Introduction to the 1997 Edition

This book dates from a barbaric, almost pre-historic age—over twenty years ago. You will realize how far back in the abyss of time that near-Feudal epoch looks in retrospect when I tell you that I wrote the entire manuscript on a typewriter. Of course, we had electric lights instead of candles, and the “horseless carriage” had come into general use, but otherwise the so-called advanced nations remained in a primitive industrial economy and few could foresee the Information Age dawning.

Those Eolithic days seem hard to recall now. Nobody but the military and a few universities had access to Internet or the World Wide Web; if I wanted to do research, I had to leave the “typewriter” — a device only a little less archaic than the quill pen—and drive to a library where I’d spend a day taking notes with a pen on a pad. No humans lived in space yet; the Mir space station did not begin construction until 1986, eight years after The Illuminati Papers appeared. Most of what I wrote then seemed as fabulous as Oz or Wonderland to the majority of readers; now, I fear some readers will find parts of this hackneyed—except in the Manhattan Literary Establishment, where these ideas are still considered wild and crazy. (Those New Yorkers still seem to think the latest radical notions are those of Freud and Marx. )

Even the first long (or longish) chapter in this book, “The Abolition of Stupidity,” dealing with intelligence-raising technologies, seemed like fantasy or satire to most 1970s readers. By comparison, if you hunt around the World Wide Web today, you will find over 1000 entries, dealing with DHEA, “Blast,” Hydergine and dozens of other brain-boosting substances. Since I can safely assume most of my readers have Web access by now, let me suggest that you find out how this field has developed by clicking on smart drugs in the Extropian web site at

Back in the ‘70s, most critics did not know what the hell to make out of these pages and generally classified the whole book as science fiction in disguise. Fortunately, readers as a group do not have the rear-view vision that seems required of posh reviewers, and many of them understood me very well. Every year now, and in fact many times a year, I meet people who tell me their choice of career resulted from reading my science faction. (Most of these people went into space engineering, psychopharmacology, life extension research or quantum physics.)

Looking back, I feel a sense of humble astonishment. I seem to have written a 1990s book in the 1970s. Only in the matter of computer networking do I appear to have missed the boat: I knew major changes would come, but I did not know enough about that field to know how rapidly or how totally the cyber-revolution would shake, quake and remake our society. Otherwise, my forecasts of the coming waves of change in space migration, longevity, and automation seem good enough to tempt me to set up shop as a fortune teller. But I did not use any “psychic” powers in my future-scans; I used simple common-sense projections of trends that had become more and more obvious throughout human history.

• Space Migration: Whenever new territory becomes habitable, humans move in, so it did not require shamanic talent to foresee a migration into space.

• Life Extension: Ever since science escaped from the tyranny of the Romish Inquisition, life span has steadily increased, from less than 40 years in the 18th Century, to 50 years at the end of the 19th, to 60 years around 1950, to 73+ for males and 78+ for females in the advanced nations today. With the research on gerontology already underway when I wrote this book, it required no genius to foresee the Life Extension Revolution, in which millions of people now use compounds with a high probability of increasing life span ever further, and thousands of researchers optimistically look forward to breakthroughs that will give us lives that measure centuries rather than decades.

• Intelligence Increase: My crystal ball, however, seems to have been cloudy on the subject of Intelligence Increase. Despite all the people using the “smart drugs” mentioned above, the majority, at least in the U.S., has grown steadily stupider. I attribute this to a deliberate policy of “dumbing down” the population, instigated by our ruling Elite after the donnybrooks and katzenjammerei of the ‘60s taught them that too many educated people represented a real danger to the status quo. Arlen, my wife, often claims that nobody educated since 1975 seems to know anything, and Kurt Vonnegut has made the same observation. I don’t think the situation has gotten quite that bad really: only the majority of Generation X seems to think Einstein invented the telescope or that the Bill of Rights says the government has the right to screw us any way it wants; a saving minority, even among the under-30, seems as bright as the best minds of any generation.

A few sections of this book discuss our nation’s rapid movement toward totalitarianism (perhaps too satirically for such a grim subject; some people thought I was joking. . .) These passages now seem, strangely, rather understated. In this connection, let me cite a recent article by Claire Wolfe¹ which rather clearly shows that our present urine testing by the Piss Police only represents a small part of the Kafkaization of this once-free Republic. Wolfe lists some of the fascist laws enacted by the 104th Congress:

• A law establishing a national database of employed people. After this is implemented, only the homeless, the hermits and the subterraneans will remain free of federal snooping.

• 100 pages of new laws creating scores of new “health care” crimes for departures from A.M.A. dogma. The penalties for such heresy include, but are not limited to, seizure of assets from both doctors and patients.

• Laws allowing confiscation of assets from any escapee who establishes foreign citizenship. (If you run, like the Jews who got out of Nazi Germany, reconcile your-self to leaving everything valuable behind.)

• The largest gun confiscation act in U.S. history.

• Increased funding for the already Gestapo-like Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the people responsible for perpetrating the Waco holocaust. (By the way, have you checked to find out if your church is BATF approved?)

• A law enabling the government to declare any group “terrorist” by fiat, without trial and without appeal. Such groups will then have to turn membership lists over to the Feds.

• Laws allowing secret trials with secret evidence for various classes of defendants.

• A law requiring States to begin issuing driver’s licenses only with security features (such as fingerprints, social security numbers etc.) by October 1st, 2000. You won’t be able to drive without giving the Feds all the data they need to snoop into all your private affairs; if that much surveillance makes you nervous, learn to hoof it.

• A law establishing a national database containing everything your doctor and you say during consultation. If you don’t like the Feds knowing all about your recent bout of the clap, or even about your vaginal yeast infection, you might think of running for the border right away; see the third item above, about forfeiture laws.

If you think this is some of kind of joke or satire that Wolfe or I invented, look up the article I’m citing. Wolfe gives the names and numbers of all these laws. For instance, the last one listed, mandating invasion of the privacy of the doctor’s office, appears in sections 262-264 of HR 3103, the innocently titled Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. Wolfe calls these statutes “land mines” because they are all hidden in bills with similarly innocuous titles.

The amusing thing (if you can still feel amused after reading the above) is that all this legislation was passed by a Republican-dominated Congress, which got elected on a platform promising to “get the government off our backs.” (Wilson’s Fourth Law: Whatever politicians promise before election, they’ll very probably do the opposite after election.) Even funnier, the Republicans still claim that so-called “liberal Democrats” represent the major threat to our liberties.

By the way, has anybody actually seen, heard, touched, or smelled a truly “liberal” democrat in the last 30 years? Or are there any rumors, yarns, or folklore about the survival of that seemingly extinct species emanating from anyone else but the Republicans?

Of course, even before the 104th Congress, you already had to give a urine sample whenever the Piss Police came along, and if any narc liked your country estate, he only had to plant a small amount of cocaine in the pantry to seize the building (and the grounds) from you without a trial. If the deliberate dumbing down of America hadn’t been so successful, the majority of the population would be in open revolt by now; but a nation of sheep submits to the shears, and to the abattoir, without even bleating in alarm.

Indeed, Claire Wolfe, whose summary of recent fascist legislation I have paraphrased, comments wanly:

Wolfe does mention, without endorsing, some of the methods that various brave souls have employed in the attempt to recapture some of our lost liberties—tax refusal; civil disobedience; non-cooperation with the authorities; boycotts; secession efforts; monkey-wrenching; computer hacking; dirty tricks; public shunning of government agents; alternative communities that provide their own medical care and utilities.

Whenever any of these tactics gets enough publicity or causes enough nuisance, the authorities react the way authorities can be expected to react. Never Forget Waco. Never.

Tax refusal, whatever brilliant legal arguments some libertarians produce to justify it, usually provokes confiscation of everything you own, and a jail term usually follows. Civil disobedience and non-cooperation can also land you in the can, or can escalate to Ruby Ridge massacres. Boycotts remain safe, if you can figure out the tactics carefully and have a lot of associates. Monkey-wrenching, computer hacking and dirty tricks remain popular, but also lead to jail if you get caught. Public shunning is both possible and legal; it happens increasingly in places like Idaho, Utah, Montana and Nevada. Alternative drop-out communities are only safe as long as they remain very low profile.

Now maybe you can see why I have so much enthusiasm for civilian space colonization.

That will still take quite a while. Meanwhile, you might consider migrating to crypto-space.

“Crypto-space” is my name for the part of cyberspace presently invisible to government snooping. As T.C. May writes:

In fact, virtual communities with virtual cash already exist in crypto-space. According to the Encyclopedia of Social Inventions,⁴ the first non-interest bearing non-taxable virtual money came into existence in Vancouver in 1983. The idea has not received much publicity, but it spread as far south as San Diego by 1990.

Unlike Fed notes, virtual money—a form of barter—does not require interest, because virtual cash is created by the people who use it for their own convenience. Fed notes, on the other hand, are created precisely to bear interest, at as high a rate as the market will bear. Your share of the national debt is money you owe to the Fed for using their notes, which you have to use until you find the Doorway to Freedom and creep off into crypto-space. And virtual cash is tax-free because the IRS can’t find it.

Evolution proceeds, it seems to me, by challenges which force organisms to get smarter. In a fascist state like Bill Clinton’s U.S.A., the smartest will find ways out of the cage much more effective than the tactics of Randy Weaver on his mountain or the Republic of Texas, or similar groups still seeking freedom within geospace. There is no freedom in geospace. Every square inch has been mapped and claimed by some nation or corporation or syndicate. The only remaining frontier is electronic.

The Internet not only opens the door to freedom just when the Feds seem to have us locked up forever, but it also seems to make “desovereignization,” as Buckminster Fuller called it, inevitable. According to Fuller’s analysis, the Great Pirates—kings, emperors, mikadoes, prime ministers—who seized control of Terra at the beginning of the Bronze Age are now sponsored entities, puppets of finance capitalism. When Fuller wrote Grunch of Giants, it required $100,000,000 to run a campaign for president; it requires even more now, due to inflation. Guess where the politicians of the world get that kind of money, and then you’ll have a good idea who really runs the world today.

Whether the Republicans or Democrats win an election, the Federal Reserve still makes the important decisions; whether the Tories or Labour win in England, the Bank of England remains in control. As Fuller wrote:

For more details of how Fuller expects these informed humans to “desovereignize” the planet, cooperatively “advantaging all without disadvantaging any” through electronic speed-of-light synergy with Internet, see

http://www.teleport.com/~pdx4d/grunch/html.

As I point out in “Celine’s Laws,” later in this volume, authoritarian communication is always blocked by SNAFU; nobody tells the whole truth about anything to those who have the power to jail and kill. Libertarian communication, via Internet, allows for quicker feedback, which will also be more accurate feedback, and Spaceship Earth will begin to move in a sensible way at last, no longer having 150+ Supreme Commanders all steering in different directions.

Until that planetary synergy (called the Global Brain by British philosopher Peter Russell) emerges fully, we still have jury nullification, guaranteed de jure since the Magna Carta and de facto unalienable. When you sit on a jury, no power on earth can force you to find somebody guilty in a case where you believe the law itself is unconstitutional, tyrannous or dangerous to your own civil liberties. Here are a few citations which State Education and the mass media try their damnedest to keep you from ever seeing:

For more details on how juries can protect our civil liberties even when the government is hell-bent on destroying them, see

The Chinese allegedly have a curse which says, “May you live in interesting times.” We undoubtedly live in interesting times, but I don’t find it a curse. As Nietzsche should have said, anything that doesn’t kill me makes me smarter. The evils of the world, which involve massive starvation as well as the erosion of individual liberty I have been discussing, challenge us to use our heads better, and the H.E.A.D. Revolution is what this book is all about.

Turn the page and you’ll find even more reason to feel braced and excited about the problems we confront and our ability to deal with them. Solving problems is one of the highest and most sensual of all our brain functions.

Robert Anton Wilson

Freedom, California

23 May 1997

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1 “Land-Mine Legislation,” by Claire Wolfe, 1997 Summer Supplement, Loompanics Unlimited, Port Towsend WA.

2 “Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities,” tcmay@netcom.com

3 Grabbe, via tcmay above

4 Encyclopedia of Social Inventions, Institute of Social Inventions, London, 1990.

5 Grunch of Giants, by R. Buckminster Fuller, St. Martin’s Press, NY, 1983, p 89.

6 O’Connell v Rex, 1884.

7 Homing v District of Columbia, 138 (1920).

8 US v Moylan, 1969.

9 Law and Contemporary Problems, 43, No 4, 1980.