← Prometheus Rising Book Summary, Notes and Highlights
Prometheus Rising Chapter 16. The Snafu Principle
Author: Robert Anton Wilson Publisher: Grand Junction, Colorado: Hilaritas Press. Publish Date: 1983 Review Date: 2022-10-5 Status:📚
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2950 This is second-circuit neuro-politics.
Highlight(pink) - Location 2954 Mammalian sociobiology, rooted in the antique neural circuits of the old brain, contains many factors opposing the evolution of domesticated primates into true freedom and objective intelligence. The chief of these “reactionary” factors was described in my novel Illuminatus! as the Snafu Principle or Celine’s Law. It holds that communication is only possible between equals. This was an over-simplification for fictional (satirical) purposes. More precisely, this proposed “law” would read: Adequate communication flows freely between equals. Communication between non-equals is warped and distorted by second-circuit Domination and Submission rituals perpetuating communication jam and a Game Without End.
Highlight(pink) - Location 2960 Political power, as a typical alpha male once said, grows out of the barrel of a gun. This is metaphorically as well as literally true. The “gun” may be symbolic and fairly abstract, consisting of ritualized social expectations (“Don’t talk back to your father”) or concrete in a non-violent but deadly way, e.g., the capacity to remove bio-survival necessities by cutting off the ticket supply in a Capitalist society (“One more word and I’ll fire you, Bumstead!”). Under the primate second-circuit socio-biological rules, everybody tends to lie a little, to flatter or to evade displeasure, when exchanging signals with those above them in the pack-hierarchy.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2965 Every authoritarian structure can be visualized as a pyramid with an eye on the top. This is the typical flow-chart of any government, any corporation, any Army, any bureaucracy, any mammalian pack. On each rung, participants bear a burden of nescience in relation to those above them. That is, they must be very, very careful that the natural sensory activities of being conscious organisms—the acts of seeing, hearing, smelling, drawing inferences from perception, etc.—are in accord with the reality-tunnel of those above them. This is absolutely vital; pack status (and “job security”) depends on it. It is much less important—a luxury that can easily be discarded—that these perceptions be in accord with objective fact.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2971 For instance, in the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, the agent had to develop a capacity to see godless communists everywhere. Any agent whose perceptions indicated that there were actually very few godless communists in this country at that time would experience cognitive dissonance—his or her reality-tunnel was at variance with the “official” reality-tunnel of the pyramid. To talk about such perceptions at all would be to invite suspicions of eccentricity, intellectual wiseacreing or of being oneself a godless communist. The same would apply to a Dominican inquisitor in the middle ages who lacked the capacity to “see” witches everywhere. In such authoritarian situations, it is important to see what the Top Dogs (alpha males) see; it is inconvenient, and possibly dangerous to see what is objectively happening.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2977 But this leads to an equal and opposite burden of omniscience upon those at the top, in the eye of the pyramid. All that is forbidden to those at the bottom—the conscious activities of perception and evaluation—is demanded of the Power Elite, the master class. They must attempt to do the seeing, hearing, smelling, etc. and all the thinking and evaluating for the whole pyramid. But a man with a gun (the power to punish) is told only what the target thinks will not cause him to pull the trigger (write the pink slip, order the court-martial). The elite, with their burden of omniscience, face the underlings, with their burden of nescience, and receive only the feedback consistent with their own preconceived notions and reality-tunnels. The burden of omniscience becomes, over time, another and more complex burden of nescience. Nobody really knows anything anymore, or if they do, they are careful to hide the fact. The burden of nescience becomes omnipresent. More and more of sensory experience becomes unspeakable. As Paul Watzlawick notes, that which is objectively repressed (unspeakable) soon becomes subjectively repressed (unthinkable). Nobody likes to feel like a coward and a liar constantly. It is easier to cease to notice where the official tunnel-reality differs from existential fact. Thus SNAFU accelerates and rigiditus bureaucraticus sets in—the last stage before all brain activity ceases and the pyramid is clinically dead as an intellectual entity.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2987 We also propose that “national security” is another semantic spook, an Empedoclean knot; that the search for national security is the chief cause of national insecurity and a potent anti-intelligence mechanism.
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We also propose that “national security” is another semantic spook, an Empedoclean knot; that the search for national security is the chief cause of national insecurity and a potent anti-intelligence mechanism.
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As Leary writes: Secrecy is the original sin. Fig leaf in the Garden of Eden. The basic crime against love … The purpose of life is to receive, synthesize and transmit energy. Communication fusion is the goal of life. Any star can tell you that. Communication is love. Secrecy, withholding the signal, hoarding, hiding, covering up the light is motivated by shame and fear. As so often happens, the right wing is half right for the wrong reasons. They say primly: if you have done nothing wrong, you have no fear of being bugged. Exactly. But the logic goes both ways. Then FBI files, CIA dossiers, White House conversations should be open to all. Let everything hang open. Let government be totally visible. The last, the very last people to hide their actions should be the police and the government. What my eminent colleague states so poetically can be stated more functionally as follows:
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Highlight(pink) - Location 2997 Every secret police agency must be monitored by an elite corps or secret-police-of-the-second-order. This is because (a) infiltration of the secret police, for purposes of subversion, will always be a prime goal of both internal subversives and hostile foreign powers and (b) secret police agencies acquire fantastic capacities to blackmail and intimidate others, in and out of government. Stalin executed three chiefs of the secret police in a row because of this danger. As Nixon so wistfully said in a Watergate transcript, Well, Hoover performed. He would have fought. That was the point. He would have defied a few people. He would have scared them to death. He had a file on everybody. [Italics added.]
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Highlight(pink) - Location 3004 Thus, those who employ secret police agencies must monitor them, to be sure they are not acquiring too much power. Here a sinister infinite regress enters the game. Any elite second order police must be, also, subject to infiltration, or to acquiring “too much power” in the opinion of its masters. And so it, too, must be monitored, by a secret-police-of-the-third-order. In brief, once a government has n orders of secret police spying on each other, all are potentially suspect, and to be safe, a secret police of order n plus 1 must be created. And so on, forever. In practice, of course, this cannot regress to mathematical infinity, but only to the point where every citizen is spying on every other citizen or until the funding runs out.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 3010 National Security, in practice, must always fall short of the logically Empedoclean infinite regress it requires for perfect “security.” In that gap between the ideal of “One Nation under surveillance with wire taps and urine tests for all,” and the strictly limited real situation of finite resources and finite funding, there is ample encouragement for paranoias of all sorts to flourish, both among the citizens and among the police.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 3014 THE BURDEN OF OMNISCIENCE or: Why you can’t reach the Court or the Castle in Kafka’s allegories
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Highlight(pink) - Location 3016 In spying-and-hiding transactions, worry leads to more worry and suspicion leads to more suspicion. The very act of participating, however unwillingly, in the secret police game—even as victim, or citizen being monitored—will eventually produce all the classic symptoms of clinical paranoia. The agent knows who he is spying on, but he never knows who is spying on him. Could it be his wife, his mistress, his secretary, the newsboy, the Good Humor man?
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Highlight(pink) - Location 3020 If there is a secret police at all, in any nation, every branch and department of government, and institutions which are not even admitted to be parts of government, becomes suspect in the eyes of cautious and intelligent people as a possible front for, or tunnel to, the secret police. That is, the more shrewd will recognize that something bearing the label of HEW or even International Silicon and Pencil might actually be the CIA or NSA in disguise.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 3023 In such a deception network, conspiracy theories proliferate. Rumor is necessary, it has been found, when people cannot find “official” news sources that can be trusted to tell them what is really going on. The present author, having worked in the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the legalize-pot movement and other dissident causes, has repeatedly been approached by friend A with dire warnings that friend B is almost certainly a secret police agent, only to be told later and independently by friend C that friend A is a secret police agent. It requires delicate neurological know-how to keep one’s sense of humor in the secret police matrix.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 3028 The more omnipresent the secret police, the more likely it is that intelligent men and women will regard the government with fear and loathing. The government, on discovering that growing numbers of citizens regard it with fear and loathing, will increase the size and powers of the secret police, to protect itself. The infinite regress again appears.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 3032 The only alternative was suggested sarcastically by playwright Bertolt Brecht (who was hounded by U.S. secret police as a communist and by East German secret police, later, as not sufficiently communist). “If the government doesn’t trust the people,” Brecht asked innocently, “why doesn’t it dissolve them and elect a new people?” No way has yet been invented to elect a new people, so the government will instead spy on the existing people with increased vigor.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 3036 Every secret police organization is engaged in both the collection of information and the production of misinformation, euphemistically called “disinformation.” That is, you score points in the secret police game both by hoarding signals (information units)—hiding facts from competitors—and by foisting false signals (fake information units) on the other players. This creates the situation I call Optimum SNAFU, in which every player has rational (not neurotic) reasons for suspecting that each and all may be trying to deceive him, gull him, con him, dupe him and generally misinform him. As Henry Kissinger is alleged to have said, anybody in Washington who isn’t paranoid must be crazy. Such is the neuro-sociological “logic” of a Disinformation Matrix. It is, as Paul Watzlawik has demonstrated, the logic of schizophrenia.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 3047 Less than ten years after the secret police game was established here by the National Security Act of 1948, the books of Dr. Wilhelm Reich were burned in a New York incinerator by government order. This was a shocking sight to some of us, who remembered that we had recently fought a long war against Nazi Germany for, among other things, their crime “against civilization” of burning books. Shortly thereafter. Dr. William Ivy, former head of a department at Chicago Medical School, was subjected to ten years of legal harassment for espousing a radical cancer cure. More recently, Dr. Timothy Leary was sentenced to 38 years imprisonment for espousing controversial ideas about neurotransmitter chemicals and reimprinting the nervous system. Now there is a war on against holistic physicians.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 3053 It does not matter whether any or all of these “heretics” were right or wrong. Scientific truth is only determined after a generation or more of research; it is not determined by throwing the dissenters in prison or burning their books. The point is that the secret police game immediately creates the social context for a return to the mechanisms of the Holy Inquisition. The intelligence of the whole society—the communication networks through which information is received, decoded and transmitted—is the first casualty.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 3057 every conspiracy regards itself as an affinity group—men and women who share the same goals and work together well. When you and I do it, it is just an affinity group. When that gang over there does it, it is a damnable conspiracy.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 3084 True conspiracy does exist when a group conceals evidence, spreads deliberate misinformation and coerces or terrorizes witnesses. Any affinity group approaches such behavior to the extent that members reinforce each other’s participation in the group reality-tunnel, especially concerning such crucial epistemological matters as what is important enough to notice and discuss as against what is trivial and better ignored. How coercive do we have to be to intimidate witnesses? Most people, as our Snafu Principle explains, are easily led to reporting what an Authority Figure wants to hear.
- Highlight(pink) - Location 3096 It must be emphasized most strongly that both positive and negative visions on all these circuits are common in UFOlogy. It seems that if the Programmers mean us well, they are accidentally doing ill to many: and if they mean us ill, as Dr. Vallee thinks, they are accidentally doing well to some of us. But this is true of all brain-change technology. It seems that Vallee’s monistic conspiracy theory is inadequate, as monistic conspiracy theories are inadequate in politics. It is more likely that the UFO experience, like the other brain-change experiences we have studied, are sometimes spontaneous and sometimes programmed; and that there are rival gangs of programmers with radically different goals in mind for humanity.
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EXERCIZES
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Start collecting evidence that your phone is bugged.
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Everybody gets a letter occasionally that is slightly damaged. Assume that somebody is opening your mail and clumsily resealing it.
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Look around for evidence that your co-workers or neighbors think you’re a bit queer and are planning to have you committed to a mental hospital.
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Try living a whole week with the program, “Everybody likes me and tries to help me achieve all of my goals.”
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Try living a whole month with the program, “I have chosen to be aware of this particular reality.”
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Try living a day with the program “I am God playing at being a human being. I created every reality I notice.” Assume that “GOD” is the answer to Da Free John’s question, “Who is the one who is living you now?”
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Try living forever with the metaprogram, “Everything works out more perfectly than I plan it.”
Notes
Total: 7
- The SNAFU principle
- In every authoritarian structure, ones views must accord with their superiors rather than with objective reality in order to prevent oppression
- Every ruler has their preestablished views reinforced by their subordinates because they’re afraid to tell them contrary opinions
- Every secret police agency must be monitored by an infinite regress of other secret police agencies to prevent infiltration or the aquisition of too much power
- Participation in spying-and-hiding transactions will eventually produce the classic symptonms of clinical paranoia
- The secret police create a social context for the return to the mechanisms of the Holy Inquisition
- Every conspiracy regards itself as an affinity group