The New Inquisition Quotes

“The Fool sees not the same tree the wise man sees.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

“Neurological research during the past two decades has rather clearly demonstrated that the passive consciousness in which there is a "Real" Universe "out there" is characteristic of left-brain domination. Correspondingly, any method of moving into the flowing-synergetic-holistic mode of consciousness — with meditation, or with certain drugs, or by the process of Zen-like attention described in the previous pages — leads to an increase in right-brain activity. Presumably, if we stayed in the flowing right-brain mode all the time we would become, in Mr. Okera's term, Dionysian.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

“Against all this mechanized barbarism, existentialist psychology and humanist psychology — aided, perhaps not coincidentally, by the metaphors of quantum physics — suggests that other models of human existence are possible and thinkable and desirable.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

“Some rough idea about causality has probably been around since the dawn of human intelligence, but the classic Western metaphor of cause only emerged after Aristotelian logic was combined with experimental method in the late Renaissance. The first doubts about causality began among quantum physicists in the 1920s. Now, since non-local effects violate this model of causality, physicists are becoming accustomed to thinking of two kinds of principles, the causal (local) and the acausal (non-local).”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

“Fear is the father of the gods," said Lucretius. But the gods are cunning and subtle; in the ancient world, when many began to misbelieve in them, some disguised themselves as Platonic Ideas and were able to survive another thousand years in that form. (In some Chairs of Philosophy they still survive.) Others, more cunning still, became General Principles and A Priori Truths and eventually evolved into the "known physical laws" worshipped by Prof. Bunge. But by this sign ye shall know them: great anxiety is aroused by him who challenges them, and their priests are full of fury and malice against such a heretic.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

“The Right Man, and especially the Violent Man, is then, according to Wilson's theory, simply turning off even more signals than is neurologically normal. Specifically, he has been conditioned or imprinted, or has conditioned himself, to suppress as "irrelevant" or "meaningless" the kind of signals that usually evoke compassion, charity or tolerance, in most of humanity. In his reality-tunnel, the only signals that reach the cortex are those confirming his thesis that People Are Rotten Bastards who need to be punished. This mental "set," however appalling socially and historically, is no more "peculiar" neurologically than the mental "set" that allows an artist to see what others ignore while simultaneously ignoring the social Status Game signals that others notice so painfully and acutely, or the "set" which makes certain art works comprehensible (because we have learned to decode their symbolism) while it sees other kinds of art as "meaningless" jumbles. Sometimes it takes quite a while to see a new type of signal: which is why even "cultivated" Europeans once saw Chinese painting as "crude" and heard Chinese music as "weird.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

“Being modeltheists, the Fundamentalists of course reject any model but their own Eternally True Model; but why are they always especially sarcastic and suspicious when Oriental or African sources are quoted? Bronowski, we noted, said frankly that the Japanese are incapable of seeing the world "objectively" — i.e. the way he saw it — but how many Fundamentalists think that, too, but are too politic to say it openly?”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

“For instance, most of us are annoyed frequently by the daily newspaper. "News" or alleged news that we don't want to read gets printed; heathenish and heretical opinions appear on the letters page, and sometimes in the columnists; politicians (of the opposite camp, of course) tell the most outrageous lies, which also get printed. With modern computer technology, all of this can soon be avoided. Just fill out a simple questionnaire and mail it in. The computer will print a slightly different version of that day's paper for each reader, and your Personalized copy will come to you in the morning containing absolutely nothing but what you want to know. After a year, or maybe five years, you will have forgotten entirely all the "alien" and uncomfortable signals that once got through to you and caused you distress.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

“Since the publication of Packard's The Hidden Persuaders, McLuhan's The Mechanical Bride, and similar books, it has been realized that techniques of inducing "mass hallucination" or something like "mass hallucination" are well known to advertisers.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

“Against that positivism which stops before phenomena, saying "there are only facts,” I should say; no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations. Nietzsche, The Will to Power”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

“Buckminster Fuller often urged his audiences to try this simple experiment: stand, at "sunset," facing the sun for several minutes. As you watch the spectacular technicolor effects, keep reminding yourself, "The sun is not 'going down.’ The earth is rotating on its axis." If you are statistically normal, you will feel, after a few minutes, that, even though you understand the Copernican model intellectually, part of you — a large part — never felt it before. Part of you, hypnotized by metaphor, has always felt the pre-Copernican model of a stationary Earth.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

“Think of the cock-eyed room designed by Dr. Ames where men "become" giants and midgets, because we cannot reprogram our brains fast enough to change perception accurately when confronted with dissonance, so we choose "the lesser of two evils," and accept congenial hallucination, rather than — Chaos and the Abyss.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

“I think it might help to regard this UFO, not as an external event () or a human "hallucination" () but as the synergetic product () of event-plus-human-interpretation.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

“In Buddhist Logic, then: Social fields are real. Social fields are not real. Social fields are both real and not-real. Social fields are neither real nor not-real.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

“That's the kind of question that got Carl Jung thinking about synchronicity (universal resonance) which is a little bit like Sheldrake's morphogenetic field and also, coincidentally, a little bit like the non-local effect in quantum mechanics.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

“If "God" is not mad, as Fort claimed, then maybe "God" is, as Buckminster Fuller once wrote, not a noun but a verb. That is, "God" is what religious people do, as, in some models, an electron is an operation performed by people (physicists) — "God" as the act of praying, the energy raised”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

“Try. Thoughts are the one phenomena still private in this world; they won't come around and arrest you at once. You have nothing to lose but mental chains. You might have a world of psychological freedom — "creativity" — to gain.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

“Of course. Chaos and the Abyss are metaphors, of the special kind that we have called metaphors about metaphors. They attempt to describe what is left when abstractions like "the leaf" and "the" "average" — linguistic reality-tunnels — are dropped from our minds.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

“Or maybe the universe has wobbles and weirdness indeed. Maybe belief in any system is maintained by "forgetting" all data that does not fit the system?”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

“The great Soviet film director, Sergei Eisenstein, once wrote an essay claiming "the camera is a liar." What did he mean by that? An old Zen Buddhist riddle asks "Who is the Master who makes the grass green?”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

“A fact allegedly exists; a non-fact allegedly doesn't exist. But existence is something we can never know all about. It is a term in metaphysics, not in operational science.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

“If they are bizarre, if they don't fit our reality-tunnel, and if they go away quickly, we are happy to dismiss them as "only" appearances, or as misperceptions.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

“Do you prefer to shift some propositions from "true" or "false" into one of the other categories? Do you think this is just pedantry, or that applying such a multiple-choice approach to life generally might clarify thought at times and even free some creative energies? Do you agree with my suggestions or do you think some propositions should be moved from the categories I assigned them into another category? And, most important in the context of this book: Do you think Inquisitions are more likely to flourish in an Aristotelian true/false game or in this kind of multiple choice game?”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

“Most modern logicians would classify 15, "God has spoken to me" as equally meaningless in the above sense. Partially, I agree. Partially, I think it more accurate, and compassionate, to regard this as a badly-formulated self-referential statement. That is, just as "Beethoven is better than Mozart" is a bad formulation of the self-referential proposition 'Beethoven seems better than Mozart to me,"it may be most helpful to consider "God has spoken to me" as a bad formulation of the correct proposition, "I have had such an awe-inspiring experience that the best model I know to describe it is to say that God spoke to me." I think this is helpful because the proposition is only false if the person is deliberately lying, and because it reminds us that similar experiences are often stated within other paradigms, such as "I became one with the Buddha-mind" or "I became one with the Universe." These have different philosophical meanings than "God has spoken to me," but probably refer to the same kind of etic (non-verbal) experiences.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

“The tenth planet beyond Pluto, in this instance, will be discovered, or won't be discovered, when the space telescope goes into orbit in the near future. The existence of advanced life-forms beyond Earth may not be verified or refuted for a thousand years or longer — or it may be verified tomorrow, if the "Space Brothers" beloved in UFO lore suddenly land en masse — but at present it remains similarly indeterminate.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

“The New Fundamentalists are not as far separated from the Old Fundamentalists as they like to think they are.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

“If the so-called "laws" contained in our models are only generalizations based on our experience until this date — if they are not spaceless, timeless, eternal and given by some divinity or other — then things that do not fit our current models should not be rejected a priori. They should be studied carefully, as clues that might lead us to better models tomorrow.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

“Remember: I am not asking you to believe these yarns at all. We know how much nonsense gets published these days, do we not? I am merely asking that you observe in yourself the strength and immediacy of the impulse to deny at once. Does this impulse vary according to the weight of the circumstantial evidence (such as it is) or according to how much your own imprinted and conditioned reality-tunnel is challenged?”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

“Such self-referential "truths" are valid for only one person at a time, or one group of persons, and do not refer to anything but the nervous system or nervous systems of those who espouse them. This does not mean that they are "false," but only that they are even more relative (and subjective) than legal proofs, for instance, and that they are very, very different from scientific or mathematical "truths.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

“Prof. Marcello Truzzi, sociologist, from Eastern Michigan University, was editor of the CSICOP journal when it was called the Zetetic. He had a difference of opinion with the Executive Council about whether dissenting views should be published. He says CSICOP isn't skeptical at all in the true meaning of that word but is "an advocacy body upholding orthodox establishment views." In other words, their alleged skepticism has become, as my paradox suggests, just another dogmatic blind faith.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science