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The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science
Wilson, Robert Anton
CHAPTER FIVE
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Right Man syndrome.
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It is a mere empirical generalization by the writer A.E. Van Vogt, in a pamphlet Report on the Violent Male, cited by Wilson in Criminal History, op. cit. p. 64-71. Van Vogt was inspired to investigate this personality type when writing a novel about concentration camps. Investigating war criminals, he went on to investigate other types of criminals. He thought he saw a pattern. The Violent Male—and almost all violence is committed by males—seems to be a man who literally cannot, ever, admit he might be wrong. He knows he is right; he is the total psychological opposite of the agnostic, in claiming absolute gnosis, total certitude, about all things. Van Vogt found that an astonishing amount of violence is committed by these males, and he calls the type The Right Man, because this man always insists he is Right.
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Not all Right Men become criminals, however. Van Vogt found considerable records of them in divorce cases, too. He claims that in every such case it was the wife who was seeking divorce. The Right Man not only knew he was Right, but also knew the wife had a duty to remain with him.
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Sometimes, Von Vogt noted, the transition from Being Right All The Time to violence only occurs while such a divorce is being sought by the wife.
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In some respects, the Right Man seems to me like a chronic case of what clinical psychologists call the Authoritarian Personality and Freudians call the anal retentive.
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the Authoritarian Personality is Always Right and tends to seek positions of power. They are obsessed with facts and figures, frequently, and are rather “cold” toward human beings (because of traumatic toilet training, according to unscientific Freudian speculation).
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They also have a statistical inclination toward being unwilling to experiment with “foreign” or “exotic” foods, and they regard philosophical speculation with extreme hostility.
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This didn’t just happen with Ohm’s Law. It happened with every damned law that I ever personally investigated in the field or in the laboratory. The explanation, of course, is instrument error. “No instrument is perfect,” etc. But then the Eternal Laws invoked by all Fundamentalists do not apply to the sensory-sensual world—the existential world, the world of ordinary experience—but to some sort of Platonic Ideal World that somehow underlies this messy experienced world? Well, not exactly. If both we and our instruments were perfect, then—lo!—we would actually see all the laws actually “obeyed” and “obeyed” precisely.
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Really? And how would one go about proving such a proposition, when all we have to work with is our imperfect senses and our imperfect instruments, and what they tune in? It seems that to believe in that Ideal World requires another “leap of faith” and I, as an agnostic, won’t jump. I’ll just stand here and wonder. Maybe there is such a world, but since we can’t tune it in or experience it, we can’t talk meaningfully about it—as the Copenhagenists say—I think that’s why they gave up the word “reality”—Back in the sub-Platonic and messy world of what people experience or think they experience:
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Maybe. And maybe this world is not only sub-Platonic but wobbly—maybe somebody will be (and has been) messing with the Big Bang from somewhere in the future, as suggested in the last chapter, so this damned world is just a blurry remnant of the real world they started from—or is that just the Platonic metaphor in a quantum disguise?
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Dr. Wheeler proposes that since the non-local connection in space has been experimentally verified by Drs. Clauser and Aspect and others, we should think about the other side of Bell’s Theorem, which also proposes non-local connections in time. (A non-local effect is everywhere and everywhen, as we have said.) Dr. Wheeler argues that our experiments today can “reach back billions of years” to literally create the past, including the Big Bang. He says “we are wrong to think of the past as having a definite existence ‘out there,’” and that the Big Bang has been/ is being created by our “acts of measurement” now.
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The only way this backward-in-time causality is thinkable to me, or to any physicist I’ve discussed it with—and it is unthinkable for Prof. Bunge, remember—is if out of the Big Bang are coming many universes, not one universe. Otherwise, we run into the Grandfather Paradox again.
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So maybe I wasn’t joking when I suggested we happen to be in one of the more wobbly universes.
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It was only an appearance, of course, but we begin to fear that in this wobbly and imperfect world appearances are all we’ve got.
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Motivated by the same desire to liberate humanity from dogma as I am—or motivated by the same blasphemous desire to subvert and corrupt, the Citadel will tell you—Fort published these cases in four huge books that annoyed Martin Gardner so severely that he decided that Fort was “sinister.” I predict that Mr. Gardner will say the same about me.
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I turn again to the paradoxical symbiosis of skepticism and blind faith. Is it easier to believe in segregating whirlwinds that pick and choose until they have frogs and only frogs in their grip, or to believe that the fundamentalist materialist reality-tunnel is, like the Thomist reality-tunnel and the Methodist reality-tunnel and the Lesbian Vegetarian reality-tunnel, a human construct, containing its own self-referential subjectivity and group Game Rules?
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That depends on temperament, I think. Those who have an emotional need for the materialist reality-tunnel will cling to it at all odds, even if that requires them to hypothesize unscrupulous reporters ad. lib., gullible scientists ad. naus, and even gentle and segregating whirlwinds ad. infinitum. Great is the faith of such “skeptics,” as I shall continue to demonstrate as we go along.
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But then again, maybe Nietzsche was right. Maybe we created that world, by the process discussed earlier—turning leaf1 and leaf2 and leaf3 etc. into “the leaf” and man1 and man2 and man3 into “mankind” (leaving out the women) and experienced measurement1 and experienced measurement2 etc. into “the” “average” “real” “measurement” which should exist somewhere—and dropping out the other wobbles and bumps as we went along, devising a lovely abstraction of a world that exists nowhere but in our heads.
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If we follow this subversive notion far enough, as Nietzsche did, we come to Chaos and the Abyss, as he did. Maybe that is why we prefer not to follow this notion very far.
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Of course. Chaos and the Abyss are metaphors, of the special kind that we have called metaphors about metaphors. They attempt to describe what is left when abstractions like “the leaf” and “the” “average”—linguistic reality-tunnels—are dropped from our minds.
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Nietzsche was a linguist and philologist before he became a philosopher, and his philosophy starts from linguistic analysis. He was one of the first—after the enigmatic Giambattista Vico—to observe that linguistic grids mold perception and constrain thought. His scandalous, hilarious and dangerous (he loved the concept) criticism of conventional morals grew directly out of this and was largely a criticism of neurosemantic habits, of how words hypnotize us and predetermine hasty Verdicts. Eventually, he asked himself: what if linguistic grids are only in our heads and not “out there”? What if etic experience, existence itself, not edited by the brain’s emic card-index system, is formless, or multiform, or perpetually evolving—too fluid and “dancing” to be captured in one model or one linguistic reality-tunnel?
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Well—and this is what drove Nietzsche to flights of poetry and sarcasm unequalled in the history of philosophy—if that is the case every standard of judgment must eventually collapse. A standard is only a way of judging whether something fits a pre-existing system. If systems are like people, mortal and mutable, then—He who believes a system, any system, wears a blindfold.
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If Nietzsche’s existential relativism be accepted, then there will always be true things that do not fit any existing reality-tunnel, just as in mathematics Godel demonstrated that there will always be true theorems not deducible from any set of axioms. (See Chapter Two.)
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We are, of course, here trying to speak about the unspeakable—an oxymoronic task. Buddhists, trying to indicate this pre-(or post-) verbal etic awareness, noncommittally call it the Void—which is supposed to make you realize you can’t say anything about it. (Chaos, to Nietzsche, who knew ancient Greek, also meant void, along with its modern meanings.)
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Mostly, the Buddhists prefer not to speak about the unspeakable, and just tell you to experience it by sitting, for instance, staring at a wall and trying to remove verbal systems from your brain. Others have tried to speak about this and given philosophy such memorable if meaningless terms as “Being,” “Pure Being,” “Absolute Being,” etc.
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Prof. F.S.C. Northrop deserves a medal of some sort for trying to describe this indescribability as “the undifferentiated esthetic continuum.” I wish I’d said that.
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To go a bit further in naming the unnameable and eff-ing the ineffable—etic reality is the state, recorded in Dr. John Lilly’s Simulations of God, of those who have been in an isolation tank, cut off from human reality-grids, for several hours. It is also, as Lilly notes, the frequently reported state of sailors who have been alone after a ship-wreck, drifting in a small boat, or explorers who have been isolated for prolonged periods. It may even be the original meaning of the Indo-European root from which we get our verb-form “to be”—to be lost, to be separated from tribal reality-tunnels. (See Chapter Two) It is also the whereof of which Wittgenstein speaks in the famous last sentence of Tradatus Logico-Philosophicus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.”
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In short, it is that old-fashioned “reality” which the Copenhagen Interpretation wisely informs us cannot be contained in scientific models. It cannot be contained in any models.
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So we are back, by linguistic analysis, or analysis of what is not linguistic, to Gribbin’s position about quantum mechanics: Everything is real or nothing is real. Every reality-tunnel is real to those who experience it, and none are “real” in the old sense of existing apart from us in a platonic Absoluteness. Chaos and the Abyss.
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And—to complete Nietzsche’s analysis—it is the fear of that Chaos, that “transvaluation of all values,” which may be the emotional motor behind all Fundamentalisms.
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Sociobiologically: Domesticated primates do not want their territorial marks erased.
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If we are not to be too literal about all that Nietzschean Chaos—if we admit that, after all, some generalizations are a little bit better than others—if we are not to become, oxymoronically, Absolute Agnostics or solipsists—Here is a model that may help, a little. It is from STTUE—Space-Time Transients and Unusual Events, so often op. cit. here in recent chapters. Persinger and Lafreniere are “behavioral scientists”; that is, they don’t like the old word, “psychologists.” They collected 6,060 of the sort of reports that we have been concerned with here. They did extensive computer analyses of the data, looking for various possible patterns and correlations. They think they have found some. What they propose is, briefly, that physical laws are not Platonic absolutes, contrary to Prof. Bunge, but statistical generalizations. Sounds familiar, that.
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Persinger and Lafreniere propose further that when there are wild statistical fluctuations in various known physical fields—the geomagnetic field, the gravitational field, etc.—they do not propose new and innovative things, like Reich’s orgone or Sheldrake’s morphic resonances—but if there are fluctuations in known fields, then—Abnormal things will really happen; but also humans near such fluctuations will have abnormal brain waves, and will hallucinate.
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To some, this will seem to lead us further into Chaos and Old Night. It is easier, and more traditional, to think of the Aristotelian choice—the phenomenon “is” “real” or it “is” “hallucinatory”—than to consider the non-Aristotelean model that the Damned Thing might be a little bit of both.
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Nonetheless, even without Persinger’s-Lafreniere’s field fluctuations, neurology already indicates that we should regard all perception as involving addition (projection) and subtraction (abstraction), which is a good working definition of partly real/ partly hallucinatory.
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It seems to me that there is a topology to UFO stories that is quite consistent with this fluctuation model. That is, if energy fields fluctuate, then those at the perimeter will only report “strange lights” in the sky or on the ground—ball lightning and other, unnamed electro-magnetic effects. Those a little closer in will report the wilder electro-magnetic effects, and possible gravitational effects, that are so often described—auto engines malfunctioning, lights turning off and on, jumping furniture of the “poltergeist” type.
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And those misfortunate persons who wander into the epicenter, where gravity and brain-waves both go mad—They will come back talking of extraterrestrials in Nazi uniforms, like Betty and Barney Hill—or they will tell us they went up in a spaceship with Jesus Christ, as in many cases—or sexual fantasy will surface, as in those who claim to have been raped by malign midgets or seduced by sexy Venusian ladies.
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Persinger and Lafreniere suggest also that sombunall of our strange falling Things or “teleportations” may be extreme gravity fluctuations.
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Then even some of our genetic monstrosities may be fluctuations caused by energy waves that impinge on the DNA?
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There is even some statistical support for this model in Persinger-Lafreniere’s computer analyses, which reveal seemingly significant increases in these Monstrosities around earthquake faults and in the weeks preceding major tremors.
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Try to think, just for a moment, Persinger-Lafreniere Po Bell’s Theorem
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Try. Thoughts are the one phenomena still private in this world; they won’t come around and arrest you at once. You have nothing to lose but mental chains. You might have a world of psychological freedom—“creativity”—to gain.