:35 ►
at least this is the way it seems to me sometimes.
00:48:40 ►
The gullible who have faith in almost any con man who comes along,
00:48:44 ►
the sociopaths who realize that the majority are gullible and take advantage of them by selling them the Brooklyn Bridge
00:48:47 ►
or sure to stay in purgatory
00:48:50 ►
or an eternity with raging dancing girls in paradise
00:48:54 ►
like Osama Bin Laden is offering his followers.
00:48:58 ►
And then there are those of us who know that the majority are gullible idiots
00:49:03 ►
and we see the sociopaths exploiting them.
00:49:05 ►
We don’t want to exploit them.
00:49:06 ►
We want to wake them up and say,
00:49:07 ►
hey, start thinking for yourselves.
00:49:09 ►
They never pay any attention to us.
00:49:11 ►
They much prefer the sociopaths who flatter them and cajole them
00:49:15 ►
and separate them from their wallets.
00:49:18 ►
And I have long ago gotten used to that.
00:49:20 ►
I’m preaching to the choir almost all the time.
00:49:23 ►
I’m never going to reach the people who need to be awakened. I only
00:49:27 ►
reach the people who have started to wake up and I help them to wake up a little further.
00:49:31 ►
That’s the biggest role I can imagine for myself.
00:49:36 ►
Do you have any use for faith personally, Bob?
00:49:41 ►
Well, let’s say I have some
00:49:43 ►
rather strong emotional commitments
00:49:45 ►
and powerful intuitions
00:49:49 ►
but I do not elevate any of them to dogmas
00:49:52 ►
and I don’t try to ram them down anybody’s throat
00:49:54 ►
I tend to believe in some kind of intelligence behind the universe
00:49:59 ►
I refuse to call it God
00:50:01 ►
because to most people God means an old man with a long beard
00:50:06 ►
who’s watching to see which 12-year-old boys are masturbating
00:50:09 ►
so he can put them in a bonfire for a million years.
00:50:12 ►
Not for a million years, but for millions and millions and millions of years.
00:50:16 ►
I can’t use the word God.
00:50:18 ►
It has so many stupid superstitious connotations.
00:50:21 ►
That’s one of the stupidest and silliest.
00:50:23 ►
The number of meteors that have hit churches,
00:50:28 ►
churches wiped out by floods, by earthquakes, by lightning strikes,
00:50:32 ►
before they put lightning rods on them.
00:50:35 ►
And by the way, why do they need lightning rods on churches
00:50:37 ►
if they think God listens to prayers?
00:50:39 ►
All they’ve got to do is, hey, don’t let any lightning hit our church.
00:50:42 ►
That doesn’t work.
00:50:44 ►
Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.
00:50:45 ►
That’s why they put lightning rods on their churches.
00:50:48 ►
You think of all the calamities that happen to churches,
00:50:50 ►
the idea of a consciousness that has a particular concern with the human race
00:50:55 ►
out of all the possible species and what Carl Sagan used to call the billions and billions of galaxies.
00:51:02 ►
But this mind behind it has a particular interest in us
00:51:05 ►
and a particular interest in
00:51:07 ►
being praised and flattered
00:51:09 ►
and cajoled by it
00:51:11 ►
when I listen to the things people say to their God
00:51:13 ►
if anybody spoke to me that way
00:51:15 ►
I’d really get pissed off at them
00:51:17 ►
I don’t need that much flattery
00:51:19 ►
I don’t want that much flattery
00:51:20 ►
it’s just plain embarrassing
00:51:22 ►
it’s obviously sycophantic and hypocritical.
00:51:25 ►
What it comes down to is, oh, you’re so big.
00:51:27 ►
You’re so big and wonderful. Do something good
00:51:29 ►
for us because we know you’re so big and wonderful.
00:51:32 ►
It’s talking to God like he’s a four-year-old
00:51:34 ►
retarded child.
00:51:36 ►
So I can’t believe it.
00:51:38 ►
Besides, look at the records.
00:51:40 ►
Look at the Koran. Look at the Old Testament.
00:51:42 ►
Look at the New Testament.
00:51:44 ►
The God described there is as the mental level, about a four-year-old.
00:51:49 ►
I can’t imagine that character creating even a carbon molecule, much less a DNA molecule.
00:51:57 ►
He would get a couple of strands in a molecule, right?
00:52:00 ►
Then he’d screw up, and then to show his vexation, he would rain fire and brimstone on two cities
00:52:07 ►
and tell whoever he elected as his representatives at that time,
00:52:11 ►
go murder another tribe over there.
00:52:13 ►
I mean, I saw through the Old Testament,
00:52:14 ►
he’s always telling them, go kill the Midianites,
00:52:16 ►
go kill the Hittites, go kill, you know, wipe the wall out,
00:52:19 ►
kill all the men and rape all the women.
00:52:21 ►
That’s a God, that’s the brain behind the universe.
00:52:24 ►
I can’t believe it. It’s only an, that’s the brain behind the universe. I can’t believe it.
00:52:27 ►
It’s only an intuition
00:52:28 ►
and it’s not a dogma, but I feel
00:52:29 ►
there’s some kind of intelligence in the universe
00:52:32 ►
and maybe above
00:52:34 ►
it for all I know, but I’m not going to argue
00:52:36 ►
about it.
00:52:40 ►
You’re listening to the Psychedelic
00:52:42 ►
Salon, where people are changing their
00:52:44 ►
lives one thought at a time.
00:52:48 ►
Now, if you and I were sitting around a fire right now, chatting with a few friends,
00:52:53 ►
it sure would be fun to pick up where Bob left off and further explore his thought
00:52:58 ►
that if everyone in the Middle East just gave up their religions,
00:53:01 ►
then they could solve their problems in a matter of weeks.
00:53:04 ►
just gave up their religions, then they could solve their problems in a matter of weeks.
00:53:10 ►
Personally, I agree with that statement, but the topic is going to have to wait for another day, maybe because it should be the focus of a plialogue someday or something like that.
00:53:16 ►
In fact, since several of our salonners have started their own podcast channels lately,
00:53:21 ►
maybe a couple of you could chew on that topic for a while.
00:53:24 ►
I’d certainly be interested in hearing some more opinions about this myself. Thank you. by intelligence. Well, I’d like to go on with some of these thoughts, but I’m already a couple of days behind in getting this program out,
00:53:48 ►
so I’m going to have to move on for now,
00:53:51 ►
since there’s at least one more thing I want to mention today,
00:53:54 ►
and that’s a posting in our Notes from the Psychedelic Salon blog
00:53:58 ►
by Planet Citizen, who says,
00:54:01 ►
Thanks, Lorenzo, and thanks for the invitation to think critically about Terrence.
00:54:06 ►
I find TM fascinating and love listening to him,
00:54:09 ►
but there is an aspect about him that I have always found troubling,
00:54:13 ►
and it centers around women.
00:54:15 ►
Listening to this talk, especially the end,
00:54:18 ►
from the perspective of almost all the women I know,
00:54:21 ►
I can’t help but think that they’d object to this social program of getting loaded, crossing sexual boundaries, etc.
00:54:28 ►
That many women find this troubling is not a crime, but it may be a clue that TM’s thought
00:54:33 ►
is somehow part of a male point of view and therefore may be limited in ways hard to see
00:54:38 ►
by other men.
00:54:40 ►
Relations between men and women in general seem to be a fascinating and not often discussed problem in the psychedelic community.
00:54:47 ►
The gist of the criticism might be that McKenna, in his flights to spiritual heights, leaves the groundedness of normal life.
00:54:56 ►
This luxury is paid for by the less powerful, who are often women.
00:55:01 ►
Whether or not the dominant hierarchies need to collapse or not, the kids need breakfast
00:55:06 ►
and someone needs to take out the recycling today. The spiritual pursuit and its shattering
00:55:12 ►
insights are hard to reintegrate into a community. Women, who are not always, but often, interested
00:55:18 ►
in preserving the health of the community, may find this threatening. TM’s goal is often,
00:55:21 ►
community may find this threatening.
00:55:27 ►
TM’s goal is often, curiously, considered in feminine terms.
00:55:30 ►
Groundedness of the body, Gaia is female, etc.
00:55:35 ►
And yet, I wonder how many women recognize femininity in this.
00:55:39 ►
Is the fantasy of an all-giving mother whore at work here?
00:55:44 ►
Perhaps a more feminine approach is to admit that there is no feminine approach. that endless categories and theories, complete with transcendent longings and disappointments,
00:55:49 ►
are part of an endless cycle of alienation and escape,
00:55:52 ►
that the way out is to give it all up and get breakfast out there.
00:55:57 ►
Or maybe this thought mandalas are a part of what makes humans beautiful.
00:56:01 ►
Who knows?
00:56:02 ►
I don’t have an answer here, but I think this missing piece deserves more attention.
00:56:06 ►
Instead of considering our collective divorces and disastrous relationships as accidents of personal history,
00:56:12 ►
could they somehow be tied in to the very structure of our models of psychedelia?
00:56:18 ►
I honestly don’t know, but I’d love to see this seriously discussed.
00:56:22 ►
Well, where to begin?
00:56:25 ►
First of all, thank you for that very thoughtful comment, Planet Citizen.
00:56:29 ►
I think you’ve raised a very important topic here.
00:56:32 ►
To begin with, I don’t want to get into a discussion about particular traits of Terrence
00:56:37 ►
since he isn’t here to defend himself.
00:56:39 ►
My only comments regarding Terrence are that I have heard him on several occasions make
00:56:44 ►
mention of the fact that
00:56:45 ►
he realized he wasn’t perfect,
00:56:48 ►
particularly in his relationships
00:56:49 ►
with others. And I’ve heard some
00:56:51 ►
stories about his personal relationships that
00:56:53 ►
aren’t all that flattering, and
00:56:56 ►
I’ve heard some friends and lovers
00:56:58 ►
who speak of him in only the
00:57:00 ►
highest regard. Ultimately,
00:57:02 ►
what we sometimes forget
00:57:03 ►
is the fact that Terrence and you and me
00:57:06 ►
and all the rest of the psychedelic community are still human beings. And with that comes all of the
00:57:13 ►
personal failings and baggage that we’ve all suffered through. I know that I’ve not been the
00:57:18 ►
best husband, father, grandfather, and friend that I could have been in every circumstance.
00:57:23 ►
And my guess is that you’ve let yourself down once or twice as well. The point that I could have been in every circumstance. And my guess is that you let yourself down once or twice as well.
00:57:27 ►
The point that I’ve tried to make on several occasions is that,
00:57:31 ►
and this is just my personal opinion, by the way,
00:57:34 ►
but my belief is that these sacred medicines don’t change us.
00:57:38 ►
They only make us more of what we already are at the time.
00:57:41 ►
Any changes that take place have to be done on our own
00:57:44 ►
after we’ve come back from
00:57:46 ►
one of these mystical experiences. The worldwide psychedelic community, which numbers in the tens
00:57:52 ►
of millions, by the way, is made up of everyday people, people like you and me. We have arguments,
00:57:58 ►
we get divorced, we sometimes don’t treat our friends very well. We aren’t all that different
00:58:03 ►
from everybody else.
00:58:10 ►
What does set the psychedelic community apart somewhat, however, is our constant searching,
00:58:17 ►
a longing almost, for a better understanding of why we’re here and what our destiny as a species is, or more importantly, what it can be if we ever get our act together.
00:58:23 ►
We are inquisitive.
00:58:24 ►
We’re searchers who are searching for something we can’t name or describe.
00:58:29 ►
And my hunch is that that fact doesn’t set us apart either.
00:58:33 ►
I think most people, once their basic food, shelter, and clothing needs are taken care of,
00:58:38 ►
wonder about the same things.
00:58:40 ►
What is different about you is that you are asking questions like the one Planet Citizen raised,
00:58:46 ►
even though you still don’t have everything in your own life going perfectly.
00:58:50 ►
In fact, I know that we have quite a few fellow Saloners who are living in what I would call almost desperate circumstances.
00:58:57 ►
Some even have to risk their lives just to get to work or go to school each day.
00:59:01 ►
And yet, once a week or so, even these very unfortunate people
00:59:06 ►
join us here in cyberdelic space.
00:59:09 ►
It’s amazing when you think about it.
00:59:11 ►
You and me and our fellow slaughters
00:59:13 ►
are on some kind of a strange path.
00:59:16 ►
One that we aren’t sure where it’s taking us,
00:59:19 ►
but for reasons that remain a little fuzzy,
00:59:22 ►
we know in our hearts that it’s leading us home.
00:59:26 ►
Or,
00:59:26 ►
or maybe we simply enjoy a little intellectual stimulation
00:59:31 ►
from time to time just to keep the monsters at bay.
00:59:35 ►
Who knows?
00:59:36 ►
All I know for sure is that I am
00:59:38 ►
wherever my thoughts are at the moment.
00:59:41 ►
And where I am right now is in cyberdelic space with you.
00:59:44 ►
And that’s exactly where I am right now is in cyberdelic space with you. And that’s exactly
00:59:45 ►
where I want to be. If only we could just pass a pipe around right now, everything would be perfect.
00:59:52 ►
Well, that’s enough philosophizing for today. Now it’s time to go outside and get some fresh air,
00:59:57 ►
don’t you think? But before I go, I want to mention that this and all of the podcasts from
01:00:03 ►
the Psychedelic Salon are available for your use under the creative commons attribution,
01:00:08 ►
non-commercial share,
01:00:09 ►
like 3.0 license.
01:00:10 ►
And if you have any questions about that,
01:00:12 ►
just click the creative commons link at the bottom of the psychedelic salon webpage,
01:00:16 ►
which you can find at psychedelic salon.org.
01:00:19 ►
And that’s also where you’ll find the program notes for these podcasts.
01:00:23 ►
For now,
01:00:24 ►
this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:00:28 ►
Be well, my friends.