My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything.
Robert Anton WilsonRead
In conlusion, there is no conclusion. Things will go on as they always have, getting weirder all the time.
Interpretation
Life is an ongoing, unpredictable journey without definitive endings.
This quote by Robert Anton Wilson reflects the idea that life does not have clear conclusions or resolutions. Instead, it suggests that existence is a continuous flow of experiences, often marked by increasing complexity and unpredictability, encouraging a mindset of acceptance and adaptability to change.
In practice
During a keynote speech on embracing change in the workplace.
My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything.
There is no governor anywhere. You are all absolutely free. There is no restraint that cannot be escaped. If anybody could go into dhyana at will, nobody could be controlled - by fear of prison, by fear of whips or electroshock, by fear of death, even. All existing society is based on keeping those fears alive, to control the masses. Ten people who know would be more dangerous than a million armed anarchists.
I see anarchism as the theoretical ideal to which we are all gradually evolving to a point where everybody can tell the truth to everybody else and nobody can get punished for it. That can only happen without hierarchy and without people having the authority to punish other people.
To work for libertarianism - to oppose the growth of government and aid the liberation of the individual - used to be an idealistic choice taken for purely idealistic reasons. Now it is an act of intelligent and almost desperate self-defense.
The abandoned infant's cry is rage, not fear.
The only way to stave off boredom, in a complex domesticated primate like humankind, is to increase one's intelligence. This is not appealing to the average primate, who instead invents emotional games (soap opera and grand opera dramatics).
Meaning is produced not only by the relationship between the signifier and the signified but also, crucially, by the position of the signifiers in relation to other signifiers.
It may be true that there are no atheists in foxholes. But you don't find many Christians there, either. Or, about as many of one as the other.
In the post-enlightenment Europe of the 19th century the highest authority was no longer the Church. Instead it was science. Thus was born racial anti-Semitism, based on two disciplines regarded as science in their day - the 'scientific study of race' and the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer and Ernst Haeckel.
In the long run, the people are our only appeal. The only ones who can free us are ourselves.
Every person passing through this life will unknowingly leave something and take something away. Most of this “something” cannot be seen or heard or numbered or scientifically detected or counted. It’s what we leave in the minds of other people and what they leave in ours. Memory. The census doesn’t count it. Nothing counts without it.
On television I feel like a man playing piano in a brothel; every now and again he solaces himself by playing 'Abide with Me' in the hope of edifying both the clients and the inmates
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