The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with
Jeff Rigenbach.
Robert Anton Wilson was born January 18, 1932, in Brooklyn.
He grew up in the section of Brooklyn known as Flatbush and, later, after his father lost
is Job on the Waterfront in a much poorer section of Brooklyn, known as Garrison Beach.
Rents were very low in Garrison Beach, Wilson recalled in his book, Down to Earth, the largely
autobiographical second volume of his Cosmic Trigger trilogy, because only the poor Irish
Catholics lived there.
At another point in the same account, he refers to his old neighborhood as an Irish Catholic
Ghetto. Not that all Irish Catholics were poor, mind you. My father had relatives in Brooklyn Heights,
Wilson wrote in 1991, who actually owned a big two-story house instead of renting a bungalow,
and I think they had central heating too. We referred to them as Lace Curtain Irish.
Only when I was much older did I discover that they called us Shanty Irish. But none of us knew
In Garrison Beach, as Wilson recalled it, there was no cognac, no cut glass, not even
any lace curtains.
When I remember life in Garrison Beach in those days, Wilson wrote in Down to Earth,
I define it chiefly in negatives.
Most readers born since 1945 cannot imagine the ignorance and brutality of those days.
Many middle-aged women had goiter, a disease creating an ugly lump in the neck, which looked
like a cancer.
People regularly died of tuberculosis, which is now normally cured in its early stages.
and Children had dozens of diseases now abolished. I myself survived measles, German measles,
mumps, flu, still a major killer in those days, rheumatic fever, whooping cough, diphtheria
and polio. The Garrison Beach, Wilson remembered, had no paved roads and nobody had central
heating. The bungalows were heated with coal when we could afford it, but more often with
With Driftwood we picked up on the beach in the summer and stacked in the yard to dry
until we used it in the winter.
Only the center of the house, living room, kitchen, got heated that way, and a trip to
the bathroom in January or February was like a journey to the pole with Scott of the Antarctic
and 20 dog sleds.
People were always dying of influenza and pneumonia and other diseases related to lack
of heat in winter.
The head cold created minor panic because it might develop into one of these killer diseases.
Knowledge of medicine was primitive. People were always expecting the worst because all
they had known in all their lives were deadly diseases and grinding poverty. One year after
my birth, President Roosevelt declared that one-third of the nation lived in conditions
as bad as or worse than what I have described. On the other hand, Wilson wrote, nothing in
When my childhood ever led me to suspect that the overwhelming majority of the human race
was living in conditions far more deplorable than the shanty Irish in Garrison Beach, attentive
listeners will have noted that one of the childhood diseases of his era that Robert
Anton Wilson personally survived was polio.
The story is worth recounting for reasons that will become evident as we go along.
When I was diagnosed as having polio at age two, Wilson wrote in Down to Earth, the doctors
told my parents I would never walk again.
But my mother fought back against the medical verdict.
She and Wilson's father, after giving up on the doctor who said I'd be paralyzed for life,
and just by blind chance, found one of the few doctors in the United States who thought
the Kenny Method was worth trying.
The Kenny Method was the method advocated by Elizabeth Kenny, an Australian physical therapist
and nurse who had reported extraordinary results in working with polio patients who had been
told by medical doctors to expect lives of paralysis.
Her method had won many adherents in Australia by the time it was used on Robert Anton Wilson
in 1934, and it would win many more adherents in this country a decade later during World
World War II, but it faced an uphill struggle both down under and in the United States.
As Wilson wrote in 1991, the American Medical Association and the whole organized medical
profession at that time had denounced Kenny and all her works.
She was only a nurse and therefore couldn't discover anything of importance.
She was only a woman also and therefore could not understand medicine, which requires male
brains.
The technique of treating polio, we were told, was dangerous nonsense and hogwash and witchcraft.
Thus, 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 denounced as unscientific and useless.
This instilled in me certain doubts about experts.
Wilson, who would never walk again, walked for the rest of his life, though with a bit of a limp when fatigued and sometimes with a cane.
If he had ever had anything that could be described as an attitude of reverence toward authorities, however, it never recovered.
There are careers that seem custom designed for such people.
People.
And so, by the time he was old enough to go to high school, he knew he wanted to be a
writer.
By this time, his family was considerably more prosperous, for Wilson started high school
just after the end of World War II, which had brought increased work for longshoremen
and warehousemen, and new employment for his father, at higher wages than he'd ever earned
before the Depression started.
And after the war, the prosperity had not only continued, it had actually grown.
Wilson's father remembered his long years of unemployment, however, and was determined
that his son would train for a career that would continue to pay him, even in tough times.
Writing was an impractical dream.
What his son needed was a career like engineering.
So the family moved to the section of Brooklyn known as Bay Ridge, and young Bob enrolled
in Brooklyn Technical High School.
It is not recorded whether any lace curtains were purchased for their new home, but Wilson
recalled that after the move to Bay Ridge, they were living so well compared to the Depression
that I imagined we were lace curtain Irish at last.
From Brooklyn Tech he went in 1952, after a couple of years of working and saving his
money to the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, now a part of New York University, where,
about a decade later, Leonard Peacoff and Murray N. Rothbard would be teaching.
He studied engineering and worked in that field, and as a medical orderly and as a salesman,
among other jobs he regarded as meaningless dead ends.
But he was also, in his spare time, writing.
Gradually he began to sell some of that writing, and gradually that began to open a few doors.
He got a job as a copywriter at an advertising agency.
And then, in 1962, when he was 30 years old, a small Ohio-based magazine he had been writing
for offered him a job as an editor.
He eagerly accepted the offer.
But when he arrived in Brookville, Ohio, about 15 miles northwest of Dayton, to take up his
Robert Lutte, a German writer and filmmaker, was world famous for his duties as co-editor with Mildred Loomis of Balanced Living Magazine. He arrived under what you might call an assumed name.
A few years before, when he first began earning money by writing, he had decided to use the name Robert Anton Wilson as his professional name.
He had been born Robert Edward Wilson, but he wanted to reserve his real name for the serious literary works he would write one day.
The Anton he had adopted to the radio station had to be the name of the book with which he would write his first book, as he usually was.
The Anton he had adopted to replace Edward on the ad copy and journalism he might write in the meantime had come from his maternal grandfather, Anton Mealy of Trieste.
As Wilson later told the tale in Down to Earth, his grandfather had left the Austro-Hungarian Empire to avoid military service and was proud of the fact as a sign of his sagacity.
The best thing about America, he told my mother, was that we had no compulsory military service here.
Wilson admired his grandfather, he wrote, because the old guy was brave enough to be a draft dodger and sail across the wild Atlantic in a crude wooden ship to try to find a free country.
I wish there was still a free country here, for others like him.
In the end, of course, Robert Edward Wilson never wrote any serious literary works.
Balanced Living, the small magazine of which Robert Anton Wilson became co-editor in 1962,
was published by an organization called The School for Living, which had been founded
nearly 30 years before.
At about the same time, the two-year-old Robert Edward Wilson was being treated for
for his polio by a practitioner of the Kenny Method.
The founder of the original School for Living, on an estate outside the village of Suffern
in Rockland County, about 35 or 40 miles north of New York City, was a man named Ralph Borsodi.
Borsodi had been born in New York City in the mid-1880s, had grown up there and entered
the advertising business there, enjoying some success.
He gradually became convinced, however, that, as he put it in his 1933 book, Flight from
the City, those who chose to stay in the city, any big city, were choosing to be financially
insecure, never knowing when they might be without a job, lacking the zest of living,
which comes from real health, and suffering all the minor and sometimes major ailments,
which come from too much excitement, too much artificial food, too much sedentary work,
and too much of the smoke and noise and dust of the city, all the while living lives that
were barren of real beauty, the beauty which comes only from contact with nature and from
the growth of the soil, from flowers and fruits, from gardens and trees, from birds and animals.
Borsodi wanted to offer, he wrote, a way out for men and women who desire to escape from
dependence upon the present industrial system and who have no desire to substitute for it
dependence upon a state-controlled system.
Borsodi had read Henry George, you see, and also some Josiah Warren, some Lysander Spooner
and some Benjamin R. Tucker.
He was skeptical of the ability of the state to solve anyone's problems.
As he put it in his 1929 book, This Ugly Civilization, we are born into a political status.
We have no choice about the matter.
We are born under the dominion of politicians.
We can change our political status by emigrating from the subjection under which we are born
to some other which we may think more desirable, but we cannot free ourselves from subjection
to government altogether.
In this respect, we have somewhat less freedom today than even with regard to religion.
We can avoid tithes in many states, but none of us can avoid taxes.
Public opinion has progressed to the point where it recognizes that abandonment of the
The Church is not in itself an evil, however sinful it may be from the standpoint of the
clergy, but it has not yet arrived at a point where it recognizes that the abandonment of
the state is equally free from evil.
But while we may have to consent to a political status and to contribute to the support of
the government, we do not need to overestimate the extent to which politicians and the political
Borsodi gets better.
There are three needs of mankind, he wrote, and therefore three functions which seem to
justify the existence of governments.
The first is the protection of society as a whole and of the law-abiding members of
from the illegal and sometimes antisocial activities of individuals.
The performance of this function has brought into existence the police powers of the government, law, law enforcement and the courts of law.
The second function is the protection of the government itself from the attacks of other governments,
and by virtue of what is presumably the corollary of self-defense,
In defense, the function of attacking other governments, which may, for some reason, good, bad or indifferent, interfere with the activities of the attacking government.
The performance of this function has brought into existence the war powers of the government, armies and navies, international law and diplomacy.
The third function is that of rendering various social and economic services which seem, like our schools, too important to entrust to private initiative, or which seem, like the issue of money, too dangerous to entrust to private monopoly.
The performance of these functions has brought into existence the social activities of the government, public schools, postal service, streets and roads, fire protection, water supply, and a myriad of similar municipal and national activities.
If we admit for the moment that these functions are essential to mankind's well-being,
it does not necessarily follow that the only way in which they can be provided is through the agency of political government.
History, which is one long record of the imbecilities and the injustices of governments,
furnishes us good grounds for seeking some alternative solution for them.
and the comfort which we as individuals seek makes it very desirable that the alternative should be controlled as far as possible by us personally and not by the community as a whole.
We develop government because it is an agency which generates social control when we should develop institutions like the family, which are agencies for generating self-control.
At times, Borsodi sounds amazingly like Murray Rothbard or Robert Lefebvre.
What we call a government, he wrote in 1929, is after all nothing but a group of individuals,
who, by a variety of sanctions, have acquired the power to govern their fellows.
The sanctions range from the fraud of divine right to that of sheer conquest,
Inquest, from the imbecility of hereditary privilege to the irrationality of counting
voters.
In most cases, the extent to which these sanctions produce capable legislators, judges and administrators
will not bear critical examination.
Nominally, government exists and functions for the public.
Actually, it exists and functions for the benefit of those who have, in one of these
in these absurd ways acquired power to govern.
It is accepted mainly because of the sheer inertia of great masses of people.
Ostensibly, of course, it is accepted because it confers a sufficiency of visible benefits upon society
to make the officials who operate it tolerated in spite of the selfish and idiotic exercise of the powers conferred upon them.
Borsodi thought it absurd to fasten any serious hope on the idea of getting the right people,
or even better people, into government.
The really superior man, he wrote, just because he is intelligent enough to know the limitations
of his knowledge and the fallibility of his judgments, has no taste for the ruthlessness
which is essential to the exercise of power.
Our government officials must, first of all, maintain power.
Only by maintaining power can they have the opportunity to exercise it.
Their preoccupation with the arts which lead to power and which enable them to maintain
it after they have secured it is inescapable.
The ambitions which should animate them and the purposes for which their power should
should be used, have to be subordinated to practical politics.
Thus, if an intelligent and well-meaning person attains political power, he is almost compelled
to sacrifice the ideals to which he may originally have been genuinely devoted in order to maintain
power.
He is almost certain to sacrifice them, unless his tenure of power is accompanied by a social
In the face of these facts, Borsodi recommended economic independence.
Economic independence, he wrote, cannot, unfortunately, completely free us from government, but it can enormously reduce the field of activity for government as a whole.
Dependence upon the public services furnished by the government itself, or by quasi-governmental institutions operated upon franchises, can be materially lessened.
We can furnish our own water supply, our own sewerage system, our own fire protection, our own schooling.
Some of these things for which we now turn to the public services we can do completely for ourselves, others we can do only in part.
To the extent to which we enable ourselves to do them, we avoid the annoyance and escape the incompetence of having them performed by the state.
Support of the government through the taxes we pay we cannot avoid, nor can we entirely escape from such forms of government support as military service and jury duty.
Fortunately, we have progressed to such a point that it is possible to yield to these various forms of duress without too great suffering.
are suffering.
Perhaps philosophy can reconcile us to paying the taxes imposed upon us, even though we
see every day how the taxpayers' money is wasted by those who hold political office.
Voluntary contributions to the work of government, such as voting, party work, office holding,
and agitating, educating, and organizing reform movements, these can be reduced to almost
nothing.
Occasional effort in this direction may be justified, but earnest devotion to these contributions
to government is almost certain to disillusion and disappoint us.
To Borsodi it was clear that what was supremely important was the freedom to experiment with
our ideas, all the ideas which occur to us.
We must put ourselves into a position where the ideas which interest us can have real
will opportunity to function.
So far I have quoted Ralph Borsodi more extensively than I've quoted Robert Anton Wilson, the
ostensible subject of this week's podcast.
But I have done so because it is crucial that we understand Borsodi in order to understand
Wilson.
Clearly Wilson had read Borsodi before he showed up in Brookville, Ohio in 1962 to assume
from his editorial duties on the School for Living's magazine, or at least so one would
most likely infer upon learning that, as Wilson himself put it in Down to Earth, the first
thing I did was change the title of the magazine from Balanced Living to A Way Out, which I
hoped would attract a younger, hipper readership.
That phrase, a way out, figures in one of the passages I quoted from Borsodi's books
and Offbeat Literature.
It was there that I found and read All the Issues of Liberty, the individualist anarchist
magazine edited 1881 to 1908 by the brilliant Benjamin R. Tucker, the clearest mind ever
in politics, James Joyce called him.
I also read All the Issues of Mother Earth, the communist anarchist magazine of Emma Goldman.
Wilson didn't stay long in Brookville, only a couple of years or so.
Just long enough, really, to read his way through the library and learn the basics of
magazine production.
Then his career took off.
As the early 60s became the mid-60s, he moved on to Ralph Ginsburg's Fact back in New York
and then to Hugh Hefner's Playboy in Chicago.
He stayed there seven years, longer than he ever stayed in any other job in his life.
He wrote of the experience in Down to Earth that Playboy paid me a higher salary than
any other magazine at which I had worked and never expected me to become a conformist or
sell my soul in return.
I enjoyed my years in the bunny empire.
I only resigned when I reached 40 and felt I could not live with myself if I didn't
make an effort to write full-time at last.
The biggest success of his subsequent freelance career was Illuminatus, a three-volume satirical
novel written in collaboration with fellow late-60s Playboy editor Robert Shea.
To the extent that it is possible to say coherently what Illuminatus is about, it's about conspiracy
theories and conspiracy theorists, but it also mixes in the 60s counterculture, the
The Libertarian Movement and a number of other arcane topics, along with what would later
become Wilson's trademark agnosticism and skepticism about not only all authorities,
but also all claims to truth, especially universal truth.
Robert Anton Wilson freelanced for the rest of his life, nearly 35 years altogether.
He died in January 2007, just a week shy of his 75th birthday.
Things weren't always easy financially.
Though it became a cult classic, Illuminatus did not make him rich, but he became extremely
well-known.
Nonetheless, he never let his fame go to his head.
He continued to write for small, low-budget periodicals, including libertarian movement
periodicals like Sam Conkin's New Libertarian of which he was a contributing editor from
some time in the late 1970s through the 1980s.
He also showed up now and then at libertarian gatherings of various sizes and types.
I still remember how startled I was one day in 1981 when I was chairing a panel on civil
liberties at the National Libertarian Party convention in Denver.
I had been chatting with my fellow panelists and letting them know how I'd be managing
things and I hadn't been paying much attention as the room filled up.
So when at last I stood to make a few introductory remarks and looked out at the crowd that had
gathered, I almost jumped out of my skin when I realized that the man sitting in the middle
of the front row, virtually under my nose, was none other than Robert Anton Wilson, then
in his late 40s and at the height of his fame.
Illuminatus won the Libertarian Futurist Society's Hall of Fame Award in 1986.
This award has also been won over the years by such works as Robert A. Heinlein's The
Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and Anthem, George Orwell's 1984
and Animal Farm, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Eric Frank Russell's The Great Explosion,
C.M.
Kornbluth's The Syndic, Ira Levin's This Perfect Day, Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed,
Evgeny Zamyatin's Wee, A. E. van Vogt's The Weapon Shops of Isher, Anthony Burgess's A
Clockwork Orange, and J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.
Winning the Hall of Fame Award amounts to a kind of official recognition.
This work is a true classic of libertarian science fiction or fantasy.
Robert Anton Wilson was never much for official recognition, of course, but I have every reason
to believe that he was pleased by this particular instance of it.
This is Jeff Rigenbach.
www.fieggen.org