Fugitive Thoughts: Timothy Leary's Reading of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow

[Quick prefatory remark: This post was actuated by a blogger friend I admire, PQ, who writes with verve and erudition about James Joyce, hip-hop, sports and many other things. He'd just tackled Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow for the first time and wanted to know what I might have to say about Timothy Leary's reading of Pynchon. I've read his Pynchon piece, "The Allure of Gravity's Rainbow and Its Mysterious Author" and it's stellar. We meant for our posts here to be complementary. Let us know what you think! Thanks, - OG]

I wonder if anyone reading this has ever had the same recurring bizarre fantasy that I've had: I become so deeply immersed in the worlds of my reading and books that when what we so laffingly call "the real world" calls me away, I curse inwardly...and fantasize about Reading In Prison. I capitalize that because it seemed to demand it. It's such a crazy thought and I've only spent one night in a jail in my life. It was hellish. Does some antique area of my mind think prison is an amniotic desert island, with chow breaks twice a day, or some sort of zen book-meditation retreat?

And then there's the knowledge of what solitary confinement does to a person's brain: every good study I've read likens it to torture. All I think about when I've fantasized about Reading In Prison is the lack of The World calling on me to do, ya know: adult stuff, like work or pay the bills or take out the garbage. I've no doubt been infected by numerous books where writers talk about all the reading they'd done in prison. Not much else to do. I conveniently bracket off ideas about getting killed in a gang fight, or raped, or going mad from lack of intimate contact with other humans, especially females. It's an embarrassing thing to confess here, but I have my reasons, albeit nutty ones.

After Thomas Pynchon published The Crying of Lot 49 in 1966, for what we know, he spent the next six-odd years smoking cannabis in a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan Beach, California, writing the most dazzling, harrowing, encyclopedic epic of the second half of the 20th century, Gravity's Rainbow, which appeared in 1973. The number of scholarly books and articles about that novel runs into the thousands. It's a daunting read. Pynchon's erudition is on the level of Joyce, but his bend toward scientific knowledge seems particularly impressive. Robert Anton Wilson writes, "Pynchon shows considerable knowledge of information theory and other scientific matters generally ignored by the literary intelligentsia. In [Gravity's Rainbow] he uses calculus and quantum mechanics in the way Joyce used Homer in Ulysses."

                                  I own two copies of GR, but neither has this cool cover

While Pynchon worked on his magnum opus, Timothy Leary's years from 1966 to 1973 seemed, in retrospect, to have been imagined by Pynchon. Leary held court in a 100-room mansion loaned to he and his friends by heirs to the Mellon fortune in Dutchess County, upstate New York. He met and dined and became friends and collaborators with an absurd number of celebrities and intellectual luminaries: McLuhan, Jimi Hendrix, John and Yoko, Albert Hoffman, virtually everyone in underground publishing. He was married at Joshua Tree, with a director of TV's "Bonanza" filming. He toured putting on plays about Jesus and Buddha, was in San Francisco at the beginning of the Summer of Love and was recognized everywhere. He was at Altamont. He kept a home in Berkeley all the while he conducted experiments with his own mind at the Millbrook mansion. He became friends with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, based out of Laguna Beach, CA. He traveled to Manhattan to meet with Krassner, Abbie Hoffman, and Jerry Rubin and clashed with their new visions of the Yippies. He went on lecture tours. He debated Dr. Sidney Cohen, who now opposed LSD; earlier Cohen had turned many Hollywood stars to the drug. He watched as the youth of Unistat grew militantly against LBJ and then Nixon as Vietnam escalated. He ramped up a run for Governor of California. He was continually meeting with his legal team to combat bullshit "busts" in Laredo, Texas (where cops "found" two roaches in his car), Orange County (where they pulled him over for no reason, planted a bit of pot in his ashtray and arrested him), and in upstate New York (where G. Gordon Liddy and his goons repeatedly harassed him and his friends). He went to Otto Preminger's apartment and turned him on to LSD, because Preminger wanted to make a movie about it.

Leary went to prison in 1970, escaped thrillingly with the help of the Weather Underground, made it out of the country to Paris, then Algeria, where Eldridge Cleaver - another fugitive from the madness of 1960s Unistat, and seemingly damaged by prison himself - treated Leary and his wife like prisoners. (Cleaver's book Soul On Ice was one of many books that fed my demented Reading In Prison fantasies, no doubt!). Leary escaped Algeria and ended up in Switzerland, feeling at times very much under guard by a millionaire arms dealer Michel Hauchard, who seems one of the more enigmatic  figures in Leary's life during those six-seven years. (My litany barely touches on these incredible years; the interested reader is encouraged to read Leary's autobiography, Flashbacks;  Robert Greenfield's unfriendly but well-researched bio of Leary; and don't miss John Higgs's lucid and delightful take on Leary: I Have America Surrounded. I'm still waiting to get my hands on R. U. Sirius's recent Timothy Leary's Trip Through Time.)

                                      Leary in 1969, by photographer Robert Altman

Getting back to this period in Leary's life: he gets caught in Kabul and ends up back in the California Archipelago. He once counted how many different prisons he'd been in: 36. It was in solitary confinement in Sandstone, Minnesota that Leary asked a trustee for something to read. "No books fro special cases," was the answer. Soon after, he "heard the clank of the padlock and the rasp of the metal slot being opened. He passively accepted a book which was pushed through the slot." It was the recently released novel Gravity's Rainbow. Leary, in solitary confinement, read it for 12 hours straight until the lights went off, then woke at sunrise and read it for 15 hours. When he finished the first reading, he began again at page one and annotated, "decoded, outlined and charted the narrative." (I wonder whatever happened to that copy?)

Why? Why was Leary so enchanted by this book? Because, somehow, this Pynchon guy, in postmodern prose (kaleidoscopic narrative, shifting perspectives of time, unworldly erudition, hundreds of characters, lowbrow humor, passages of phantasmagorical proportions) had described the very worlds Leary had been enmeshed in during and after his academic career. I will elaborate on this below, but first: solitary confinement.

I have some hyper-educated friends but not one I've talked to lately had thought much about solitary, except that it seems inhumane, even for a bona fide murderer. I agree, but if you don't: read up on solitary. To me, it's so medieval I want it stopped Yesterday. And we are making some progress. I will include links to a few articles I read on it in the notes. Solitary literally damages the brains of inmates, and many of them are there because of damaged brains in the first place. If anything, prisoners should be in environments that stimulate their brains. Off my soapbox, for now...

So: picture Leary, with people like Manson all around him, reading a book filled with robotic scientists bent on total control of humans and machines, in an all-out rush toward megadeath...and it's a "rational" world! How did Leary's brain cope with this?

Robert Anton Wilson visited Leary many times in prison, and one time Wilson asked Leary how did he manage to cope in such a situation? Leary said he was spending time with the most intelligent person he knew: himself. This sounds flippant and/or typical Leary, but it could be that Leary's prior reading and extensive cosmopolitan experience gave him such a cognitive surplus that he could deal with it all. Also: he didn't spend years on end in solitary, as many prisoners in California have. Remember: he was really a political prisoner. He was facing 50 years at age 50 for two roaches. (Friends of Leary say he was imprisoned, basically, for "Poor usage of the First Amendment.") Nixon had called Leary "the most dangerous man in America." Imagine this shit: it really happened.

Leary was a PhD in Psychology, a fierce individualist-libertarian and had written a dense book called Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality that his peers awarded him Best Psychology Book of the Year. And then there was the scientific mindset that had carried over to his experiences on psychedelics. (Still: I often wonder to what extent - if any - solitary confinement had damaged him; this seems an underrated discussion when writers probe Leary's life after 1976.)

If we look at the 20th century, many of us, when forced to use one word, might choose "bloodbath." Go back to the late 1890s and read the scads of scientist's proclamations that the 20th century will be a utopia. Why wasn't it? Leary says Pynchon nailed it: it was nationalistic forces using their brightest scientific minds to compete using neuro-technological know-how. "The national competitions of 1914 compelled the antagonist countries to master the tank, the airplane, radio and the rapid transportation of masses of people. The political lineups of World War II seem equally absurd until we understand that the genetic purpose of the conflict was to stimulate the development of radar, rocketry, synthetic chemistry, atomic fission, long-range naval maneuvers and accelerated aeronautics, and, most important, computers and digital linguistics." The teleological riff is Leary's; we don't know - of course! - if Pynchon agrees. Although, this?

After all of Leary's run-ins with Authority and Control, who can fault his reading of Pynchon in this way: "Every character in Gravity's Rainbow is either an operative working for a Psycho-political hive-bureaucracy, or and Independent Intelligence Agent (Out-Caste) working counter to the hive-bureaucracy." In other places Leary calls these competing genetic "castes": Control vs. Expansion, with Pynchon elucidating a monumental treatise on human intelligence control - which Leary thought made people stupider - against intelligence expansion. Some readers may be thinking Leary's just talking about the freedom to explore one's own mind using consciousness-expanding drugs, but it's far, far, far deeper than that. And this is where it gets Really Weird.

Early on in your first reading of Gravity's Rainbow you'll notice the repeated allusions and hints and outright citations of academic-military types and their psychological test apparatuses. The Americans were steeped in their Skinner, the Europeans in Pavlov. Conditioned responses. Control. Not much thought for the dignity of the individual. All must be rational, quantified. There will be no limit to the delving into how much control can be exerted on agents (people). As Leary writes about this aspect in Pynchon:

"The Anglo-American Psychological Warfare Branch operates a mind control unit called Pisces (Psychological Intelligence Schemes for Expediting Surrender)...From a base in England, Pisces' agents probe the mysteries of consciousness, behavior and brain-function, using Pavlovian conditioning, ESP, brain surgery, hypnosis, clairvoyance, drugs, objective questionnaires, projective tests, personality assessments, behavior modifications."

                                    Henry A. Murray, colleague of Leary's at Harvard,
                                    sadist, one-worlder, "liberal," speed freak, Melville
                                    fanatic, CIA spook for MKULTRA ops. A real
                                    innarestin' character.

Back at Harvard, before he got thrown out for allowing undergraduates to take part in his experiments using psychedelics, Leary had turned on fellow Harvard Psychology professor Henry A. Murray. Murray had worked with the OSS during the war, and continued working for the OSS's successor, the CIA. Murray was a methamphetamine freak and sadomasochist (see Alston Chase's woefully under-appreciated Harvard and the Unabomber, esp. pp.240-326). Murray's great achievement had been the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), something both Leary and Pynchon knew a lot about. Biological organisms and machines were subject to entropy, a topic fascinating to two of Unistat's greatest scientific thinkers after the war, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener. The CIA was interested to find out how humans broke down. They hired undergraduates, told them very little about what was going on, and basically drugged the students with quite large doses of LSD. One student remembered seeing an ad: he'd get $15 an hour to be a "psychopath for a day," saying to a friend, "Imagine getting paid for what we do anyway!" Theodore Kaczynski needed the money. He was subjected to LSD without knowing what it meant, then a battery of abusive psychological testings.

                                 Theodore Kaczynski as Math prof at Berkeley. He'd soon
                                 drop out - 1971 - and move to a cabin in Montana.
                                 Source: Wikimedia Commons

In a letter Kaczynski wrote from prison to attorney Michael Mello: "We were told that we were to engage in a debate about our personal philosophies, and then found that our adversary in the debate subjected us to various insults that, presumably, the psychologists helped him to concoct. It was a highly unpleasant experience."

While Leary and his Harvard psychology colleagues were using LSD to gain insight into religious experience and seeing if it helped prisoners to see their own part in the "game" of criminal go-round that led to recidivism (it seems to have been very promising), Murray and his CIA-linked Harvard men were purposefully making their subjects "as confused and disquieted" "as much as possible" and that "All subjects became, to a varying degree, both anxiously and angrily involved in this stressful situation." Apparently, Murray thought Leary's importance of "set and setting" was something to sneeze at indeed.

[Above I linked to Pynchon's essay, "Is It O.K. to be a Luddite?" We now know the FBI suspected some very prominent writers as possibly being, or knowing who the Unabomber was: Tom Robbins was surveilled and visited by the FBI and questioned. The Feds gave William T. Vollmann quite a look as a suspect. Of course John Zerzan had been a suspect. Zerzan openly admires Kaczynski. Due to Pynchon's essay on Luddism and common interpretations of his writings about technology, many of us wonder to what degree the FBI took seriously the idea that Pynchon may have been suspect. Perhaps we'll hear from Pynchon on this one day. Maybe not.]

Back to Leary, writing on psychological warfare in Pynchon: (In addition to massive psychological testing and screening by military co-opted academics) "Diagnosis and treatment of psychological casualties - an entirely new concept of human nature - also developed. Machines break down; personalities could not break down until personality types were defined by our new mechanical-civilization. All our external technology serves as a model to understand internal (i.e, somatic-neurological) technology. Machines help us to understand our own bodily mechanics. Electronic computers lead us to understand and control our own brains."

Leary also spilled about who got to implement CIA "dirty tricks" and other espionage games. They too were dosed with LSD and tested. "Easy-going, trustful souls, given to cocktail fun, were transferred out to the Office of War Information. Distrustful, cagey, paranoid types were immediately screened-in as part of the Intelligence (sic) elite." Then Leary quotes Pynchon from page 434 of Gravity's Rainbow:

"...the New Chaps, with their little green antennas out for the usable emanations of power, versed in American politics, (knowing the difference between the New Dealers of OWI and the Eastern and moneyed Republicans behind OSS), keeping brain-dossiers on latencies, weaknesses, tea-taking habits, erogenous zones of all, all who someday might be useful."

O! The lives of Pynchon and Leary! Leary died on May 31, 1996. Pynchon seems very much alive as I write. Leary kept an archive of everything he did from an early age, and much of it is housed now in the New York Public Library. Has there been a more media-friendly intellectual who was not at the service of the Hive-State? And then there's Pynchon. Will he leave us with an autobiography? Will we ever know much of his life? It would seem we will find out whether or not we are allowed access to the personality of Pynchon, sometime by around 2030. (Pynchon turns 78 on May 8, 2015.)

Nevertheless, outside of academia, I think Leary should be more often noted as a wonderfully erudite exegete of Pynchon's magisterial novel. I've only quoted from a few of Leary's notes on Pynchon. I wish he had left even more. As a reader of Pynchon, I appreciate Leary's comments and notes on Pynchon; Leary clearly constitutes an "elite" reader of the book. In delving into Timothy Leary's reading of Pynchon we detect a mostly neglected but quite informed work in "deep politics."

NOTES:
- RAW's quote about Pynchon: Everything Is Under Control, pp. 137-138
- "heard the clank of the padlock..." - Intelligence Agents, p.54
- "The national competitions...digital linguistics" - Neuropolitique, pp. 140-141
-"Every character in GR..." - Intelligence Agents, p.54
- "The Anglo-American Warfare..." - Intelligence Agents, p.54
- "Imagine getting paid..." - Harvard and the Unabomber, p.252
- "as confused and disquieted" and "All subjects..." - Harvard and the Unabomber, p.251
- "Diagnosis and treatment of psychological casualties...our own brains" - Intelligence Agents, p.109

Large Study Links Psychedelic Use to Reduced Recidivism

solitary confinement:
The Horrible Psychology of Solitary Confinement
What Solitary Confinement Does To The Brain
How Extreme Isolation Warps the Mind
Does Prison Erode the Brain?
"From a Steel Box to a Wicked Young Girl," by Robert Beck, AKA "Iceberg Slim", originally in From the Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim; found in Outlaw Bible of American Essays, pp.7-16

film:
The Net: Unabomber, LSD and the Internet (dir: Lutz Dammbeck) (See esp from 57:05 to 1:02:50, about the Josiah Macy Group conferences: Henry A. Murray was a participant; and when Dammbeck travels to the heavily wooded and secluded Pescadero, CA, to interview pioneering systems theorist Heinz von Foerster, not long before Heinz died. Von Foerster has always seemed to me one of the trippiest intellectual characters to me, and this interview does not disappoint! The Heinz von Foerster sequence is between 1:07:50 and 1:15:40)

other books:
John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, by Steve J. Heims
Game of Life, by Timothy Leary
Chaos and Cyberculture, by Timothy Leary
Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon
A Gravity's Rainbow Companion, by Stephen Weisenburger
Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties and Beyond, by Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain

                                          artwork by Bobby Campbell

Garrison State: POTUS's SOTU Speech and the Semantic Unconscious

Around a minute into Obama's 2015 State of the Union speech we heard these words:

"Tonight, for the first time since 9/11, our combat mission in Afghanistan is over. Six years ago, nearly 180,000 American troops served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, fewer than 15,000 remain. And we salute the courage and sacrifice of every man and woman in this 9/11 Generation who has served to keep us safe. We are humbled and grateful for your service.

America, for all that we've endured; for all the grit and hard work required to come back; for all the tasks that lie ahead, know this:

The shadow of crisis has passed, and the State of the Union is strong."

Yeaaa...Nope. Unistat is strung out on policing the world on behalf of its owners and the other wealthy states in the world. It's pretty much Our Thing.

Get a load of what Nick Turse has say about what ZERO of our "news" outlets has mentioned, then feel free to tell us why "the shadow of crisis has passed and the State of the Union is strong."

Here's my favorite neologism - hey, 'tis new to me! - in 2015: "surrealpolitick"

Neomedievalism as Metaphor, and a Plethora of Our Discontents

For anyone who's paying attention, Obama's conducting of the "global war on terror" seems Pentagon-run, and coterminous with the Bush-Cheney years of utter barbarity and horror. The war in Afghanistan, if it already seemed endless to you (it certainly does me), in truth, will be going on at least another ten years, no matter what happy-talk you hear in the mainstream electronic media or the corporate newspapers. The Obama Administration? Forget it. Here are some of the moves Obama's made that make him no different from the Neoconservatives that got us into this mess:

• Patriot Act extended: no reforms have been made from the Bush/Cheney era
• Warrantless wiretapping? Obama just signed an extension for five more years
• increased secrecy, repression and restriction of releases from Gitmo, let alone that it hasn't been shut down
• a new scheme for indefinite detention on Unistat soil
• a new theory of Presidential assassination powers, even of Unistat citizens
• Miranda rules diluted

I could go on and on, but I'll tell you the truth: I'm weak of heart when it comes to such things, and I just get depressed. Why do you think the OG usually writes about seemingly everything but this shit?

"The voice of history of often little more than the organ of hatred or flattery." - Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

You may have heard that Unistat is getting out of Afghanistan at the end of next year. Last month the Pentagon's top lawyer said we should see the Afghan war as "finite" but clearly, that was for the consumption of dupes and starry-eyed wishers. There's every reason to believe Unistat will be in Afghanistan for 10 more years, possibly forever. We are not "exiting" at the end of 2014. If you believe that, I know a Nigerian Prince who has some money he wants to share with you. The devil is in the semantics of the thing. And O! what semantics. You want semantics? I'll give you semantics.

"This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take awhile." - George W. Bush, on 9/16/01, to the press, South Lawn of the White House

                                                        Hedley Bull

Medievalism/Neomedievalism and Neoconservatism
In 1977, British political theorist Hedley Bull published The Anarchical Society: A Study of World Order in Politics. Considered a "realist" thinker in International Relations, Bull was concerned with the rise of non-state and post-state actors in a field of thought that was governed by Cold War nation and state-based approaches. Bull's book has since become a classic in the field, and apparently every textbook in foreign relations now includes sections on neomedievalism.

Here's some of what Hedley Bull was onto in 1977. He had the foresight to see non-state and post-state actors on the world scene as playing a big enough role that we must begin to think in new ways. But first: who or what are "non-state actors"? Some would be: international terrorists, corporations and their own paramilitary squads, drug cartels, NGOs, and, even though he didn't mention them - because they didn't exist then, but he probably would have included them - computer hackers.

Some alternative paths, or solutions for world order with the rise of non-state actors, for Bull:

• world government 
• "solidarity of states" (probably a strengthening of the UN)
• a disarmed world
• ideological homogeneity among existing states
• a modern medieval model

There are other alternative paths; I have only skimmed Bull and have been greatly aided in this intellectual area by texts that comment on Bull, the best being a slim title, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror, by Bruce Holsinger a prof. of English (specializing in the medieval era) and Music at the U. of Virginia. Holsinger points out that Bull devoted a scant few pages to  a neomedieval path to a new world order, but it looks like the NeoCons took that section of the book very seriously indeed...or so I infer from reading Holsinger reading Bull...

                                              Bruce Holsinger, defending the good 
                                             name of Medieval Studies, defending well

Holsinger, whose field of Medieval Studies covers roughly the 5th-15th centuries, includes the rise of Islam, the fall of the Roman Empire, the Crusades, Charlemagne, Mohammed, the Koran, courtly love, the Book of Kells, the English kings Shakespeare would immortalize in plays such as Richard III  and Henry IV, Marco Polo, Petrarch, St. Francis of Assisi, the Aztec Empire, Dante, Chaucer, feudalism, the Jin dynasty, Hildegard of Bingen, and Genghis Khan; Holsinger objects to the appropriation and semantic use of "medieval" by the post-9/11 Unistat political regimes. In one place he admits it's now so pervasive that the word "medieval" may not recover from its new meaning, but that his Medieval Studies colleague, Carolyn Dinshaw of NYU, tongue in cheek, proposed starting a group Concerned Medievalists For Peace, in the wake of 9/11.

The Holsinger book is - to me - the most interesting work on the deeper political workings of the Pentagon, neoconservatives, and the utter disasters of Unistat foreign policy since I read Nicholas Xenos's slim book, Cloaked In Virtue, on the cult of neocons that emanated with Leo Strauss, and how he taught a secret inner "true" reading of philosophers like Hobbes, to his initiates. The great irony, since I became aware of the Neo Cons (after Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind came out), was that Strauss was one of the many great Jewish intellectuals imported from Europe during the rise of Hitler.

(short article, not by Xenos: "Leo Strauss's Philosophy of Deception")

"History is the only laboratory we have in which to test the consequences of ideas." - Etienne Gilson

What Holsinger does is show how the rhetoric of "medievalism" has been applied by NeoCons to get us into this mess. The infamous "torture memos," for instance. I've read some maddening things on how the lawyers inside Bush's White House twisted semantics in order to override the Geneva Convention III (the POW issue) to redefine prisoners of war as "enemy combatants" which overrides Geneva, all International Law, and even human rights. Obama has gone along with this.

                                            Glenn Greenwald: if you want to know more 
                                            about the truth - as I see it - of Unistat foreign
                                            and domestic policy: read him!

Because the terrorists were stateless, or from "failed states" they aren't recognized under law. They are separated from us not only by religion and region, but by time: they are medieval. Therefore, modern ideas about law don't apply to them. Let us write the laws for them.

Holsinger goes on to show, in remarkable detail for such a short book, how the semantics of "medieval" has been used to circumvent...any semblance of sanity or humanity. In the name of "security."

What a terrific little book Holsinger has written. I just have one basic difference with him. On pp.15-16, Holsinger writes that Plato's Gorgias has "one of the great critiques of the rhetoric of anti-intellectualism in the Western tradition [...] In the words of Socrates to Gorgias, a professional rhetor, 'the rhetorician need not know the truth about things; he has only to discover some way of persuading the people that he has more knowledge than those who know."

This has always been true and always will be true. It's up to the citizens (or post- or non-state actor) to educate themselves so rhetors (in this case, anyone from the Unistat State Dept) will not believe them, and seek better ways to live on the planet with "medieval" people. I'm impressed with Holsinger, but I don't believe he knows "the truth." And I don't believe Socrates or Plato knew "the truth," either. I think Gorgias was pointing out something that Plato didn't like (and I would guess, Socrates didn't like it either, but what about his schtick: The classic "I don't know anything; I'm just askin' you" routine?) and preferred to not think was "the truth": that no one has a privileged fulcrum point from which to see The Truth, with no occlusions having to do with historical accident, class interest, personal interest, psychological disposition, etc.

(These "medieval" people are people who happened to use a money-transfer scheme - hawala - that eluded all of our ultra-sophisticated computer-tracking efforts, because they knew about our computer systems. Yea: they're "medieval." They used cell phones and shredders and FAX machines. They just want us OUT OF THEIR PART OF THE WORLD. Is that so difficult to understand? Also they're pissed we support Israel so one-sidedly; they despise us, not for "our freedoms" - you have to be a total imbecile to believe that! - but because we propped up vicious tyrannies in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Also they know we backed Iraq in the seven year Iran-Iraq war, that the CIA got rid of Iran's democratically-elected Mossadegh in 1953 and installed the brutal Shah and trained his secret police-killers, SAVAK. I could go on. They hate us for our policies. Some of these medieval people subscribe to a strain of radicalism that led to 9/11. But by no means all. All of this is "the truth" as I see it.)

Meanwhile, Unistat grows more and more medieval, in debt, the Robocop to the world, having lost its moral standing in the rest of the "free world," and seems intent on carrying out a neomedievalist foreign  (and, in some ways, domestic) policy that looks more and more like the Catholic Church trying to run the globe, circa 500-1450. And thus we drift ever closer to catastrophe.

Glenn Greenwald, from a week or so ago, in The Guardian. Germane to this rant.
Wolfowitz Doctrine
Late 2010 interview with the co-author of The Death of Neoconservatism
Five Ways Obama is Just Like George W. Bush
Monopolizing War: It's what we do best
Americans Are The Most Spied-On People In World History (Even the East Germans under the Stasi!)

Trust Me On This: Deception, Biology, Politics

"Reality is the temporary resultant of the struggle between rival gangs of programmers." - Robert Anton Wilson

When I was 16 I lived with my father just outside of Denver, and he and his childhood friend and drinking buddy got into watching pro-wrestling on TV. The absurdity and theatricality of it all made them howl with laughter. Later I attended a few live shows in downtown Denver, and was struck by the idea that a few people sitting near us seemed to believe the "matches" were on the up-and-up.

Later I read then-structuralist Roland Barthes's Mythologies (I should say I tried to read Barthes, but the  epistemological [semiotic] assumptions - derived from Ferdinand de Saussure, who I had not read at the time - rendered much of Barthes's work opaque to me) and this 1957 book had an essay on pro wrestling, which I'll link to here, if anyone is interested. Barthes contrasted boxing - in which the thrust is to see who wins, with wrestling, which was a sum of episodes, the point not being about winning, but the sheer spectacle of the thing, which with its pantomimes of characters Good and Evil, had an underlying message of playing on the ideas in mass culture about Justice.

Later I read much of Murray Edelman's work in sociology. He had a lot to say about politics as a spectacle. (Here's the NYT obit for Edelman, which gives a thumbnail of his concerns.) Edelman seems a quite underrated figure; he was writing about things that Jean Baudrillard took up much later, and, while in academic language, Edelman was still quite readable. Some have called him the first postmodern political scientist. Politics? It's a show, sorta like wrestling. Edelman says that people fall into the drama, play parts, internalize the totality of the show, and increasingly take it seriously. What? I'll try to elaborate.

Look at the foggy, mystifying language surrounding politics and its main delivery system, the mass media. Look at how many people seem to not question the semantic content of the jargon and glossary in political-speak. (Because they don't know how? Or they'd rather stick with the "fun" of playing inside the melodrama of politics? I don't know. Edelman seemed to wonder too.) Political institutions are symbolic acts that must be interpreted within some schema or another. But the institutions and acts tend to serve to more or less keep things the same rather than change things. Oh, changes do occur. If they didn't, the Show would get stale, and the players wouldn't be able to take it seriously anymore. It must perpetually seem vital to the players within. Voters who don't show up or who don't follow politics? They're onto the game and don't want to play. They see the game as bullshit. I think Edelman is right here to an extent, but I also think there are people who would rather not know anything; they don't see into/through Edelman's elaborate socio-political spectacle because they never had a serious look in the first place.

Rituals in politics are elaborate. The quantity of them is large and they are repeated so often that people cannot "see" the rituals as rituals. Rather, something solemn about Justice and Freedom and Democracy and The Good and Fairness and Meritocracy is being upheld. (Sorta like...wrestling?) The rituals of politics invest in the authority of the main players on the stage, and we are meant to hold the whole show in awe.

Now, irony and provocation being two of my favorite tropes from intellectuals, I appreciate Edelman's ouvre and I think quite a lot of it is accurate and generally edifying discourse, but, like most of those thinkers we call postmodern, there tends to be an inexorable taking of the thesis to extremes, so that something begins to waft up...what's that? Do you smell it? You do? Then it's not just me, thankgod. Yea, but what is it? Does it smell like burning garbage to you? No? Like unpleasant incense? Really? Oh! Now I know what it is! We've been reading postmodernists, and we smell a reductio ad absurdum. Whew! I was about to get the fire extinguisher.

What I like about Edelman's work is the Things Are Not As They Seem-ishness of it all; I also like that he concentrated on language and semiotic/symbolic analysis, which fits into my main model and along with valued thinkers like Robert Anton Wilson, Alfred Korzybski, Marshall McLuhan, George Lakoff, and even, in a way, Noam Chomsky. Also, there's a thread running from Giambattista Vico's 2000+ years of class warfare of the Rich vs. Everyone Else that Edelman can fit with.

What I don't like about the over-baked aspect of Edelman is the lingering hopelessness, and there's quite a clash between an idea that I think holds much sway - that if you don't "do" politics it'll be done to you - and the sort of paralysis via analysis I get from Edelman, which leads to passivity. He has made me question my role in the political Show, and now I'm far more ironic about it all, but I'm verging away. Back to deception.

In the blogpost from four days ago, I briefly discussed Edward O. Wilson. Another giant in Sociobiology, who was there at creation, was Robert Trivers. In the bibliography for Wilson's revolutionary 1975 work, Sociobiology: A New Synthesis a handful of Trivers's papers are listed. Trivers has been perhaps most noted for being a sort of hardcore exponent of Dawkins's kin selection idea, but with particular emphasis on reciprocal altruism (shorthand: "you scratch my back and then I'll scratch yours" in Biology). When you get into reciprocal altruism, you also allow for "deals" between non-kin. It gets very abstruse when you start to run with it, especially when you're trying to keep in mind what Hamilton wrote, how EOW took it compared to Dawkins, how they sought to create new ideas to separate themselves as the first-line sociobiologists/evolutionary psychologists, etc.

As Trivers elaborated on reciprocal altruism, he began to concentrate on something that seemed to spin out of it: deception. And now, after a few decades of writing and thinking about it, he's maybe the foremost thinker on deception from biology on up to humans.

Trivers, a manic-depressive genius since childhood, a longtime pot smoker, classic anti-authoritarian, who, in May of 1979 joined the Black Panthers and, according to David Jay Brown, Trivers's colleague Burney Le Boeuf, called Trivers "the blackest white man I know." (Mavericks of the Mind, p.54)

In John Horgan's review of Trivers's book The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, we see this passage:

Trivers calls deceit a “deep feature” of life, even a necessity, given genes’ brutal struggle to prevail. Anglerfish lure prey by dangling “bait” in front of their jaws, edible butterflies deter predators by adopting the coloring of poisonous species. Possums play possum, cowbirds and cuckoos avoid the hassle of raising offspring by laying their eggs in other birds’ nests. Even viruses and bacteria employ subterfuge to sneak past a host’s immune system. The complexity of organisms, Trivers suggests, stems at least in part from a primordial arms race between deceit and deceit-detection.

So how much of this stuff goes on, in all the domains of our lives? It seems easy to fall into paranoia when contemplating The Spectacle, language as virus, conspiracy, double and triple crosses and agents, counterfeiting, prevarication (the very word seems to be hiding something, no?), "spin," fakes, secrecy, claims of "transparency," the information deformations that occur within status hierarchies, advertising and PR and hypnotic techniques, etc. Let us consider this list as The Shadow of ourselves, vis a vis what we'd prefer to think about "reality": that most of us care about the Truth and act trustworthy, because we want others to act honestly with us. The Shadow would be all that which is...less than trustworthy? 

The vast data from the animal kingdom shows how common camouflage is, how many animals have developed a way to APPEAR far more menacing than they are, on and on. Is deceit built into the fabric of all biology? It appears so. But then so is the attempt to detect...

It's common to read about deceit and lying and note the linkage between our very complex intra-species signaling system (i.e, human language) and how it's exquisitely available for the purposes of deceit. When ants communicate via very elaborate pheromones, the lying has its limits, it seems, at least compared to our signaling systems.

What I also note is the biological metaphor often used in writings on deceit: that lying is "parasitic" upon the truth, and that too many people engaged in deceit tend to ruin a system. From The Oxford Companion To The Mind:

Conveying useful information from one person to another about 'facts' is the essence of this extraordinary human invention. Lying is therefore parasitic upon general truthfulness, and if its incidence becomes too high the system becomes useless.

So here we have a reason for truthfulness that's not lame-brained ("The Bible sez..." or "good people tell the truth!", etc): the system is preserved. But then we must ask, "Is the system worth preserving?" Since Ronald Reagan, people running for office as Republicans have made it part of their platform that government doesn't work and should get out of the way of "people's lives," by which they mean corporations should be able to do whatever they want. Convince people you want a job that you don't think should even exist? What "system" do they favor? And do they really believe what they say or are they being deceptive? Hoo-boy...

The "parasite" metaphor brings us back to biology, but other writers have borrowed a metaphor from physics: that deception is like entropy. But I'd rather return to wrestling.

                                 Eric Weinstein, popularizer of the kayfabe idea
                                                  for thinkers caught in "ordinary" economic reality

Eric Weinstein, relating his ideas about information and deceit in economic systems, has drawn on the obscure wrestling term kayfabe. In an article in This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking (edited by John Brockman), Weinstein cites recent work in evolutionary biology by the aforementioned Trivers and Richard Alexander that says deceit plays a bigger role than accurate information transfer in systems with selective pressures. "Yet most of our thinking treats deception as a perturbation in the exchange of pure information, leaving us unprepared to contemplate a world in which fakery may reliably crowd out the genuine. In particular, humanity's future selective pressures appear likely to remain tied to economic theory that uses as its central construct a market model based on assumptions of perfect information." (p.321) 

Weinstein says that in the early years of wrestling, matches went on for too long, guys got hurt, the matches became boring, and eventually the "sport" became a ritualized thing, "negotiated, choreographed and rehearsed," its complex dramaturgical "rules" closed to outsiders. This seems something like our financial system now, "an altered reality of layered falsehoods, in which nothing can be assumed to be as it appears." Wait, there's more.

Why didn't the "freshwater" Chicago school of economists foresee the 2008 economic meltdown? Why didn't the "saltwater" Ivy Leaguers catch it? Probably because they're caught in the kayfabe: there is a quiet agreement to not let the outsiders know the game is fixed. Note: neither group suffered for not knowing. And still they are "experts." 

Weinstein says that, if you're wondering why there are no investigative journalists doing the real work they used to do and seemingly "bitter corporate rivals cooperate on everything from joint ventures to lobbying efforts," we'd understand this better if we knew what a kayfabe is. And it comes out of the traveling-carnival of hokum that is professional wrestling. 

"What makes kayfabe remarkable is that it provides the most complete example of the process by which a wide class of important endeavors transition from failed reality to successful fakery." (p.322) Weinstein sees kaybrification as an important feature of love, science, war, finance and politics. And we would all be better served to know this term and its mechanisms. The truly horrifying thing about kayfabe, as I read Weinstein about it, is that it shows the 1%/Ruling Class and its managers how many layers of disbelief the human mind is capable of suspending before fantasy melds seamlessly with reality.

Add to that: wrestling eventually became so over the top that it had to admit it was fake...but the public loved it anyway, or as Weinstein puts it, "Professional wrestling had come full circle to its honest origins by at last moving the responsibility for deception off the shoulders of the performers and into the willing minds of the audience." (p.323) (an online link to the Weinstein article I'm drawing from is HERE.)

Going back to my idea about secrecy and spin and deceit and advertising and other such terms as part of the Shadow of truth, and given the kayfabe and Trivers's arguments (even bacteria and viruses employ subterfuge to sneak past your immune system)...to quote a famous painter: Who are we? Where are we going?

My favorite philosopher, Robert Anton Wilson, was not an academic and more like a great generalist-thinker. He gave an interview 36 years ago and here's one Q and his A that, I think, pertains to these topics, and provides a slight slant that allows us more perspective:

Science Fiction Review: How serious are you about the Illuminati and conspiracies in general?

Robert Anton Wilson: Being serious is not one of my vices. I will venture, however, that the idea that there are no conspiracies has been popularized by historians working for universities and institutes funded by the principle conspirators of our time: the Rockefeller-Morgan banking interests, the Council on Foreign Relations crowd, the Trilateral Commission. This is not astonishing or depressing. Conspiracy is standard mammalian politics for reasons to be found in ethology and Von Neumann's and Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Vertebrate competition depends on knowing more than the opposition, monopolizing information along with territory, hoarding signals. Entropy, in a word. Science is based on transmitting the signal accurately, accelerating the process of information transfer. Negentropy. The final war may be between Pavlov's Dog and Schrodinger's Cat.

However, I am profoundly suspicious about all conspiracy theories, including my own, because conspiracy buffs tend to forget the difference between a plausible argument and a real proof. Or between a legal proof, a proof in the behavioral sciences, a proof in physics, a mathematical or logical proof, or a parody of any of the above. My advice to all is Buddha's last words, "Doubt, and find your own light." Or, as Crowley wrote, "I slept with Faith and found her a corpse in the morning. I drank and danced all night with Doubt, and found her a virgin in the morning." Doubt suffereth long, but is kind; doubt covereth a multitude of sins; doubt puffeth not itself up into dogma. For now abideth doubt, hope, and charity, these three: and the greatest of these is doubt. With doubt all things are possible. Every other entity in the universe, including Goddess Herself, may be trying to con you. It's all Show Biz. Did you know that Billy Graham is a Bull Dyke in drag?
-The Illuminati Papers, p.47

Question from the OG: Where is The Shadow? 

Here's 7 minutes of Chomsky and Trivers, riffing on the topic of deception:

On Obscure, Coded and Alchemical Texts: Part 1

Preliminary: Vico and Weirdness
There's an essay from 1974 by George Steiner called "On Difficulty" that I've often dipped into or just re-read. In it he provides a taxonomy of difficulties vis a vis the reading of certain texts. But he doesn't address an issue that has long fascinated me: the deliberate obscurantism by a writer out of necessity of not being persecuted by Authority.

As some of you know, I'm fascinated by the writing of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), a quirky Neapolitan scholar who toiled largely unknown in Europe, but was rediscovered in the 19th century and has seen his academic stock rise ever since. He's been "claimed" by fascists, anarchists, liberals, Neo-Cons, and Karl Marx cited him in Kapital. He's now thought of by some as the founder of Anthropology. As a young thinker he, like much of Europe, got caught up in a love for Descartes, but then lost his religion and combatted "Renato"'s ideas for the rest of his life.

If you haven't yet checked in on Vico, his magnum opus is translated in English as The New Science. Vico reads like a Mad Scientist: he's totally brilliant and way ahead of his time and you're floored by the power of his ability to create new views of receiving ancient texts. A few pages later you're wincing as you read, his ideas are so crazy. Then he seems to repeat himself, oddly, because he's done the fashionable thing and tried to lay out a way of understanding an entire body of knowledge in the way that Euclid did, via the positing of axioms, and building from there.

Despite the ostensibly formal structure, Vico's great book is diffuse, tangential, discursive, baroque, and wonderfully nutty.

A more poetic take on Vico comes from the great scholar Anthony Grafton:
"Vico's history of the human race, in short, is less a fresco painted spontaneously than a Watts Tower of found objects, combined in dazzling new ways but often old and battered in themselves..."-p.xxix of the Intro to Dave Marsh's translation of the The New Science

I agree with Grafton. It's also so profound in its insight that I will never stop reading Vico, neither his New Science nor any of the other books that I'm so fortunate someone saw fit to translate from Italian.

I would like to use Vico as both a home base and a jumping off point for a series of essays on obscurity in texts throughout history. When I address the "nutty" and obscure and strange aspects of Vico, I am coming down on the side of those who say that Vico wrote in this obscure manner because he had a very real sense that what he was trying to say about history and language and class warfare, that the Inquisition would do him great harm if he wrote plainly. When I first encountered this idea it knocked me on my ass, and my fascination with this aspect of writing and reading texts throughout history has stayed with me.

                                     When you open a copy of Vico's New Science, you see this, so
                                                 overflowing with symbolism it's a veritable semiotic feast of codes!

The Strange Case of Isaiah Berlin and Leo Strauss
One of the greatest readers and commentators on Vico in the 20th century was Isaiah Berlin, an intellectual of magnificent scope and breadth, with an elegant prose style and a very creative, even playful way of dealing with Great Ideas. I am in awe of Berlin the intellectual. One of the things I have tried to learn from him is this: you get to know a book or author or thinker so well you can talk about his ideas as if you are an Adherent. And yet you are not a believer or hardcore fanatic of any one thinker. It's a sort of intellectual yoga: study a person or a book or a set of philosophical ideas so intensely that a reader or listener will mistake you for an acolyte. I think it's an aspect of love to be able to talk about someone's ideas in a way that makes the original thinker you talk about sound totally fascinating...even if you find some of the ideas personally distasteful.

It's not easy.

And I came upon this passage in Conversations With Isaiah Berlin, that the Iranian intellectual Ramin Jahanbegloo conducted in 1988 and 89, the book being published in 1991:

RJ: What do you think about Leo Strauss and his political philosophy?

Berlin: I knew Leo Strauss personally and liked him. He was a very learned man, a genuine classical and Talmudic scholar, who thought that political philosophy went gravely wrong with Machiavelli - "the teacher of evil" - and has never recovered since. For him, no political thinker since the Middle Ages has found the true path. Burke came nearest to it, but Hobbes and his followers had gone badly wrong and gravely misled others. [...] Objective Good and Evil, Right and Wrong, have been dethroned. [Now here's where it gets meaty- OG] Strauss was a careful, honest and deeply concerned thinker, who seemed to have taught his pupils to read between the lines of the classical philosophers - he had a theory that these thinkers had secret doctrines beneath the overt one - which could only be discovered by hints, allusions, and other symptoms, sometimes because such thinkers thought in this fashion, sometimes for fear of censorship, oppressive regimes and the like. This has been a great stimulus to ingenuity and all kinds of fanciful subtleties, but seems to me to be wrong-headed. Strauss's rejection of the post-Renaissance world as hopelessly corrupted by Positivism and empiricism seems to me to border on the absurd. - pp.31-32

Okay. Wow. First off: When I first happened upon this delightful book of transcribed conversations I had mired myself in a vast Straussian swamp, trying to understand this Godfather of NeoConservatism and how he became so influential. The more I read, the more occult he seemed, with his acolytes, who were largely behind the George W. Bush administration, and, by my way of assessing history, largely responsible for bringing Unistat to its knees, possibly (probably?) never to recover.

From my readings, Berlin's assessment that Strauss's rejection of positivism, empiricism and other, relatively SANE ways of modeling the world and reading political philosophy is not only "absurd," it borders on a systematized insanity. It's a fascinating story, and I wonder if Peter Dale Scott would call the whole Strauss nexus of conservative acolytes as part of Deep Politics or Deep History?

["If history is recorded, then deep history is the sum of events which tend to be officially obscured or even suppressed in traditional books and the media. important recent deep events include the political assassinations of the 1960s, Watergate, Iran-Contra and now 9/11. All these deep events involve what I call the deep state, that part of the state which is not publicly accountable, and pursues its goals by means which will not be approved by a public examination. The CIA (with its ongoing relationships to drug- traffickers) is an obvious aspect of the deep state, but not the only one, perhaps not the dirtiest."-PDS]

That Berlin knew Strauss and liked him! That Strauss tried to "convert" Berlin when Isaiah visited him in Chicago! (p.32, op.cit) That Berlin seems to think it "wrong-headed" that Vico's style is so baroque and weird because of "oppressive regimes"! That I seem to be on the side of Leo Strauss, who, if one gets into arcane critical texts about how Strauss taught his Inner Circle how to read people like Hobbes (see, for example the slim but truly excellent Cloaked In Virtue: Unveiling Leo Strauss and the Rhetoric of American Foreign Policy, by Nicholas Xenos)...I had to step away from the books.

I will say that reading Xenos's book and a few others (like The Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet), led me to understand why Ron Suskind was told by a Bush person that Suskind lived in the "reality based community": the Bushies were so steeped in Straussian ideals (which seem to me to be profoundly antidemocratic and yea, I'll say it: fascistic) that their "reality" was being forced on the larger world...

I mean, think about it: they started a $3,000,000,000,000 war on Iraq (according to Nobel Prize economist Joseph Stiglitz) with ZERO proof Iraq had anything to do with 9/11...and they got away with it!!!

But I digress. I wanted to illustrate that I found a disagreement between me and Isaiah Berlin, and I do think outside influences can warp the writing and style of a writer. This idea is thought of as paranoid by some people. I will argue my point largely by giving examples as the main ballast for my rhetoric. I think it's related to the long Nightmare of History, and ought more properly be thought of as part of the history of censorship and another of our favorite topics at the Overweening Generalist: book burning.

As I go on with this topic in later installments, I hope to score some points against one of my heroes, Isaiah Berlin, and in so doing make some of you think maybe I'm some seriously Smart Dude who really ought to be paid more attention, if only for the unmitigated brilliant sheen of his thought. <cough>

Here's a 10 minute video on Isaiah and his ideas of Negative vs. Positive liberty. Throw it in at the end here because I think it covers some Hidden History, etc: