RAW Week: Mark Dery's 1997 interview with Robert Anton Wilson

Here's an essay about RAW (followed by interview with him) by our friend Mark Dery, which ran in 21C magazine.

Mark Dery: You’re best known as the co-author of the Illuminatus! trilogy, which seemingly interweaves every known conspiracy theory. What do you think makes this moment in history such a breeding ground for paranoid visions of government cover-ups of alien autopsies, black helicopters over America and so forth. Is millennial culture out of control?

RAW: Yes. Most people don’t know why the world is changing so fast and in so many weird directions, so they look for somebody to blame; it just depends on their belief systems, whether they’re going to blame the Elders of Zion, the Bavarian Illuminati, the Freemasons, Swiss bankers, or whoever. People just can’t understand that some things are dynamic structural factors of the whole sociology, the whole technological environment in which we live; they want to find a bloc-like entity to explain everything. It’s primitive, but very prevalent. I’m currently working on a book called The Encyclopedia of Conspiracies; it’s an attempt to keep the irony subdued and do a scholarly treatment of conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories fascinate me because they’re a good testing ground for non-Aristotelian logic. Most people either accept them in whole or reject them in whole; I try to apply fuzzy logic, asking “How much of this can really be proven and how much of it is just blind assertion?” It’s interesting to look at them without an either/or but simply in terms of how probable various parts of the theory are. Either/or seems so crude and primitive to me, and yet most people are still hung up on it. Korzybski had a major influence on my thinking in this regard.

The Rabbit Warren Report: An Investigation into the Funhouse Logic and Reality Tunnels of novelist Robert Anton Wilson

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• [Aram Jahn]

  Now how, in my enthused delvings and collectings and print-outs and paper files of RAW interviews, did I ever miss Mark Dery’s? Maybe ‘cuz he calls him Robert A. Wilson? Anyway, thanks for this, Frauenfelder.

• [sdaris]

  Just wanted to say thanks for doing this whole RAW thing. I didn’t know much about him before, but now I am just riveted by every word he ever said or wrote! It completely resonates with me and I can’t get over how many “YES” moments I’m having. Wow.

• [Thad Boyd]

  Nice.  Respectful but also critical of some of RAW’s goofier notions.

• [Thad Boyd]

  Huh — what’s with the “Died in 1997″ bit at the bottom?  Would that be the greatly-exaggerated rumors of his death that he referred to in Cosmic Trigger 3?