Natural Law, Or Don't Put A Rubber On Your Willy And Other Writings From A Natural Outlaw: Or Don't Put A Rubber On Your Willy, And Other Writings From A Natural Outlaw



Natural Law

or don’t put a rubber

on your willy

and other writings

from a natural outlaw

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Robert Anton Wilson

Edited by Chad Nelson



Copyright © 1999 Robert Anton Wilson

All rights reserved. No part of this book, in part or in whole, may be reproduced, transmitted, or utilized, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except for brief quotations in critical articles, books and reviews.

Print: ISBN: 978-1-952746-10-9

eBook: ISBN: 978-1-952746-11-6

First Edition 1999

Second Edition 2021, Hilaritas Press

eBook Version 1.0 – 2021, Hilaritas Press

Cover Design by amoeba

eBook design by Pelorian Digital

Hilaritas Press, LLC.

P.O. Box 1153

Grand Junction, Colorado 81502

www.hilaritaspress.com



Robert Anton Wilson

Photo by Duncan Harvey

Warning: The Attorney General has determined that this book may be hazardous to your dogma.

Neither the author nor the publisher will be held accountable for the use or misuse of the information contained in this book.

The laws of God, the laws of Man

He may keep who will, and can;

Not I: let God and Man decree

Laws for themselves and not for me.

– A.E. Housman

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Acknowledgements

Many thanks to all who enthusiastically offered to share their RAW material, without which this collection would not be possible. Specifically, Paul Krassner, who generously agreed to let Hilaritas Press use any of the articles from RAW in The Realist, Sy Sarfansky, founder and editor of The Sun, author John Higgs, KBOO Community Radio, and especially Victor Koman, publisher of KoPubCo.com, a treasure trove for Wilson fans. Victor reflected on having met RAW with an anecdote too good to omit:

RAW was a fun guy, even though he tried to look serious and mystical in photos. Never took critics (or acolytes) seriously. I and some of my friends visited him and Arlen. Arlen was a very sweet Mother Earth type, too, who gave each of us a small potted Aloe Vera cactus, which I still have, now grown large and in several pots.

Enormous gratitude to Martin Wagner (RAWilsonFans.de), Mike Gathers (RAWilsonFans.org), and Tom Jackson (RAWIllumination.net) for their efforts to keep Wilson's work alive and evolving through their respective websites. I think I speak for many students of Wilson whose scholarship would be sorely lacking without their work.

Finally, special thanks to Tom Jackson and Jesse Walker who were instrumental in their editorial and conceptual insights.

– Chad Nelson, editor

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Happy Maybe Day by John Higgs

Introduction to the 2021 Edition– by Chad Nelson

Natural Law, or Don’t Put a Rubber on Your Willy

Political Myth and Self-Hypnosis

The Wrath of Rothbard

Smith Ex Cathedra

Law in Science and Theology

Faith and Deep Belief

Metaphysics Without God

Natural Law as Ventriloquism

On Sodomizing Camels

What Is Against Nature?

Why Not Violate Nature?

The Individual vs. the Abstract

Toward a Conclusion Almost

Sleep-Walking and Hypnotism

Other Writings from a Natural Outlaw

Sex Education for the Modern Liberal Adult

Notes of a Skeptical Mystic

Don’t Be Afraid of Black Magick

The Compleat Skeptic

Skepticism and Solipsism

Neurological Relativism

A New Writer: F.W. Nietzsche

Dreams Without End

The Semantics of Good & Evil

KBOO-FM Interview

In Doubt We Trust

I OPENING

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Happy Maybe Day

By John Higgs

originally published in The Guardian

on July 23rd, 2009

Join me in celebrating a day of not being sure about anything. But don't expect the Certain to thank you for it.

Today is Maybe Day, a day inspired by the late writer Robert Anton Wilson. It was his hope that on this day people of all creeds and beliefs would come together and chant, Jesus is the only son of God, maybe Hear O Israel, the Lord thy God is one, maybe and There's no God but Allah, maybe, and maybe Mohammed is his prophet. At this point the world would suddenly become a far saner place.

Of course, it is not necessary to congregate to celebrate Maybe Day. It is not even necessary to say those words out loud. Simply reading the words in a newspaper or a blog is enough to participate, and in that spirit may I personally thank you for joining in and making Maybe Day 2009 such a success.

But be careful: the Wars of the Certain rage around us. As Wilson pointed out, certitude is seized by some minds, not because there is any philosophical justification for it, but because such minds have an emotional need for certitude. By celebrating Maybe Day you risk abuse from those people, the Certain, who object to the unsure, the sceptical or the deeply confused. In The God Delusion, to give one example, Richard Dawkins engages with the monotheistic viewpoint with argument, but he dismisses agnostics with insults. They are, in Dawkins' view, the theological equivalent of the Lib-Dems, namby-pamby, mushy pap, weak tea, weedy, pallid fence-sitters.

To sympathise with the Certain for a moment, they do not have it easy. There are billions of people on this planet and they all have wildly differing ideas about politics, ethics, theology, art and science. It is very hard for the Certain to insist that their own position is the only right, true and undeniable one, especially if they posses a basic knowledge of mathematics and probability. You can rationalise away this problem by deciding that the rest of the world is basically composed of idiots, but it is rarely a good idea to admit this publicly. We live in a culture where megalomania is frowned upon.

Then there was the relentless march against certainty that took place in the 20th century. The work of Einstein, Joyce, Picasso, Heisenberg, Leary, Jung, Lorenz and countless others showed that we do not possess a single model of our universe that can account for all that we find around us. Instead, we have a number of contradictory models, each with their own strengths and flaws, and we must decide which is the most practical to adopt for our current needs. Our task, therefore, is to keep testing those models, to evaluate probabilities and to reject once-treasured ideas when more suitable replacements are found. This is not to say that all models are equally valid; rather, it is to say that all models should be recognised as incomplete, flawed and useful only to a point. To quote Robert Anton Wilson again, I don't believe anything, but I have many suspicions.

Maybe Day allows us all to cast off our certainties, if only for one day. It is a day when you can allow yourself to be sceptical of your favoured models without any danger of damage to your ego. The Certain are invited to climb up on the agnostics' fence and join them for a cup of their famous weak tea and a plateful of mushy pap. By sitting up on the fence, they'll be able to see the whole territory. Maybe the Certain will be surprised by this view. Maybe they will see that the important question is not which side of the fence they should defend, but what idiot put the fence there in the first place, and exactly who benefits from leaving it up?

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Introduction to the

2021 Edition

by Chad Nelson

Aggression is simply another name for government. Aggression, invasion, government are interchangeable terms. The essence of government is control, or the attempt to control. He who attempts to control another is a governor, an aggressor, an invader . . .

–Benjamin Tucker

There is no governor anywhere: you are all absolutely free.

–Hugh Crane

Each July 23rd, I celebrate Maybe Day with an immersive dive into Robert Anton Wilson’s declared philosophy of model agnosticism. One recent non-Wilsonian addition I have added to the day’s reading list is the preceding essay by John Higgs, Happy Maybe Day, a punchy and succinct summary of Wilson’s agnostic worldview. I usually share the Higgs piece when trying to convey the liberatory concept of model agnosticism, which suggests never regarding anyone’s representation of the world with absolute belief or complete denial – especially your own. To the uninitiated, it sounds too mundane to call a philosophy, but as Wilson says, there is joy ineffable in freedom from fixed ideas.

If Happy Maybe Day piques someone's interest, I often refer them to Natural Law, or Don't Put a Rubber on Your Willy – for my money, Wilson’s most compact, yet thorough summary of model agnosticism, with as many aha-moments as any of his more complex works. Its subject matter, Natural Law, is the belief that there is an inherent, discoverable moral order governing mankind – one found through the exercise of man’s reason – at least if you ask its more atheistic proponents. Wilson’s basic contention is that Natural Law seems neither provable nor disprovable – a meaningless proposition, similar to other abstractions with capital letters. Natural Law, he says, appears to be a map that does not correspond to any real territory.

Maps can be tremendously useful until we cease to recognize our own creative role in the cartographic process. Natural Law proponents, like other authoritarians, use this word-and-symbol hypnosis – deliberately confusing map and territory – as a rhetorical weapon to mandate that others abide by their moral standards because they are natural, and by extension, unquestionable.

Wilson pulls the ethereal idea of Natural Law down from the heavens and into the clandestine laboratory of guerilla ontology, where we can dissect it. This is where Wilson always seems to succeed: deconstructing anthropocentric gods like Natural Law, reducing them to the point where we can see their contradictions, have a good laugh at them, and understand that we need not pay them any mind. For when you realize the world of the Certain, the dogmatic masses, all varieties of Right Men we must constantly contend with, are as clueless as you are (They don't have the faintest idea! chortled Terence McKenna), it becomes incredibly hard to be mad at them, to judge them, really, to do anything short of having compassion for their predicament. The predicament we all share – that of being shackled by belief.

It is an understandable predicament. Belief has much to offer. For some, it represents comfort. By adopting a common narrative, the believer finds community, a way to fit in. For others belief is a more sinister tool: a means to achieving power for those cunning enough to become High Priests of their community’s Belief Systems. Those who question the paradoxes of Belief Systems risk being labeled heretics and getting excommunicated from the tribe. We can see this play out in the pages of New Libertarian, where Wilson’s essay first appeared. Wilson’s detractors make it a point to revoke his libertarian card over his ideological heresy. Wilson has no need for the label though, because for him, model agnosticism allows a closer union between the individual and the world out there than any Belief System possibly could.

Even many heretics are content to simply adopt alternative Belief Systems. Model agnosticism takes us further out on the edge than mere heterodoxy, to a space where all Belief Systems become tools to be sampled and discarded as suits one’s particular situation. This kind of perspectival ethics (in contrast to universal, thou shalt morality) channels one of Wilson’s major influences, Friedrich Nietzsche, about whom Wilson once remarked:

He tears down so many accepted ideas that you’re left floating in a kind of nihilistic void. Many people find this terrifying. I find it exhilarating, and I manage to recover from it every time I subject myself to re-reading something by Nietzsche.

For Wilson, releasing all beliefs in favor of uncertainty, curiosity, investigation, experimentation, and constant revision, jarring though it may seem at first, results in an I Opening. A recreated, more expansive sense of oneself, yet more stripped-down and authentically you.

But how does one get from A to B? It is no small task to deprogram a lifetime’s worth of dogma. The easiest way to be brainwashed is to get born, says Wilson in his interview with Sy Safransky. The works in this volume alternate between diagnosing the condition and prescribing remedies for a return to one’s original self. The journey can be slow, taking place over long periods of time, assisted by subtle neuro-metaprogramming exercises. Or it may be accelerated by dramatically altering one’s consciousness using various yogic techniques, entheogens, and other radical shock therapies passed down to us by generations of mystics and renegade misfits like Wilson. But don’t take his word for it. Try it yourself.

~~~

Natural Law originally appeared in the April 1985 issue of New Libertarian as part of a larger debate over the topic which spanned two issues of the journal. Wilson’s essay was one of six, he being one of the two Natural Outlaws (a term coined by one of his opponents, Murray Rothbard) who bucked conventional libertarian thinking on the matter.

Wilson slyly plays the role of humble philosopher, holding open the possibility that his opponents may well be right, and practicing what he has elsewhere called good semantic hygiene. That is, limiting his language to descriptions of his own phenomenological experience, and not overstating his case. Wilson casts enough doubt on Natural Law that I have to imagine the New Libertarian audience was a hung jury. Which, when you really think about it, should not come as a great surprise. Believers have an almost insurmountably high burden of proof, no matter what the Belief System. Poke a few holes in one’s B.S. and it is reduced from certainty to mere probability. And that is Wilson’s position, basically. That life is more accurately measured in probabilities.

Those Who Know do not like this quantum anarchy. In their eyes, the uncertain are tantamount to namby-pamby, mushy pap, weak tea, weedy, pallid fence-sitters, notes Higgs, quoting Richard Dawkins. At one point in the debate, one of the Natural Law proponents, George H. Smith, offers a brief but telling acknowledgment, stating that Natural Law remains a vital, ongoing discipline. One that, as with every intellectual discipline, is bound to be debated and refined as knowledge progresses. Here, Smith actually seems to bolster model agnosticism, a philosophy which embraces the never-ending flux of life.

~~~

A concluding note on the other essays included in this volume:

Students of Wilson inevitably come across many of his countless consciousness-expanding articles, interviews, short stories, and poems which never found their way into book form. While the additional entries in this volume represent, for me, the best of Wilson's aggravated case of agnosticism and tie-in nicely with Natural Law, or Don’t Put a Rubber on Your Willy, I realize that they are also simply some of my personal favorites which I am grateful will now see the light of day, thanks to the good folks at Hilaritas Press.

Some of the selections may seem more directly in line with the ideas presented in Natural Law – others, perhaps more tenuous. Wilson sometimes described his work as an attempt to synthesize General Semantics and Zen Buddhism. That fusion seems to be the most prominent thread running through all of these essays, if one must map them with a coherent thematic scheme. If at first you don't see the relationship between them, give them a few reads and let them sink in. I can't say for certain, but I suspect you too will connect the dots.

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Natural Law,

or Don’t Put a Rubber on Your Willy

POLITICAL MYTH

AND SELF-HYPNOSIS

A rose by any other name

Would never, never smell the same

And cunning is the nose that knows

An onion that's been called a rose.

– Wendell Johnson,

Your Most Enchanted Listener

Nobody ever wins a debate with an editor in his own magazine, for the same reason that nobody has ever persuaded the Pope of his own fallibility.

Three years ago, Loompanics published The Myth of Natural Rights by L.A. Rollins. In 1985, the New Libertarian magazine (1515 W. MacArthur Blvd, #19, Costa Mesa, CA 92626) published extensive debate on the very interesting issues Rollins raised. I participated in that debate, and the experience was enlightening, although not in the Zen Buddhist sense. Briefly, the editor, Samuel Edward Konkin III, did not print my article as I wrote it; instead he printed the article intercut with a running commentary by himself, in the form of numerous footnotes attempting to rebut all my major points.

In the ordinary civilized decorum of debate, a gentleman is expected to wait until his opponent's time is up before replying. Interrupting your opponent continually is called heckling and is regarded as boorish and uncivil. I could not regard Konkin's interpolations in my article as anything else but literary heckling, and I was curious. Ordinarily, Konkin seems a civilized person. I wondered about the psychology of the heckler and why it can afflict even the educated person if his or her prejudices are sufficiently affronted.

Basically, I think, the heckler fears his opponent. He thinks that the opponent's ideas are a clear and present danger, as it were, and that they must be drowned out before they seduce anyone. You generally know when you have trodden upon somebody's deepest prejudices because their civility deserts them and they begin interrupting excitedly and adopting the heckler persona.

In thinking this over, and considering also the emotional and almost hysterical nature of other responses during the debate on Natural Law sparked by Rollins, I have realized that there seem to be deep religious passions involved in this issue, and that my article in New Libertarian only scratched the surface of the psychology and neurology of the Natural Law cult. I have therefore decided to rewrite my thoughts in more depth and publish them where the Natural Law cultists can only denounce them after they have been read and cannot heckle and distract the reader while they are being read.

Curiously, while the Natural