Schrodinger's cat trilogy - By Robert Anton Wilson Page 0,2
the scientific shamans of the primitive, terrestrial phase of the cruel, magnificent Unistat Empire. This may be hard to understand when many Establishment scholars still deny that anything like scientific shamanism existed in the twentieth century, but it is nevertheless well documented that Wilson, Leary, Lilly, Crowley, Castaneda, and many others pursued rigorous studies in scientific shamanic research even under the persecution of the “neurological police” so characteristic of that barbaric epoch.* Some have even proposed that Schrödinger’s Cat is actually a manual of shamanism in the form of a novel, but that opinion is, almost certainly, exaggerated.
* See the Editor’s “Clandestine Neurotransmitter Research Under the Holy Inquisition and the D.E.A.,” Archives of General Archaeology, Vol. 23, No. 17.
On December 1, 1983, Benny “Eggs” Benedict, a popular columnist for the New York* News-Times-Post, sat down to compose his daily essay. According to his usual procedure, he breathed deeply, relaxed every muscle, and gradually forced all verbalization in his brain to stop. When he had reached the void, he waited to see what would float up to fill the vacuum. What surfaced was:
One month to go to 1984.
Benny looked at the calendar; what happened next would be portrayed by a cartoonist as a light bulb flashing on over his head. He began pounding the typewriter, comparing the actual situation of the world with Orwell’s fantasy.
His column, headed “One Month to Go,” was read by nearly 10,000,000 people, the News-Times-Post being the only surviving daily paper available to the 20,000,000 citizens of the six boroughs of New York City. Nine million of the 10,000,000 readers were a little bit paranoid, this being the natural ecological result of crowding that many primates into such a congested space, and most of them agreed with the most pessimistic portions of Benedict’s estimation of Orwell’s accuracy as a prophet.
“One month to go to 1984” became a catchphrase to conclude or answer anybody’s complaint about anything. “One month to go to 1984”—soon you heard it everywhere; it reached Chicago by December 10, San Francisco by December 14, was even quoted in Bad Ass, Texas, on December 16.
By December 23 the London Economist printed a very scholarly article on world history from 1949, when Orwell’s book was published, to the present, enumerating dozens of parallels between Orwell’s fiction and the planet’s nightmare.
In Paris a prominent Existentialist, in an interview with Paris Soir, argued that living inside a book, even a book by an English masochist like Orwell, was better than living in reality. “Art has meaning but reality has none,” he said cheerfully.
The six-legged majority on Terra were never consulted when the domesticated primates set about building weapons that could destroy all life-forms on that planet. This was not unusual. The fish, the birds, the reptiles, the flowers, the trees, and even the other mammals weren’t allowed to vote on this issue. Even the wild primates weren’t involved in the decision to produce such weapons. In fact, the majority of domesticated primates themselves never had a say in the matter.
A handful of alpha males among the leading predator bands among the domesticated primates had made the decision on their own. Everybody else on the planet—including the six-legged majority, who had never been involved in primate politics—just had to face the consequences.
Most of the domesticated primates of Terra did not know they were primates. They thought they were something apart from and “superior” to the rest of the planet.
Even Benny Benedict’s “One Month to Go” column was based on that illusion. Benny had actually read Darwin once, in college a long time ago, and had heard of sciences like ethology and ecology, but the facts of evolution had never really registered on him. He never thought of himself as a primate. He never realized his friends and associates were primates. Above all, he never understood that the alpha males of Unistat were typical leaders of primate bands. As a result of this inability to see the obvious, Benny was constantly alarmed and terrified by the behavior of himself, his friends and associates and especially the alpha males of the pack. Since he didn’t know it was ordinary primate behavior, it seemed just awful to him.
Since a great deal of primate behavior was considered just awful, most of the domesticated primates spent most of their time trying to conceal what they were doing.
Some of the primates got caught by other primates. All of the primates lived in dread of getting caught.