The United States of Paranoia

by Jesse Walker

  It was the incineration that caught Wilson’s attention. He recoiled at the thought that the U.S. government was burning books, and he decided to seek out Reich’s forbidden writings and judge the ideas for himself. He came away from the experience enchanted by the writer. Reich’s politics mixed easily with Wilson’s interest in antiauthoritarian ideas; Reich’s ideas about orgone meshed with Wilson’s growing interest in Buddhism, Taoism, and other sorts of mysticism; and Reich’s calls for sexual liberation offered a link between the two, a way Wilson could connect political and psychological repression.

  By that time Wilson had married the playwright Arlen Riley, adopted her two children, and sired two more. He worked at a series of straight jobs to support his family while writing after hours for The Realist and other alternative outlets. Sometimes he landed jobs that allowed him to write for a living, though the nature of that writing varied considerably from one employer to another. In Passaic, New Jersey, he churned out ad copy for the Popular Club Plan. In Lane’s End, Ohio, he lived on a homestead and edited a decentralist journal that had been called Balanced Living. (He changed the name to Way Out, amped up the magazine’s anarchist and Reichian content, started publishing poetry by Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer, and alienated a lot of readers.) Back in New York, he was a staffer at Fact, where he profiled both Mad and The National Inquirer.

  And for three months he worked for a company he called “the country’s leading schlock factory,” editing three pulp magazines and writing an ESP column for a tabloid paper. “I read the predictions that had appeared over the past several months,” he later recounted, “and began grinding out my own predictions, out of the blue. It was surprisingly easy. Among other things, I predicted that Lyndon Johnson would be assassinated, that anti-American riots would occur in another Latin American nation, that the $15,000,000 pornography collection on the closed shelves of a large public library would be robbed by a mob led by a defrocked priest ‘well known in occult circles,’ that flying saucers would be in the news again, that shocking discoveries would be made at Stonehenge throwing new light on ancient Egypt and revealing how man came to be on earth (ESP bugs, I reasoned, are generally also the types who believe that man was deposited here by flying saucers and that Egypt is full of occult mysteries), that peanut butter would be found to contain radioactive isotopes, and that a Hollywood star would be involved in a sex-and-LSD orgy.” Soon he was getting fan letters. “Many of them congratulated me on the number of my predictions that came true, although actually none of them ever came true.”54

  His big break came in 1966, after Playboy spotted a scathing attack on Hugh Hefner that Wilson had written for The Realist a few years before and was impressed enough to offer him a job. (Or at least that was how Wilson described the hiring process to Paul Krassner.) Wilson moved to Chicago, where the magazine put him in charge of the Playboy Forum, a letters column that dealt frequently with individual rights and abuses of power. After he published a discussion of spying by the U.S. Post Office, the editors of the libertarian newsletter Innovator sent him an issue featuring a story about private alternatives to the post office.55 Not long afterward, Innovator received and printed a letter about private police and arbitration agencies, signed by one “Simon Moon.”56 Moon was really Wilson, and Innovator’s editors included Kerry Thornley. The two began a correspondence, and Thornley introduced his new friend to Discordianism, which Wilson immediately embraced.

  Meanwhile, Wilson’s encounters with paranoid politics were coming closer to home. He was going to antiwar rallies, contributing to underground newspapers, having Black Panthers over to visit, and otherwise behaving in ways that might attract unwelcome official attention. There was a fair amount of pot and psychedelic drugs in the apartment too, amping up the fear of the police. “I learned you don’t say anything that somebody who’s tapping the phone is gonna wanna know,” his daughter Christina later remembered. “You don’t answer the door because it could be the FBI.”57

  But if Wilson was wary about the long arms and ears of the law, he also saw the absurdity of living your life in constant fear. “I think it’s probably what inspired my novels,” he told an interviewer years later. “I learned to live with that without getting paranoid.”58 The Discordian spirit of play and the sixties spirit of paranoia intermingled as Wilson, Thornley, and their allies began Operation Mindfuck, a free-form art project that was part political protest, part parade of pranks. In a weird way, it resembled the more bizarre COINTELPRO operations: something you might do if you learned about the FBI’s Siberian beetle plot and attempted to emulate the surrealist sensibility that must have come intuitively to the federal agent who conceived it.

  Wilson laid out the basic instructions for Operation Mindfuck in a memo sent to several friends (including Krassner). Participants were “to circulate all rumors contributed by other members,” and they were “to attribute all national calamities, assassinations or conspiracies to the other member-groups.” The one great risk, he cautioned, was that “the Establishment might be paranoid enough to believe some wild legend started by one of us and thereupon round up all of us for killing Abraham Lincoln.”59

  So they sent a letter on Bavarian Illuminati stationery to the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, just to confirm that “we’ve taken over the Rock Music business. But you’re still so naïve. We took over the business in the 1800s. Beethoven was our first convert.”60 Robert Welch of the John Birch Society got a letter informing him that Gary Allen was an Illuminati agent. When a New Orleans jury refused to convict one of the men Jim Garrison blamed for the JFK killing, Garrison’s booster Art Kunkin of the leftist Los Angeles Free Press received a missive from the “Order of the Phoenix Angel” revealing that the jurors were all members of the Illuminati. The telltale sign, the letter explained, was that none of them had a left nipple.

  The Discordians planted stories about the secret society in various leftist, libertarian, and hippie publications, introducing the Illuminati to the counterculture. “We accused everybody of being in the Illuminati,” Wilson recalled. “Nixon, Johnson, William Buckley, Jr., ourselves, Martian invaders, all the conspiracy buffs, everybody.” But they

  did not regard this as a hoax or prank in the ordinary sense. We still considered it guerrilla ontology.

  My personal attitude was that if the New Left wanted to live in the particular tunnel-reality of the hard-core paranoid, they had an absolute right to that neurological choice. I saw Discordianism as the Cosmic Giggle Factor, introducing so many alternative paranoias that everybody could pick a favorite, if they were inclined that way. I also hoped that some less gullible souls, overwhelmed by this embarrassment of riches, might see through the whole paranoia game and decide to mutate to a wider, funnier, more hopeful reality-map.61

  They inserted that chart into The East Village Other. They placed odd ads in Innovator. They practically took over the Chicago paper rogerSPARK, which once had been a fairly staid New Left outlet affiliated with the 49th Ward Citizens for Independent Political Action.62 The Discordians filled it with anarchist politics and surrealist satire: Someone scanning the classifieds might see an ad declaring, “PARANOIDS UNITE; you have nothing to fear but each other! Send for the informative booklet ‘How to Start Your Own Conspiracy’. Free from the Office of the District Attorney, New Orleans.”63 In the summer of 1969, the paper accused Chicago’s mayor of being an arm of the octopus, running the front-page headline DALEY LINKED WITH ILLUMINATI.64

  In the April 1969 edition of the Playboy Advisor column, right after an inquiry about blue balls, this missive appeared:

  I recently heard an old man of right-wing views—a friend of my grandparents’—assert that the current wave of assassinations in America is the work of a secret society called the Illuminati. He said that the Illuminati have existed throughout history, own the international banking cartels, have all been 32nd-degree Masons and were known to Ian Fleming, who portrayed them as SPECTRE in his James Bond books—for whic
h the Illuminati did away with Mr. Fleming. At first, this all seemed like a paranoid delusion to me. Then I read in The New Yorker that Allan Chapman, one of Jim Garrison’s investigators in the New Orleans probe of the John Kennedy assassination, believes that the Illuminati really exist. The next step in my galloping descent into credulity occurred when I mentioned this subject to a friend who is majoring in Middle Eastern affairs. He told me the Illuminati were actually of Arabic origin and that their founder was the legendary “old man of the mountains,” who used marijuana to work up a murderous frenzy and who fought against both the Crusaders and the orthodox Moslems, adding that their present ruler is the Aga Khan; but, he said, it is now merely a harmless religious order known as Ismailianism.

  I then began to wonder seriously about all this. I mentioned it to a friend from Berkeley. He immediately told me that there is a group on campus that calls itself the Illuminati and boasts that it secretly controls international finance and the mass media. Now (if Playboy isn’t part of the Illuminati conspiracy), can you tell me: Are the Illuminati part of the Masons? Is Aga Khan their leader? Do they really own all the banks and TV stations? And who have they killed lately?65

  The letter was signed “R.S., Kansas City, Missouri,” but it had actually been cooked up by Wilson and Thornley. Wilson’s reply, written in the light and neutral tone expected of the Playboy Advisor, cleared up most of the historical confusions contained in the letter (though it added the unsupported claim that Weishaupt’s Illuminati were “based loosely” on the Old Man of the Mountain’s order). The Berkeley Illuminati, Wilson added, were “a put-on by local anarchists.”

  It wasn’t always easy to tell where Operation Mindfuck ended and sincere paranoia began. “The Discordian revelations seem to have pressed a magick button,” Wilson later wrote. “New exposés of the Illuminati began to appear everywhere, in journals ranging from the extreme Right to the ultra-Left. Some of this was definitely not coming from us Discordians.” Not that it was always clear who “us Discordians” were either. Though some of the Berkeley Illuminati were acquainted with Thornley, they had independently invented the joke of posing as an ancient conspiracy.66 At one point, Wilson recalled, the Los Angeles Free Press printed “a taped interview with a black phone-caller who claimed to represent the ‘Black Mass,’ an Afro-Discordian conspiracy we had never heard of. He took credit, on behalf of the Black Mass and the Discordians, for all the bombings elsewhere attributed to the Weather Underground.”67

  Wilson and Thornley met only once in that period, when Wilson spent the night at Thornley’s place in Tampa in 1968. They smoked some pot and started ruminating about their project. “What if there really is an Illuminati?” Wilson asked. “Maybe they’ll find out about us and be pissed.”

  “I doubt if there is,” Thornley replied. “And if there by some chance is, they would probably be very happy to have wildass fools like us covering up for them by spreading bizarre theories.”68

  In 1969, Wilson and another Playboy editor, Robert Shea, began to work on what would become the most influential element of Operation Mindfuck. Inspired by the nutty letters the magazine often received, Shea and Wilson decided to write a novel “perched midway between satire and melodrama, and also delicately balancing between ‘proving’ the case for multiple conspiracies and undermining the ‘proof.’ ”69 The result was Illuminatus! It was basically finished in 1971 but it wouldn’t be published for another four years, with significant cuts and with the book sliced into three volumes.70 (A one-volume edition finally appeared in 1984.)

  Illuminatus! is the ur-text of the ironic style—the book that, as the comics writer Alan Moore later put it, “changed paranoia from an illness into an illuminating game.”71 It is often described as a story in which all the world’s conspiracy theories turn out to be true, but it would be more accurate to say that it treats every interpretation of the world, conspiracist or not, as equally plausible and equally ridiculous.

  The novel layers one conspiracy atop another atop another, creating a mosaic that refuses to be reduced to a single straightforward narrative. Various characters suggest early on that the Illuminati are the master conspiracy pulling the strings of the world’s elites, and we meet a loose alliance of anarchist organizations fighting against them: the Legion of Dynamic Discord, the Erisian Liberation Front, the Justified Ancients of Mummu, even a band of talking gorillas. But each new revelation undermines the information the reader thinks he knows. It’s the sort of story where several conspiracies independently show up in Dallas on the same day to kill John F. Kennedy, and even the assassins aren’t entirely sure which one fired the decisive bullet. By the end we learn that the allegedly all-powerful Illuminati are as baffled by the world as everyone else.

  All the primal myths are invoked in Illuminatus!—the Enemy Above and the Enemy Below, the Enemy Outside and the Enemy Within, even the Benevolent Conspiracy. I wouldn’t dare attempt to summarize the novel’s labyrinthine plot. I’ll just say it’s as good a guide as you’ll find to the apocalyptic fever dreams of the 1960s and ’70s: an acute critique of paranoia that is all the more powerful for being so deeply paranoid itself.

  The conspiracy-hunting community wasn’t sure what to make of Illuminatus! In the Michigan-based newsletter Conspiracy Digest, editor Peter McAlpine introduced an interview with Wilson by commenting that many of his readers believed “that Wilson, himself, was an Illuminati agent attempting to lampoon and discredit conspiracy theories.” Others, on the other hand, “felt sure he was doing his best to slip the truth past Establishment censors by disguising the truth as a titillating parody.” And some readers, aware of Wilson’s “occult-Gnostic-psychedelic connections,” thought Illuminatus! “was a reliable guide to the inner doctrines of the hidden world of the secret societies alleged to control the conspiracy.”

  The conversation that followed was cordial but contentious. The most telling exchange might be this one:

  McALPINE: Nesta Webster in her Secret Societies and Subversive Movements claims that the inner doctrine of the Illuminati was (is?) antiauthoritarian anarchism: the destruction of Church and State. On the other hand, Illuminatus! and some of the Illuminati secret records (see Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy) suggest that Weishaupt’s real goal was (or is?) a new and absolute state tyranny (now achieved?). Was anarchism a cover for the Illuminati’s real goal? Or was the Illuminati’s anarchism sponsored by the International Bankers only until the ancient order of kings and queens was destroyed, making way for the bankster dictatorship?

  WILSON: Beats the hell out of me. The only safe conclusion about Dr. Weishaupt and his buddies is that their attempt to maintain secrecy has worked marvelously well: no two investigators of the Illuminati have come to the same conclusion about the real purpose of the Order. My Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati asserts that the real inner secret was that they had contact with Higher Intelligence in the system of the double star Sirius. I don’t think that’s any more preposterous than any other theories about the Illuminati, and I’ll bet a lot of my readers believe it. The evidence is so good that I’d believe it myself if I didn’t know what a great artist I am and how easy it is for me to produce baroque and beautiful models to fit any weird facts you give me to work with.72

  Wilson warned McAlpine, “One reality-tunnel is as limiting as another. We are all blind men investigating the elephant. You have to jump quickly from reality map to reality map, time after time, to begin to ‘see the Elephant,’ in the Sufi phrase, and realize how complex and funny this whole terrestrial drama is.”

  McAlpine didn’t share Wilson’s sense of the absurd, but he did agree about the importance of exploring multiple perspectives. McAlpine had his own worldview—“only philosophies based on self-interest as the highest individual value make any sense to me,” he once wrote73—but he went out of his way to weigh the claims being made in other parts of the political spectrum. In one issue he interviewed Mae Brussell. In another he interrogated Lyndon LaRouche
, a veteran of the New Left who had started drifting toward the radical Right. (LaRouche was known for his elaborate conspiracy theories, which frequently featured Henry Kissinger and the queen of England; for the internal authoritarianism of his political organization, which was frequently called a cult; and for a series of assaults he dubbed Operation Mop-Up, in which LaRouche’s followers attacked the members of other leftist groups with bats, chains, and other weapons.74 Conspiracy Digest cited LaRouche’s theories fairly frequently, and it just as frequently added editorial caveats.) The debut Digest featured a four-page review-essay on anti-Semitic conspiracy literature, with an introduction explaining that McAlpine “refuse[d] to ignore any source” no matter how much he might disagree with the source’s opinions.75 In a sign that even McAlpine was willing to flirt with the ironic style, he at one point mentioned a book called We Never Went to the Moon. “We don’t take this one seriously,” he explained, “but collectors of conspiracy apocrypha may want it anyway.”76

  McAlpine’s readers might have enjoyed Cover-Up Lowdown, a cartoon syndicated to underground and college newspapers for about half a year in 1976—sort of a Ripley’s Believe It or Not! for conspiracy buffs. But the comic’s entertaining approach could hardly be more different from the Digest’s dry earnestness. Written and drawn by Jay Kinney and Paul Mavrides, each Cover-Up Lowdown consisted of a single panel built around an allegation about the Enemy Above, with the source of the claim identified in a footnote. One cartoon, for example, reported that “JFK’s preserved brain and related slides, important for fixing the true flight path of the fatal shot, were discovered missing from the Nat’l. Archives in ’72. There’s still no clue as to who took them or where they are.”77 The report was sourced to Robert Sam Anson’s 1975 book They’ve Killed the President, and it was illustrated by a picture of a brain and several slides walking out of the archives, looking like a mother duck and her ducklings.