Everything is under control : conspiracies, cults, and cover-ups

446 Pages·1998·1.2 MB·English

by  Robert Anton Wilson

EVERYTHING
IS
CONTROL
UNDER
Conspiracies, Cults, and Cover-ups
ROBERT ANTON WILSON
WITH MIRIAM JOAN HILL
DEDICATION
to
Mimi Hill
one wonderfully efficient Websearcher
and to
Valerie and Barry and Christina and Alexandra and Maureen
and Jennifer and Jeremie and Brahm and Richard and Paula
and to
Arlen
“semper in te glorior”
A characteristic common to all intelligence officers,
East and West, is that they have
a special open-mindedness.
For them nothing is impossible
just because it is improbable.
from http://www.livelinks.com/sumeria/politics/supermol.html

Contents
Epigraph iii
Introduction 1
A 19
B 57
C 98
D 141
E 161
F 168
G 191
H 223
I 245
J 261
K 264
L 275
M 289
N 308
O 323
P 334
Q 353
R 356
S 369
T 398
U 408
V 416
W 418
X 429
Y 430
Z 433
About the Author
Other Books by Robert Anton Wilson
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
INTRODUCTION
Just because you’re not paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not
plotting against you.
—Popular proverb of the 1990s
A random telephone survey of 800 American adults in September
1996 found that 74 percent—virtually three out of four cit-
izens—believe that the U.S. government regularly engages in
conspiratorial and clandestine operations. This does not necessar-
ily indicate increasing flight to fantasy, or confusing TV with
reality: The same study found that only 29 percent believe in
witchcraft, and a mere 10 percent believe Elvis Presley is still
alive.1
If three out of four of our citizens—a much greater majority
than that won by any president of the U.S. in our lifetimes—sus-
pect the government of felonious and nefarious activities, that
means that quite ordinary people now believe what only embit-
1Survey published by George magazine (November 1996), cited in Fortean Times, February
1997, p. 21.
2 / Everything is Under Control
tered left-wing radicals believed a century ago, in the 1890s (and
only professional cynics like H.L. Mencken believed as late as the
1920s). Now, not just the far left and the cynics see all manner of
double-dealing in Washington: The far-right wing has even more
dire suspicions than all the galoots ahoof in the Republic added
together. Nobody in the U.S. today has the sort of blind faith in
our rulers that they taught us in grade school, and the above-
mentioned three out of four of us hardly trust them at all.
But the government does not have any monopoly on the low
end of the confidence curve. We live in an age in which humans
distrust other humans more than ever before. One can hardly
think of any subset of the species, Homo Sap, that has not become
an object of uneasy suspicion by some other subset. The profes-
sions all belong to the criminal classes, according to popular
opinion: TV repairpersons cheat us regularly, and so do auto
mechanics. Doctors, merchants, the clergy, and alleged “experts”
of all sorts have a dark smog of similar suspicions floating almost
visibly around them. We all know that “experts” can be hired to
testify to any side of any case. (See Elmyr.) Other groups also
appear fungible and nefarious to many.
Even Academia has its own brands of conspiracy theory, or
something much like it. The two leading schools of art/culture
criticism, known as Deconstructionism and Post-Modernism,
amount to seeking, and usually finding, ulterior motives in any-
body’s “model” or “narrative” about the human situation,
whether that “narrative” appears as a play by a genius such as
Shakespeare or just a TV sitcom; or as a novel, a film, a document-
ary film, a sculpture, a grand opera, a painting; or as an alleged
“finding” of social science, or even an ordained law in the hard
sciences; or as a political or religious faith. Basing their skeptical
method on both the best and worst zetetic tendencies from Freud
to
Robert Anton Wilson / 3
Buddhism, the Deconstructionists leave one feeling that no com-
munication can be trusted to say what it means or to mean what
it says. The Post-Modernists often seem to refuse to communicate
at all. (I say that without malice, because I myself have been called
a Post-Modernist.)
Maybe dogs are the only people around who still trust human
beings, and I have even noted that some dogs seem dubious about
us lately.
Strange Narratives
When I first developed a taste for books (around age 8 or 9, I
guess) one of the first I read had the daunting title Believe It or
Not! and contained hundreds of almost unbelievable but allegedly
factual yarns about strange doings on this planet. The author, a
popular cartoonist of the time named Robert Ripley, began with
a section on oddities of human religion, under the classical-
looking headline, “Strange is man when he seeks after his gods.”
Even at this age, I do not know if Mr. Ripley invented that aphor-
ism or found it in some real classic; but it lingered in my memory
for more than half a century.
Men (and women) indeed become strange when seeking gods.
As the present work will show, however, they become even
stranger when seeking devils. And the narratives they invent
have all the sinister charm and eerie cornball poetry of Bela Lugosi
at his best moments. It almost seems that the human mind works
like a giant magnifying glass: If you turn it to Positive Thoughts,
it will enlarge them and multiply positivity endlessly, as it does
for Christian Scientists and disciples of Rev. Norman Vincent
Peale; but if you turn it upon Evil, it will soon show you
everything you most fear lurking with slavering jaws and green
tentacles right outside your front door.