by Greg Johnson
We can see that it is all too easy to regard Stirner, Nietzsche, and Camus as ‘fascists,’ and refuse to consider them any further. All those honest, decent people who defend the rights of minorities and wear CND badges and take part in hunger marches are bound to react with furious contempt to thinkers who declare that leftism is based on muddled thinking, and that the road to freedom is as narrow as the eye of a needle . . . [Hopkins] refuses to accept that anyone who raises these same basic questions about human purpose and the morality of power is bound to be tarred with the same brush as the Nazis. He insists that what he is talking about is not power-mania or a desire to put human beings in concentration camps, but the fundamental issue of whether man is a god or a worm.305
In the summer of 1958, Colin delivered a lecture (the text of which has been lost) to a short-lived group founded by Hopkins that the latter had hoped to turn into a political party, the Spartacans. Little information has survived about this group, but it is said to have been elitist and Rightist in orientation. According to Stuart Holroyd, another writer and a friend of Colin’s who was present at the lecture, Wilson discussed psychological experiments which demonstrate that only five percent of humans actually possess leadership traits which allow them to dominate the others, and that political power should therefore rest in this five percent.306 This is likely accurate, given that Wilson frequently cited this research throughout his writing career, albeit minus the political conclusion.
THE OUTSIDER
So what is The Outsider? The book is still in print—and has been continuously since 1956—so readers still have ample opportunity to find out for themselves. But I will provide a brief overview. It is a survey of writers, artists, and mystics who Colin believed defined the outsider identity. These included H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Hermann Hesse, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, T. E. Lawrence, Vincent van Gogh, Nijinsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoevsky, William Blake, Ramakrishna, and G. I. Gurdjieff, among others.
Colin defined “outsiders” as those individuals who feel alienated from the society they live in, and who are compelled to defy the conventions of their time and attempt to forge something new that transcends it, either in their work or in their own lives (sometimes both). In his second book, he said that outsiders “appear like pimples on a dying civilization”307 which has lost its sense of health, spirituality, and meaning. Colin believed that the existentialists, who were at the peak of their popularity in Continental Europe at the time he was writing, held the key to understanding this predicament. The existentialists believed that life has no meaning apart from what we ourselves give it, resulting in a condition they referred to as “the absurd,” a view which Colin seconded. But he took the French existentialists to task for coming to what he saw as negative conclusions. Sartre and Camus, he pointed out, saw it as a tragedy that man has no essential meaning and lamented that he was “condemned” to be free. Such a view led Sartre to the rather ridiculous supposition that, all meanings being equal, he should embrace Communism. For Colin, existentialism was not about making arbitrary commitments, but rather of affirming the boundless potential freedom of the individual to realize himself.
The mystical experience was a vital proof of this. (“Any system of values must ultimately be mystical,” he wrote.)308 Although Colin was interested in religion and lamented its loss as a form of social cohesion and as a means for the outsider to attain states of intensity, unlike the capital-T Traditionalists, he never looked to it as a way out of the modern predicament. Rather than interpreting mysticism in a religious way, he saw such experiences as a crucial factor in human evolution. An analogy he frequently used was the “Christmas morning” experience that a child has, when everything seems fresh, vibrant, and somehow more real than it does on ordinary days, just for that morning; he also liked to cite the “absurd good news” referenced by G. K. Chesterton, which he understood as those moments when the meaning and goodness of existence seems self-evidently clear in a burst of revelation. In Colin’s view, for some people such experiences are a rarity that only come about inexplicably and by chance, but psychologically healthy people have such experiences all the time. He believed that those who were among the elite of human society (which, as previously mentioned, he estimated as being five percent of the whole) would actively seek such states through various means such as adventure, danger, sex, drugs, combat, art, the intellect, and/or asceticism. For Colin, this was more than just a psychological phenomenon—it was a presaging of an entirely new form of consciousness that humans are only just beginning to explore, but which will eventually bring about an entirely new phase in our evolutionary development. “The outsider stands for truth,” he said.
The problem with this view is that the people who have such experiences will do anything possible to avoid coming to the conclusions that these states ought to drive them towards—namely, that the mind is an instrument of as yet undreamed potential that we are only just beginning to understand and harness. Wilson pointed toward the Romantics of the nineteenth century as an example of this: in their work, they scaled the heights of beauty, intensity, and nobility; but in their lives, many of them frequently fell victim to depression, madness, addiction, and suicide—problems which have since percolated out from the artists’ salons to the masses and continue to plague our society today. In Wilson’s view, until men could heroically embrace their freedom by refusing to accept the limitations placed on them by society and by the drabness of everyday life—limitations which he believed were illusory and were rather tricks played on us by the lower parts of our minds—they would never be able to advance to a higher stage of development. Outsiders, however, flawed as they are, are the vanguard of this coming change in consciousness.
CAREER & IDEAS
In spite of the savaging his second book sustained at the hands of the critics, the success of The Outsider had at least provided Colin with enough money to purchase a home in Cornwall, where he and Joy were to remain for the rest of their lives, and they began raising a family. They eventually had two sons and one daughter. (Colin also had a son from his previous, short-lived marriage.) He now had a reputation as a writer, and this enabled him to begin supporting himself entirely from his writing, although this proved to be a challenging task for a man with a family, and explains his prodigious output. His crucial need to make his living by his pen even led to him nearly having a nervous breakdown in 1973, from the strain of overwork.
In typical Wilsonian fashion, Colin was inspired to take one of his primary ideas from this experience, which he termed “the ladder of selves,” by which he meant the various levels of consciousness that one can attain. Most, he felt, never venture beyond the lower rungs, which are accessible by anyone with merely biological impulses. But those with a drive to realize their will, he believed, could access the higher rungs, and discover previously unknown layers of their own personalities. Colin believed that multiple personality disorder was a corruption of this facet of human nature.
Nevertheless, Colin persevered, and always earned his living solely as a writer, supplemented with occasional teaching gigs, lecturing, and television appearances. Wilson also had a reputation for being a voracious book and record (LPs, for the young) collector. He is reputed to have acquired many tens of thousands of volumes over the course of his life, and eventually had to construct a series of sheds on his property in Cornwall in order to house them all.
Colin’s writing career had two distinct phases. The phase that commenced with The Outsider, and which comprises most of his work of the 1950s and ’60s, has been termed his “New Existentialism” phase. This is when Colin laid down the premises for his work, primarily through the examination of philosophy and literature, although he also began to engage with psychology. He befriended Dr. Abraham Maslow, and adopted from him the term “peak experience” to describe the mystical states of intensity which outsiders experience. Maslow believed that peak experiences come and go, but that on
e couldn’t control them. Colin contested this idea, believing that they could be induced at will, and he worked at developing techniques by which they could be attained.
At the same time, he was also laying the foundations for a new school of existentialism that was free of the pessimism that he regarded as defining its French incarnation. Colin was very adamant that pessimism was detrimental to human development, and believed that it affected perception and thus altered one’s ability to accurately know the world and oneself. This was an overriding concern throughout his career. The existentialists, and the phenomenologists who had preceded them, had used the term “intentionality” to describe perception as an act of the will rather than as something automatic or involuntary; the mind decides to perceive something, and then becomes aware of it. Conversely, that which the mind chooses not to perceive is ignored. The French existentialists saw this condition as reducing human life to absurdity. Wilson rather believed that it demonstrated that seeing life as meaningless and tragic was a matter of choice rather than the realization of some inherent condition; one simply chooses to see meaninglessness instead of meaning. Those who see the world as a bleak and tragic place, Colin held, were suffering from what he called a high “indifference threshold”—such people are unwilling to make the effort to actually perceive life in all its possibilities, either deliberately out of fear or due to a lack of vitality.
An illustration he frequently used to make this point was the creation in the course of Van Gogh’s lifetime both of the painting, Starry Night, and his suicide note. When one looks at the painting, one is awestruck by the wonderment of the scene. It gives the impression of an overflowing of the senses, of gifted perception made permanent. And yet the man who was capable of seeing the world in this way was also capable of despising life to the extent that he could destroy himself, leaving a note that read, “Misery will never end.” “Starry Night was true, the suicide note was false,” Colin was fond of saying. I still believe that the possibilities for a new existentialism based upon the premises that he outlined remains an as yet unexplored possibility worthy of further consideration, and may even offer a worthy alternative to postmodernism—something which Colin himself hinted at in some of his later essays.309
In 1971, Colin’s interest in the mystical led to one of his most important works, The Occult.310 This was the book that launched what came to define the second part of his career: the paranormal and the supernatural, which Colin believed provided further evidence for the coming change in human consciousness. While doing research for the book, he came to believe that such phenomena are manifestations of unsuspected powers of the human mind, which he thought we would eventually learn to control and exploit. It was in this book that Colin first coined the term Faculty X, which he saw as the faculty of the human mind which allows us to escape the merely personal and narrow and instead become aware of mental vistas larger than ourselves; the refinement of Faculty X, Colin believed, should be the true goal of the outsider.
The Occult became the first of many books that Colin would write on the subject. Beginning in the 1990s, he also wrote a series of fascinating books on the evidence for an advanced, worldwide civilization on the Earth in prehistoric times (along the lines of Graham Hancock’s Fingerprints of the Gods).311 Even these books tie into his interest in consciousness, since he believed, along with Julian Jaynes, that the ancients possessed a different form of it than we have today, one in which human perception was more deeply tied to Faculty X than today.
The other genre that defines the second part of Colin’s career is true crime, which he first engaged with in 1961 when he co-wrote the Encyclopaedia of Murder with Patricia Pitman,312 although he began writing much more on the subject beginning in the 1970s. Murder is also a subject frequently dealt with in his novels. Colin was always fascinated by it, and by serial killers in particular. He viewed serial killers as a sort of flawed type of outsider—he believed they were creative individuals whose powers had been misdirected into violence, and that the thrill they got from transgressing the moral order, which he thought induced a type of peak experience in the killers, became addictive. Colin thought that some criminals could be successfully rehabilitated by offering them an artistic outlet while they were in prison, and he helped to design experimental programs that were tested successfully in prisons in the United States.
Some people who had been admirers of his early books were disappointed by the turn that Colin’s work took from the 1970s onward. Apart from occasional short essays on his previous topics, Colin largely abandoned philosophy and literary criticism—he wrote no major book-length works on those subjects after the mid-1970s. Part of this was no doubt because he discovered that it was easier to sell occult and true crime books than books on philosophy. However, I believe that he had said everything that he wanted to say about philosophy in those early books, and his later books—the best of them, at any rate—can be seen as a continuation of his earlier concerns in other mediums. Colin’s perpetual subject was always consciousness and its possibilities, and while some may disagree with the direction he took, there is no doubt in my mind that he genuinely believed that the study of the occult and of the criminal mentality could offer vital clues as to how consciousness is evolving, and thus help to resolve the “search for meaning” of the existential outsider.
There are also some books of his that defy easy categorization. There is A Book of Booze,313 which is on one of his greatest loves: wine (and I can report that we polished off several bottles at his insistence on the evening that I was fortunate enough to join him for dinner). There is Brandy of the Damned,314 his survey of one of his other greatest loves: classical music. There is L’Amour: The Ways of Love,315 a book he wrote on sex to accompany a series of erotic photographs. And there are also his many novels, including several written in the world of the Cthulhu Mythos of Lovecraft; but trying to do a survey of them goes beyond the scope of this essay.
POLITICS
As this is appearing in North American New Right, I feel I should also add something about Colin’s relationship to politics. The first thing it is important to emphasize is that Colin always eschewed politics and rarely mentioned it in his work; he said repeatedly that he didn’t think writers should engage with the subject at all, and suggested on more than one occasion that writers who did so were wasting their time. He also claimed that he really didn’t understand politics himself. (In one essay he wrote, “I am only a writer, and I have always suspected that all writers are idiots where politics are concerned.”)316 Nevertheless, there are a few interesting things to be recounted.
His earliest political flirtation in his youth was with anarchism; his first, and as far as his biographers know only, political activism of any sort was as a speaker for two London anarchist groups during a brief period in the mid-1950s, prior to the publication of The Outsider: the first was the London Anarchist Group, and the second was the Syndicalist Workers’ Federation of North London. He also attended the meetings of a third group of “freethinkers” called the Bridge. By Colin’s own account, he always knew that anarchism was nonsense, but enjoyed the intellectual stimulation (and occasionally, stimulation of a sexual nature from some of the female members) he received and the opportunity to practice public speaking. Invariably, however, Colin would confront his erstwhile comrades with his belief that their utopian dreams would fail so long as they neglected to address the irrational side of human nature, that could only be contained by the sort of self-discipline which had once been offered by religion, rather than by any political system—which would always result in him being asked to leave.
In the later 1950s and ’60s, he expressed sympathy for socialism in some of his public statements (in an essay from 1959 he referenced his “old dream of a new British Left Wing with a little more life than the Labour Party and less stupidity than the Communists”),317 but eventually lost it in the course of doing research for his biography of George Bernard Shaw,318 a Fabian.
His socialist leanings didn’t prevent him from discussing his admiration for the novels of Ayn Rand in his 1965 book, Eagle and Earwig.319 He saw Rand as advocating a similar type of individualist heroism as his own, with a contempt that was akin to what he had termed the “fallacy of insignificance” in modern thought. He was thus spurred to write her a letter pointing out this correlation. To his chagrin he received a blistering return letter from Rand’s secretary, Nathaniel Branden, in which the “inappropriateness” and alleged offensiveness of his letter was castigated. Colin never again discussed Rand in his work.
In attempting to explain his aversion to politics, he once confessed early in his career, “I’m too English to have much liking for the idea of the State. The English, like the Americans, are harebrained, vague and anarchistic. Thank God.”320
But it was when The Outsider was first published that Wilson struck up one of his more notable friendships, specifically with Sir Oswald Mosley, then leader of the Union Movement, whom he was invited to meet for lunch at the Hyde Park Hotel. (Wilson later claimed that he had known nothing of Mosley’s political activities at the time.) By Wilson’s own account, the two shared an interest in many of the same thinkers and ideas (he wrote that they “spent the entire meal discussing literature and philosophy—in particular, [their] mutual detestation of Bertrand Russell, and admiration of Spengler.” Wilson claimed that Mosley was “one of the most intelligent men I had ever talked to, and . . . his interest in ideas was genuine and not superficial.”