Week 69,Illuminatus online reading group

Benjamin Tucker

(This week: Pages 756-768, appendices Daleth, Tzaddi, Vau, Zain and Cheth).

Many of the sections in this part of the book refer to individualist anarchists from the 19th century, whose teachings have ever since influenced libertarians and anarchists, including Josiah Warren and Lysander Spooner. Pierre Proudhon,  and Benjamin Tucker. 

Wilson read much of that material when he lived in Yellow Springs, Ohio,  in the 1960s, editing an alternative magazine. (That sojourn is immortalized in Illuminatus!.Yellow Springs is the home of Antioch College, where Simon Moon majored in math.) There are references to Wilson's reading material in, for example, Cosmic Trigger 2: "Two years earlier, at the School for Living library, I had read most of the classics of anarchist theory. The State was created by conquerors, these books said, to police the peoples they had enslaved. The revolutions of the 18th Century failed because, instead of abolishing the State and organizing society into voluntary communes and syndicates, we had stupidly continued the State apparatus, thinking we could 'control' it by democratic elections. These elections cannot control the state because the Great Pirates who own the Earth and its resources own the State, too, and know how to buy elections." (Page 198.)

Wilson also says, on page 206, "I learned a lot about Third Choice systems — social doctrines that were neither Capitalist nor Marxist — at the School of Living, which had a great library of radical and off-beat literature. It was there that I found and read all of the issues of Liberty, the individualist-anarchist magazine edited by the brilliant Benjamin R. Tucker ("the clearest mind ever, in politics," Joyce called him.)

So as  you can see, the roots of Wilson's anarchist/libertarian thinking reach back much farther than relatively modern libertarian writers such as Ayn Rand. (Wilson did go through an Ayn Rand phase, which he also recalls in Cosmic Trigger 2: "Like most Randoids, I went around for a few years mindless parroting all of the Rand dogma and imagining I was an 'individualist'." (Page 119).

Probably the closest modern equivalent of the sorts of people Wilson was interested in would be the Center for a Stateless Society, although Wilson remains an influence on more conventional libertarians.

There is also discussion in this section of the appendices about alternative private currencies, which thanks to the Internet are being realized in the form of Bitcoin and other alternatively currencies. Here's a review of a new book about Bitcoin. 

(Next week: Appendix Lamed: The Tactics of Magick, pages 768-783).