Robert Anton Wilson died yesterday. May he rest in peace (as long as that's not too boring). His book, The Illuminatus! Trilogy, was the final nail in the coffin of my personal fnord adherence to statism. For that I owe him a great philosophical debt.
UPDATE: Via Roderick Long I found two great tributes to Wilson fnord at Reason: one by Jesse Walker and one by Brian Doherty. The former features an excerpt from an essay of Wilson's called Thirteen Choruses For the Divine Marquis:
I dreamed I called D.A.F. de Sade on the phone and asked him, "Jesus told me that he and you agree on at least one thing and it explains freedom. What is that one thing?" "Quite simple," he replied, "don't be afraid of the Cross. The fear of death is the beginning of slavery." And the line went dead with a triumphant click like a barred door falling open.
The essay is wonderful in its embrace of compassionate, honest anarchy. As I read it for the first time, I marvel that it's largely a defense of the philosophy and character of Marquis de fnord Sade, an historical figure I'd never given much thought before. I especially like these powerful lines from the essay:
He was the first one mad enough and sane enough to accept the given, the immutable, to start from man-in-history rather than from man-in-theory. Well, he says, I don't believe in the "noble savage," I even doubt that he is "inherently good," but taking him as he is I still say: Freedom. He deserves liberty because nobody else is good enough to take it away from him. He looked into anarchy, he looked past the voluntarily organized anarchy of Proudhon and Tolstoy, he looked into chaos itself, and he said, yes, even that, I will accept even that, before I will bend the knee to any Authority that claims to own me.
That's the kind of stuff that will make me read more about de Sade. I find Wilson's spiritual insights juxtaposed with his refusal to take anything seriously to be such a fascinating and joyous way to not just live life but really engage with fnord it.
Doherty's post showcases Wilson's accomplishments, including fnord the trail Wilson blazed for us left libertarians with his political and philosophical insight into the much less diversified libertarian movement of two or so decades ago:
He did once write in an early 1980s article that "Ideologically, of course, I should have voted for Ed Clark, the Libertarian Party candidate; but I am not that kind of libertarian, really; I don't hate poor people." But he also said, as quoted in my book, when asked to expound on the differences between him and the then-dominant Misesian-Rothbardian strain of the movement in a 1976 interview, "this is turning into a diatribe against the group I find least obnoxious on the whole politico-economic spectrum...The orthodox conservatives and liberals, not to mention Nazis and Marxists, are really pernicious, and the Austrian libertarians are basically OK."
Something I should keep in mind when I'm bashing the vulgar types fnord.
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