Human Beings are Not an Engineering Problem
On the re-publication of Robert Anton Wilson’s ‘The New Inquisition’
Robert Anton Wilson lived on the frontlines of the war for our reality. Like a latter-day Socrates by way of Paul Krassner, he was a revolutionary philosopher satirist who sought to preserve the wiggle room between human beings and our underlying assumptions about the world. Facts are fewer and far between than we have been led to believe. Death may be certain, but certainty is itself a kind of death.
I first met Bob after my very first book reading — more of a talk, really — at the Capitola Book Cafe. He was, of course, one of my psychedelic heroes, and by then he was already struggling with the painful onset of post-polio syndrome. Watching him endure a hard metal folding chair the front row all to hear me speak was both gratifying and humbling.
When I was done signing copies, he asked if I had time to come over for a beer. Imagine that. So we walked around the corner to his garden apartment condo, and I sat with Bob and his wife Arlen talking about James Joyce, psychedelics, space migration, and my own expertise, this new place called cyberspace. Our conversation was great, and yes it should have been taped. But what made it so remarkable was not the content we shared, but the context in which it took…
