'The birth pangs of a cosmic Prometheus rising out of the long nightmare of domesticated primate history'

Excerpts from Robert Anton Wilson's 'Prometheus Rising':

From: 'Preface to the Second Edition' (1997)

As I contemplate this tenth printing of a "far out" or "freaked out" book that began its career back in 1978, I feel only mildly embarassed by the predictions that proved over-optimistic. ... I feel much more astonished, and pleased that many of the predictions now seem much less shocking than when I first published them. Indeed the wildest and most "Utopian" future-scans in here are precisely the ones that have had the greatest support in the 1990s. To see two decades ahead, even in a few years, counts as some sort of success in the Futurism game. And every bulletin from the embattled MIR space station reminds me that if my space forecasts projected "too much too soon," part of what I expected does in fact already exist and the rest is obviously evolving.

I feel more chagrined about my lyrical evocation of Intelligence Intensification. In the 1970s, I simply did not recognize the extent to which the 1960s "youth revolution" had terrified our ruling Elite, or that they would try to prevent future upsurges of radical Utopianism by deliberately "dumbing down" the educational system. What they have produced, the so-called Generation X, must rank as not only the most ignorant but also the most paranoid and depressive kids ever to infest our Republic. I agree with outlaw radio star Travis Hipp that the paranoia and depression result inevitably from ignorance. These kids not only don't know anything; they don't even want to know. They only realize, vaguely, that somebody has screwed them out of something, but they don't have zest or bile to try to find out who screwed them and what they were screwed out of.

Fortunately, this Age of Stupidity cannot last very long. Already most people know that if you want a good TV or VCR, you buy Japanese or German, etc. Eventually, in order to compete, the Elite will have to allow a bit more education for American youth, before we sink fully to the level of a Third World nation.

From 'Chapter Five -- Dickens & Joyce:The Two-Circuit Dialectic'

In Chapter Three of Finnegan's Wake, the "offenders" (invaders) and "defenders" (natives) get so thoroughly mixed up that all that remains is a composite "fender" who takes the blame for everybody.

This cyclical view of history, whether in Joyce, Rattray, Taylor, Vico (Joyce's source), Hegel-and-Marx, etc. is only part of the truth, but it needs to be stressed because it is the part that most people fearfully refuse to recognise. Whether we speak in terms of Taylor's Matrist-Patrist dialectic, Vico's cycle of Divine, Heroic and Urbanized ages, the Marx-Hegel trinity of Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis, or any variation thereon, we are speaking of a pattern that is real and that does repeat.

But it only does so to the extent that people are robotized: trapped in hard-wired reflexes.

When the accumulated facts, gimmicks, tools, techniques and gadgets of neuro-science -- the science of brain change and brain liberation -- reaches a certain critical mass, we will be able to free ourselves from these robot cycles. It is the thesis of this book that we have been approaching that critical mass for several decades now and will reach the crossover point faster than you expect.

The current rampages of territorial-emotional pugnacity sweeping this planet are not just another civilization failing, Vico fashion.

They are the birth pangs of a cosmic Prometheus rising out of the long nightmare of domesticated primate history.

From Chapter Six -- The Time-Binding Semantic Circuit

Whoever can scare people enough (produce bio-survival anxiety) can sell them quickly on any verbal map that seems to give them relief, i.e., cure the anxiety. By frightening people with Hell and then offering them salvation, the most ignorant or crooked individuals can "sell" a whole system of thought that cannot bear two minutes of rational analysis. And any domesticated primate alpha male, however cruel or crooked, can rally the primate tribe behind him by howling that a rival alpha male is about to lead his gang in an attack on this habitat. These two mammalian reflexes are known, respectively, as Religion and Patriotism. They work for domesticated primates, as for the wild primates, because they are Evolutionary Relative Successes. (So far.)

The emotional-territorial or "patriotic" circuit also contains status programs or pecking order. Working in tandem with first-circuit bio-survival anxieties, it is always able to pervert the functioning of the semantic-rational circuit. Whatever threatens loss of status, and whatever invades one's "space" (including one's ideological "head space"), is a threat to the average domesticated primate.