Robert Anton Wilson’s Anarchist Friends
Was RAW an Anarcho-Technocrat? A Letter to Don Werkheiser
As I write in Chapel Perilous: The Life & Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson, in 1962, Robert Anton Wilson, his wife Arlen, and their four children, ventured west from the pavement paradises of New Jersey to the fertile soils of Dayton, Ohio to join, and work for, the School of Living. SOL is a non-profit educational network that back-to-the-land institution, begun a by Ralph Borsodi, the American Agrarian philosopher and author, in 1934, with the intention to educate others in the self-reliant traditions found within the American political-economic canon that seek to promote individualist and mutualist forms of living, minus the excessive avarice now existing within our most current structures. Bob and Arlen’s adventure with the SOL began when Arlen discovered an entry in the Encyclopedia Brittanica for the political philosophy of Anarchism. It read:
“The name given to a principle of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government — harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements, concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of civilized being.”
Prop’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Subscribed
This entry, written by the Peter Kropotkin, the Russian biologist and anarchist, whose geologically explorations allowed him to observe a cross-species capacity and practice of cooperation among the “wild animals,” in nature. This insight sparked him to write Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902) and opened up a long vocation as a radical theoretician among a growing list of radical thinkers.
For Bob and Arlen, discovering such an idea syncopated smoothly with their readings of Ralph Borsodi, whose books stressed moving from the city to more rural climes and advocating for more personal freedom. Borsodi included in his curriculum a knowledge of the work of Henry George, the once gigantically writer, author of Progress and Poverty (1879), which asked why did poverty in America proliferate after the supposed progress the industrial revolution brought to this country? George’s book argued that the basis of wealth is land, land that became monopolized, but a single tax on land would raise enough revenue to eliminate poverty in the country. This idea became known as the Single Tax, or Land Tax and it became hugely popular with its readers. George’s book and ideas were once so popular that it sold as many copies as the Bible and helped spark the Progressive movement within America. Borsodi likely learned of Henry George and agrarian philosophy from his mentor, Bolton Hall, the Irish born lawyer, activist, and originator of the modern American back-to-the-land movement. Hall was a fan of the work of Henry George and also that of a French philosopher named PJ Proudhon. Proudhon, of course, receives the credit for coining the term “Anarchism,” as defined by Kropotkin above. Hall’s enthusiasm for the work of Benjamin R. Tucker, the American Individualist Anarchist, Leo Tolstoy, the novelist and Christian pacifist anarchist, and Herbert Spencer, the British philosopher who coined the term “survival of the fittest.” Borsodi brought integrated those influences, and more, into the SOL, and by the time Wilson arrived, the SOL library had amassed a large collection of work from all these thinkers and more.
By the time Bob and Arlen arrived at SOL Mildred Loomis, the writer, activist, and “grandmother of the counterculture,” was leading the school. Loomis hired Wilson as the co-editor of its journal, which he promptly changed the name from Balanced Living to A Way Out. While at SOL, Wilson was a frequent visitor to the school’s library, reading original works from Benjamin R. Tucker, Lysander Spooner, Josiah Warren, P.J. Proudhon, and Emma Goldman. (I write in more detail about this in my book, Chapel Perilous: The Life & Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson.)
While attending SOL, Wilson met some contemporary American anarchist thinkers like Laurance Labadie, the writer and son of Joseph Labadie, the American anarchist thinker. Bob also befriended Don Werkheiser, the writer and creator of “Mutual Option Relationships,” notion promoting the value of voluntary associations.
During the writing of Chapel Perilous: The Life & Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson I procured some correspondence between Wilson, Mildred Loomis, and Don Werkheiser, which I share in this post.
The following is a letter from Wilson to Werkheiser from March 12, 1975. The letter was written months prior to the publication of Illuminatus! Trilogy, so Wilson is on the cusp of emerging from the poverty that haunted Wilson since he left Playboy magazine four years earlier. You can read in his message to Werkheiser that he is close to finally breaking through the threshold when he writes, “I’m going to be world-famous or in jail by the end of 1975. Watch.”
RAW’s letter
Mailed on March 12, 1975
Dear Don,
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
I am delighted to hear from you again after all these years and to learn that you have written a 1000-page book. Goddess help you and guide you in your dealings with publishers…
I now see to have 4 books in print, 3 nonfiction (PLAYBOY’S BOOK OF FORBIDDEN WORDS, SEX AND DRUGS: A JOURNEY BEYOND LIMITS, and THE BOOK OF THE BREAST) and 1 fiction (THE SEX MAGICIANS.) I also seem to have 3 more scheduled: a 3-volume novel with Bob Shea (ILLUMINATUS! OR LAUGHING PHALLUS PRODUCTIONS PRESENTS), a hit of journalism with Mike Horowitz (THE TIME LEARY STORY) and my own again PROMETHEUS RISIING: A MAGICK MANUAL FOR THE SPACE AGE.
I’M ALSO WORKING ON A MORE SERIOUS BOOK ABOUT Leary (THE STARSEED SIGNALS), a biography of Aleister Crowly (LION OF LIGHT) and a journalistic survey of current life-extension research (DEATH SHALL HAVE NO DOMINION), none of which have publishers yet.
Left Mexico in 1972 after growing very broke there. Got $5000 in advances from Playboy Press and mov ed on to Mendocino County where we rented a 250-acrerqanch with bears and mountain lions and a TREEmendous Pacific Ocean view including migrating whales in January. Went broke again, after a while, moved to Berkeley and went on Welfare last Spring. Still waiting for a big enough sale to get off Welfare…all of which is typical of book-writers these days. I find.
Roseman wants to do a big promo on ILLUMINATUS! which will describe it as “the anarchist Acid Rock answer to Tolkien,” but whether he gets that remains to be seen, Meanwhile, I am doing every kind of pre-promo I can think of. My current agent tells me I’ve a natural gift for promotions but it AIN’T natural at all; I’ve learned thru the fuckups involved in the first four books.
I’m going to be world-famous or in jail by the end of 1975. Watch.
Playboy Press gave Spiro $50,000 advance on his book after giving me $5000 advance on two books. That’s when I decided to become a genius at promotions. Nobody else will do it for a writer if he don’t grok how to do it for hisself, yuk yuk…
I’ll be innarested in how you derive social phenomena from psychology, biology and physics. Leary and I are currently deriving everything from the Periodic Table of Elements via Leary’s Periodic Table of Neurogenetics. Some of that is in the Scientific Magick article you ordered from Gnostica.
I wrote to Central State for your address a year or so ago and they never answered. Some students finally burned it down maybe…
Immortality, Starflight, Neurologic,
And hope
Bob W
No, I haven’t lost interest in land-money-politics. My current thinking on such matters appears fairly regularly in SRAF Bulletin and in Against the Wall. My emphasis may have shifted somewhat, as Kenneth Burke might indicate by saying I used to anarcho-technocrat and am now anarcho-technocrat. The importance of getting off this planet — socially, politically, evolutionarily, spiritually, magically etc., — is central to all of my thinking these days.
Crowley is the first anarchist (of sorts) in the cabalistic Magick tradition; hence his fascination for me. But he is a kind of fascist-anarchist and not entirely congenial. I am developing my own school of Zen Witchcraft; but Crowley is a big part of it, frankly.
In answer to those who complained that his writing was too hermetic and obscure, Crowley wrote the enclosed one-page book almost entirely in one-sylabil words (Isn’t it strange that I never learned to spell syllable or syllabil or whatever it is….) AL is Liber Al vel Legic Latin Hebrew for The Book of the Goat.
