← The New Inquisition Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science
The New Inquisition Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science Chapter 5. Chaos and the Abyss
Author: Robert Anton Wilson Publisher: Grand Junction, Colorado: Hilaritas Press. Publish Date: 1986 Review Date: 2022-9-3 Status:⌛️
Annotations
-
Highlight(pink) - Page 158 · Location 3233 Right Man syndrome.
-
Highlight(pink) - Page 158 · Location 3234 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.
-
Highlight(pink) - Page 158 · Location 3252 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).
-
Highlight(pink) - Page 158 · Location 3254 They also have a statistical inclination toward being unwilling to experiment with “foreign” or “exotic” foods, and they regard philosophical speculation with extreme hostility.
-
Highlight(pink) - Page 163 · Location 3360 ❗️ 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?
-
Highlight(pink) - Page 163 · Location 3364 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.
-
Highlight(pink) - Page 168 · Location 3469 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.
-
Highlight(pink) - Page 168 · Location 3477 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.
-
Highlight(pink) - Page 168 · Location 3479 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.
-
Highlight(pink) - Page 168 · Location 3482 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?
-
Highlight(pink) - Page 169 · Location 3488 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.
-
Highlight(pink) - Page 169 · Location 3495 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.)
-
Highlight(pink) - Page 169 · Location 3498 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.)
-
Highlight(pink) - Page 169 · Location 3501 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.
-
Highlight(pink) - Page 169 · Location 3504 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.
-
Highlight(pink) - Page 169 · Location 3505 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.”
-
Highlight(pink) - Page 170 · Location 3513 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.
-
Highlight(pink) - Page 170 · Location 3515 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.
-
Highlight(pink) - Page 170 · Location 3519 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.
-
Highlight(pink) - Page 170 · Location 3520 Sociobiologically: Domesticated primates do not want their territorial marks erased.
-
Highlight(pink) - Page 173 · Location 3591❗️ 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.
-
Highlight(pink) - Page 174 · Location 3601 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.
-
Highlight(pink) - Page 174 · Location 3611 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.
-
Highlight(pink) - Page 175 · Location 3627 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.
-
Highlight(pink) - Page 175 · Location 3632 Try to think, just for a moment, Persinger-Lafreniere Po Bell’s Theorem
Notes
Amount: 1