{"id":21787,"date":"2013-08-22T14:31:08","date_gmt":"2013-08-22T19:31:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=21787"},"modified":"2013-08-22T14:31:08","modified_gmt":"2013-08-22T19:31:08","slug":"exercises-in-guerrilla-ontology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/08\/22\/exercises-in-guerrilla-ontology\/","title":{"rendered":"Exercises in &#8220;guerrilla ontology&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>An excerpt from Jesse Walker&#8217;s new book <em>The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory<\/em> has been posted at <a href=\"http:\/\/disinfo.com\/2013\/08\/robert-anton-wilson-operation-mindfuck\/\" target=\"_blank\"><em>disinformation<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>[Robert Anton] Wilson laid out the basic instructions for Operation Mindfuck in a memo sent to several friends (including [Paul] Krassner). Participants were \u201cto circulate all rumors contributed by other members,\u201d and they were \u201cto attribute all national calamities, assassinations or conspiracies to the other member-groups.\u201d The one great risk, he cautioned, was that \u201cthe Establishment might be paranoid enough to believe some wild legend started by one of us and thereupon round up all of us for killing Abraham Lincoln.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>So they sent a letter on Bavarian Illuminati stationery to the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, just to confirm that \u201cwe\u2019ve taken over the Rock Music business. But you\u2019re still so na\u00efve. We took over the business in the 1800s. Beethoven was our first convert.\u201d Robert Welch of the John Birch Society got a letter informing him that Gary Allen was an Illuminati agent. When a New Orleans jury refused to convict one of the men Jim Garrison blamed for the JFK killing, Garrison\u2019s booster Art Kunkin of the leftist <em>Los Angeles Free Press<\/em> received a missive from the \u201cOrder of the Phoenix Angel\u201d revealing that the jurors were all members of the Illuminati. The telltale sign, the letter explained, was that none of them had a left nipple.<\/p>\n<p>The Discordians planted stories about the secret society in various leftist, libertarian, and hippie publications, introducing the Illuminati to the counterculture. \u201cWe accused everybody of being in the Illuminati,\u201d Wilson recalled. \u201cNixon, Johnson, William Buckley, Jr., ourselves, Martian invaders, all the conspiracy buffs, <em>everybody<\/em>.\u201d But they<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>did not regard this as a hoax or prank in the ordinary sense. We still considered it guerrilla ontology.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>My personal attitude was that if the New Left wanted to live in the particular tunnel-reality of the hard-core paranoid, they had an absolute right to that neurological choice. I saw Discordianism as the Cosmic Giggle Factor, introducing so many alternative paranoias that everybody could pick a favorite, if they were inclined that way. I also hoped that some less gullible souls, overwhelmed by this embarrassment of riches, might see through the whole paranoia game and decide to mutate to a wider, funnier, more hopeful reality-map.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An excerpt from Jesse Walker&#8217;s new book The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory has been posted at disinformation: [Robert Anton] Wilson laid out the basic instructions for Operation Mindfuck in a memo sent to several friends (including [Paul] Krassner). Participants were \u201cto circulate all rumors contributed by other members,\u201d and they were \u201cto [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,57,10,28],"tags":[127,299],"class_list":["post-21787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-humour","category-liberty","category-media","tag-conspiracytheories","tag-paranoia"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5Fp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21787"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21787\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21789,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21787\/revisions\/21789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}