My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything.
Robert Anton WilsonRead
On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.
Interpretation
In a world that feels oppressive and confining, the best response is to seek freedom and escape from constraints.
This quote by Robert Anton Wilson suggests that modern society can feel like a restrictive environment, akin to a maximum security prison. Rather than accepting this as a permanent state, it encourages individuals to take proactive steps towards liberation and personal autonomy, advocating for creativity and courage in breaking free from societal limitations.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about personal development and breaking free from societal norms.
My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything.
There is no governor anywhere. You are all absolutely free. There is no restraint that cannot be escaped. If anybody could go into dhyana at will, nobody could be controlled - by fear of prison, by fear of whips or electroshock, by fear of death, even. All existing society is based on keeping those fears alive, to control the masses. Ten people who know would be more dangerous than a million armed anarchists.
I see anarchism as the theoretical ideal to which we are all gradually evolving to a point where everybody can tell the truth to everybody else and nobody can get punished for it. That can only happen without hierarchy and without people having the authority to punish other people.
To work for libertarianism - to oppose the growth of government and aid the liberation of the individual - used to be an idealistic choice taken for purely idealistic reasons. Now it is an act of intelligent and almost desperate self-defense.
The abandoned infant's cry is rage, not fear.
The only way to stave off boredom, in a complex domesticated primate like humankind, is to increase one's intelligence. This is not appealing to the average primate, who instead invents emotional games (soap opera and grand opera dramatics).
I suppose it's a very highly developed form of denial, but some part of me completely denies that I'm a performer.
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is to learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I have never thought that a Christian would be free of suffering, umfundisi. For our Lord suffered. And I come to believe that he suffered, not to save us from suffering, but to teach us how to bear suffering. For he knew that there is no life without suffering.
I believe if God doesn't give you a miracle, you are a miracle of God for somebody else's salvation.
If the clockwork universe equated the human body with the mechanics of the clock, the digital universe now equates human consciousness with the processing of the computer. We joke that things don't compute, that we need a reboot, or that our memory has been wiped.
So eager are our people to obliterate the present.
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