The Perils of Operation Mindfuck

My foreword to The Chapel Perilous, the new RAW biography by Gabriel Kennedy

FOREWORD

Never has there been a society in greater need of Robert Anton Wilson than our own, right now.

As Bob would no doubt be explaining to us, our problem is not that we don’t know what to believe, whom to trust, or how to respond; it’s that we think we do. We are certain what the words and pictures on our screens mean, whom they indict, whom they absolve, and which side’s story they tell. It’s not only a dangerous way to live; it’s entirely less fun.

It’s amusing to me now that I was nervous the first time I met Robert Anton Wilson back in the early nineties. To me, he was not only a counterculture legend — the author of Cosmic Trigger and The Illuminatus! Trilogy, initiator of Operation Mindfuck and Pope of the Discordian Church — but an authority figure and role model. I was on my very first book tour, gushing with my optimistic appraisals of the early cyberdelic movement, when I noticed him sitting the front row. I had modeled my talks after Bob’s style of lateral thinking, comparing and contrasting perspectives while never quite committing to one. It was the space between them, the ambiguity itself, that mattered. But now that I was in front of RAW Himself, I became obsessed…