Humpjones

Robert Anton Wilson’s Guide to Sex (That Never Happened)

Posted Jan 14, 2012

Robert Anton Wilson

Big thanks to the good people at Boing Boing for doing Robert Anton Wilson Week, which comes as I’ve been re-re-re-reading Quantum Psychology. Synchronicity accelerates. I found this gem in a lost interview that’s packed full of brilliant ideas and one-liners, as per. (For example: “Doubt lasts longer than faith and provokes thought rather than discouraging it.”)

I wanted to share this passage, though, where RAW details a book idea he never got around to…

Pope Bob’s Unfinished Guide to Human Sexuality

“I have a lot of ideas for books. One of them is The Truth About Sex. I probably will never do this one; that’s why I talk about it so much. I’d like somebody to rip the idea off, so I don’t have to do it. There was a book that was a bestseller, ten or 15 years ago, Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex But You Were Afraid To Ask Your Doctor, and it was in question and answer form. I thought the author was one of the stupidest people I’d ever read. I decided to do the book correctly. It’d be in question and answer form, but instead of one answer to each question there would be four or five, or maybe even a dozen, all from leading authorities, and all contradicting one another. The idea of the book was to show that the authorities don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. It’s an area full of prejudice.

There’s no real science of sexology yet; it’s all various people expressing their personal prejudices and disguising it as psychology or sociology. So I thought, take a question like, “What causes homosexuality?” and give twelve different answers just to show how much the scientific community really knows; they can’t even agree about a simple thing like that. “What causes heterosexuality,” for that matter? “What is the difference between vaginal and clitoral orgasm?” I’d get about 24 different opinions on that, in the literature.

The reason I’ll probably never do that book is getting the permissions from all these authors is a Herculean task, which publishers always dump on the writer. And once they found out what they had agreed to, the experts would all be furious because they’d all look like idiots, because they’re all overly dogmatic. They’d be very furious and god knows what they’d do about it. So I hope somebody else does that book and I don’t have to do it.”

#WHALAM

Thanks to the wonders of Teh Internets, this would be pretty easy to accomplish. Rather than being released as a book, it could simply be a website operating under basic “Fair Use” laws to spotlight the monumental ignorance of our species.

Of course, Human Sexuality for Filthy Apes has more than a few similarities to the concept that RAW outlines above, but the big difference is that I’m actively participating in the stupidity. Rather than point fingers and laugh, I am developing my own vast and contradictory Theory of Everything. I aim to demonstrate that science is far too much fun to be left to actual scientists, and furthermore, since we’re all engaged in the creation of fictional belief structures, we should aim considerably higher than mere “plausibility.”

As Klintron explained to me in a dream last night: “What you’re really doing is taking Salvador Dali’s concept of Critical Paranoia and applying it to the whole of modern science.”

Amen.