The United States of Paranoia (29 page)

That same year he contributed some pages to another book, though in this case I am using the word “book” loosely.
The
Principia Discordia, or How the West Was Lost
was a collection of antireligious, antistatist, and generally antiauthoritarian humor assembled by Hill; only five copies were printed. It included an early attempt at a Discordian mission statement. “Why are the secrets of the atom used to promote chaos among men? Why are the most generous motives of men played upon to produce slavery? Why do otherwise sane people attend church on Sunday?” asked a passage contributed by Thornley. “The purpose of The Discordian Society is to provide false, comforting answers to questions of this sort; to give mystical reasons for the disorder around us; to promote unworkable principles of discord—in short, to provide the world with a workshop for the insane, thus keeping them out of mischief as Presidents, Ambassadors, Priests, Ministers, and other Dictators.”
37

As this and other texts circulated among the church’s growing circle, Hill and Thornley and their collaborators kept adding to the new faith’s mythos. Discordians, they decided, were discouraged from praying, prohibited from eating hot dog buns, and encouraged to break the prohibition on eating hot dog buns. And every Discordian was a pope. Or at least all the male Discordians were. The women were called momes.

Much of this appeared in the radically revised 1969 edition of the
Principia
, now subtitled
How I Found Goddess and What I Did to Her When I Found Her
, which had a print run of much more than five and would be reprinted several times in the ensuing decades. It was silly stuff, but some serious ideas could be spotted floating behind the jokes. Order, the Discordians argued, is in the eye of the beholder. “The real reality is there,” the
Principia
explained, “but everything you KNOW about ‘it’ is in your mind and yours to do with as you like. Conceptualization is art, and YOU ARE THE ARTIST.”
38

It was natural that the Discordians would become fascinated by conspiracy theories, the fringier the better. What better example could there be of a mind organizing signals into an intricate imaginary order than a crank’s mad attempts to explain the irrational world? As one Discordian pope put it, “Nesta Webster had all sorts of spooks in her head (I always imagine her looking under the bed for Illuminati agents at night), but she was so modest that she didn’t recognize herself as the artist creating all that. She imagined it was going on outside her.”
39

The pope in question was Robert Anton Wilson, a novelist, journalist, and essayist who wrote frequently about conspiracy theories. All three streams flowed into his work: He was a Fortean, a Discordian, and a regular contributor to
The
Realist
. You could see those influences in the literary method he called
guerrilla ontology
. Since ontology is the study of being, he explained, “the guerilla approach is to so mix the elements of each book that the reader must decide on each page ‘How much of this is real and how much is a put-on?’ ” That, he said, was the “basic technique of all my books,” be they nominally fiction or nominally nonfiction.
40
It was a perfect fit for the ironic style.

Wilson’s writing was marked both by skepticism and by a playful willingness to suspend his skepticism. He believed conspiracies were “standard mammalian politics,”
41
but he also recognized, as in his comments about Webster, that conspiracy theories often revealed more about the theorist than they did about the actual objects of the theorizing. He was also extremely antiauthoritarian in his politics, and this attitude made him both more willing to believe that powerful people were engaged in criminal plots and less willing to believe that the conspirators were capable of carrying out those plots competently. In 1975, he and Robert Shea would publish
Illuminatus!
, a three-volume novel that both embodied the ironic style and played a large role in bringing the Illuminati into contemporary popular culture.

Robert Edward Wilson—he traded the Edward for an Anton after he started writing professionally—was born in Brooklyn in 1932. Wilson’s father lost his job not long after the boy was born, and the family had to move to a coal-heated bungalow on an unpaved road in Gerrison Beach, an Irish Catholic enclave on Long Island. In that place and time, Wilson later recalled, the angry unemployed “were divided into two hostile camps. The first group said The Depression resulted from the machinations of the Wicked Jews, but the other group said it resulted from the selfish scheming of the Wicked Republicans. My father was in the second group. Despite their ideological differences, both groups of heretics voted for Roosevelt religiously.” Well,
almost
all of them voted for Roosevelt religiously: There were a few odd ducks such as Wilson’s uncle Mick, an acolyte of the anti-Semitic radio priest Charles Coughlin. Mick Wilson thought the president “was actually a rich Jew, who had changed his name from Rosenfelt,” his nephew later recalled.
42
When Wilson’s dad joined the CIO, his uncle took to singing, “Hi-ho, hi-ho / I joined the CIO / I paid my dues to a bunch of Jews / Hi-ho, hi-ho, hi-ho.”
43

Wilson’s dad and uncle did agree on one thing: Neither one wanted the United States to enter World War II. Mick still suffered from the poison gas he had encountered as a soldier in the previous big war, and neither he nor his brother wanted Americans to be sent off to battle again.

Wilson contracted polio as a child, and his doctors told his parents that he would be paralyzed for life. He overcame that, thanks to the Sister Kenny method, a controversial treatment developed by an Australian nurse who is now regarded as a pioneer of physical therapy. As a result, he wrote, “the major event of my early childhood consisted of being cured of a major crippling illness which left most of its victims permanently confined to wheelchairs,
by a method which all recognized Experts regarded as unscientific and useless
. This instilled me with certain doubts about Experts.”
44
The objects of his doubt soon grew to encompass the Catholicism that dominated his neighborhood. When he went to Brooklyn Technical High School and encountered the liberals who taught civics there, he found he had doubts about some of their ideas, too—particularly their support for Franklin Roosevelt’s war. He started reading antiwar historians, despite the disapproval of his teachers.

He also, at age seventeen, became a Trotskyist, finding that the Trots “agreed with me about how capitalist wars get started, but they weren’t anti-semitic nuts like Uncle Mick.”
45
That phase didn’t last long. Though he was the only member of his party cell who actually came from a working-class background, the others kept accusing him of having “bourgeois tendencies.” Fed up, he left the organization and adopted the ideas of Ayn Rand instead. He quickly discarded those dogmas, too.
46

Wilson was working his way through a variety of ideologies, incorporating individual ideas that he liked but growing steadily more suspicious of large-scale belief systems in general. (In later years, he would frequently point out that “belief system” can be abbreviated as “b.s.”) He found that he had absorbed Uncle Mick’s distrust of banks and governments even as he recoiled from his uncle’s bigotry and ideological certainty.
47
He knew he didn’t like the form of capitalism that prevailed in the United States in the middle of the century, and he knew he didn’t like the form of socialism that had taken hold in the eastern bloc either. He started investigating alternative systems, looking for ideas that “transcend the hackneyed debate between monopoly Capitalism and totalitarian Socialism.”
48
His favorite was the individualist anarchism promoted by Benjamin Tucker and other nineteenth-century libertarians.

He was also intrigued by the theories of Wilhelm Reich, a radical psychiatrist who had fallen prey to the paranoia of the postwar era. Reich had already, in Wilson’s admiring words, been “expelled from the International Psychoanalytical Society for being too Marxist, from the Communist Party for being too Freudian, and from the Socialist Party for being too anarchistic.”
49
After arriving in the United States in 1939, Reich attracted sensationalist press coverage by preaching sexual liberation and touting the allegedly curative properties of “orgone,” a cosmic energy that the psychiatrist believed he had discovered. Before long there was a Food and Drug Administration investigation and then an injunction ordering the destruction not just of Reich’s orgone accumulators—the devices that had attracted the FDA’s attention—but of all of Reich’s books that invoked orgone energy or “allied material.” When Reich did not cooperate, he was charged with contempt and sentenced to two years in prison, where he died.

Historians often attribute the psychiatrist’s legal difficulties to the witch-hunting atmosphere engendered by McCarthyism. It is possible that they are partly right; it’s not hard to imagine intersections between the Red scare and the Reich scare. But as with Fredric Wertham’s anticomics crusade, the driving forces behind the war on Reich hailed from the left. Wertham himself denounced the psychiatrist in
The New Republic
in 1946, describing one of Reich’s books as “exactly what the fascists preach.”
50
The next year in the same magazine, the prominent consumerist Mildred Edie Brady pointed to Reich and his “cult of no little influence” to remind psychiatrists of “the responsibility of their profession to discipline itself if it is not to be disciplined by the state.”
51
Her article inspired the FDA’s investigation.

Brady had been on the receiving end of an inquisition in 1941, having lost her job at the Office of Price Administration when Representative Martin Dies charged the agency with harboring Communist sympathizers.
52
Now one of her articles set into motion the process that culminated with Reich imprisoned at the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary and his books dumped into an incinerator. Disciplined by the state, indeed.
53

It was the incineration that caught Wilson’s attention. He recoiled at the thought that the U.S. government was burning books, and he decided to seek out Reich’s forbidden writings and judge the ideas for himself. He came away from the experience enchanted by the writer. Reich’s politics mixed easily with Wilson’s interest in antiauthoritarian ideas; Reich’s ideas about orgone meshed with Wilson’s growing interest in Buddhism, Taoism, and other sorts of mysticism; and Reich’s calls for sexual liberation offered a link between the two, a way Wilson could connect political and psychological repression.

By that time Wilson had married the playwright Arlen Riley, adopted her two children, and sired two more. He worked at a series of straight jobs to support his family while writing after hours for
The Realist
and other alternative outlets. Sometimes he landed jobs that allowed him to write for a living, though the nature of that writing varied considerably from one employer to another. In Passaic, New Jersey, he churned out ad copy for the Popular Club Plan. In Lane’s End, Ohio, he lived on a homestead and edited a decentralist journal that had been called
Balanced Living
. (He changed the name to
Way Out
, amped up the magazine’s anarchist and Reichian content, started publishing poetry by Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer, and alienated a lot of readers.) Back in New York, he was a staffer at
Fact
, where he profiled both
Mad
and
The National Inquirer
.

And for three months he worked for a company he called “the country’s leading schlock factory,” editing three pulp magazines and writing an ESP column for a tabloid paper. “I read the predictions that had appeared over the past several months,” he later recounted, “and began grinding out my own predictions, out of the blue. It was surprisingly easy. Among other things, I predicted that Lyndon Johnson would be assassinated, that anti-American riots would occur in another Latin American nation, that the $15,000,000 pornography collection on the closed shelves of a large public library would be robbed by a mob led by a defrocked priest ‘well known in occult circles,’ that flying saucers would be in the news again, that shocking discoveries would be made at Stonehenge throwing new light on ancient Egypt and revealing how man came to be on earth (ESP bugs, I reasoned, are generally also the types who believe that man was deposited here by flying saucers and that Egypt is full of occult mysteries), that peanut butter would be found to contain radioactive isotopes, and that a Hollywood star would be involved in a sex-and-LSD orgy.” Soon he was getting fan letters. “Many of them congratulated me on the number of my predictions that came true, although actually
none
of them ever came true.”
54

His big break came in 1966, after
Playboy
spotted a scathing attack on Hugh Hefner that Wilson had written for
The Realist
a few years before and was impressed enough to offer him a job. (Or at least that was how Wilson described the hiring process to Paul Krassner.) Wilson moved to Chicago, where the magazine put him in charge of the Playboy Forum, a letters column that dealt frequently with individual rights and abuses of power. After he published a discussion of spying by the U.S. Post Office, the editors of the libertarian newsletter
Innovator
sent him an issue featuring a story about private alternatives to the post office.
55
Not long afterward,
Innovator
received and printed a letter about private police and arbitration agencies, signed by one “Simon Moon.”
56
Moon was really Wilson, and
Innovator
’s editors included Kerry Thornley. The two began a correspondence, and Thornley introduced his new friend to Discordianism, which Wilson immediately embraced.