I have always been fan of the most bizarre conspiracy theories: that aliens have been in contact with our government since as early as the Tunguska event or Roswell; that Freemasons, Rosicrucians, or the Bavarian Illuminati secretly run the world; that George H. W. Bush was describing the some sort of secretive star-chamber of sinister manipulators on a global scale when he used the term “new world order”; that Hitler escaped his final retribution and lives in a secret base in the “inner earth”– a world that exists inside our own, with the “inner light” of our world projected on a landscape inverted on the “inside” of a hollow planet; that JFK was killed by a cabal of communists, mafioso, CIA operatives and J. Edgar Hoover-fronted homosexuals bent on dominating the Earth… the list goes on interminably and insanely.

Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea wrote a truly excellent book called “Illuninatus” in the late 1960’s. It is written in the style of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and “Finnegan’s Wake”: essentially writing a book onto a printed page (easy in pre-word-processor times, since everything was done on a typewriter) and then cutting it up paragraph by paragraph, throwing the scraps into a bucket, mixing it up and drawing each piece out one by one and recording it as the book in the order extracted. The book is called “Illuminatus” and it attempts to incorporate every conspiracy from the supposed rescue of Christ from the cross to John Dillinger’s death (and reported recovery) and display of his reportedly exceptionally large penis to “selected” guests at the FBI to the JFK and RFK assassinations to the ’68 Chicago riots into a description of the state of mankind and its readiness to accept an ascension into a new state of awareness.

It is a great book for the very reason that it destroys every mechanism used to describe the world as a victim of conspiracy. Conspiracies cannot exist.

One thing I’ve learned about the way that the world in my few years of living on it is that no conspiracy can last for long. By legal definition, a conspiracy is more than one person planning  and executing an illegal act for nefarious purposes. Consider the classic bank robbery: there is more than one person who plans and executes it. What makes such an felonious act fail when one or more of the perpetrators is caught? Somebody talks.

Somebody always talks. The hairless monkey, if he loves anything at all, loves to talk, to brag, to blabber, to boast. Talk makes the world go round, and nothing can stay secret for long if a hairless ape (that’s us) is involved, and the more shaved primates involved, the more the likely that they will chatter. Welcome to the human race– no one can keep their mouth shut for long.

“Good Fella’s” is one of my favorite movies because it demonstrates (with the “Lufthansa heist”) that sooner or later, living, breathing human beings are going to talk, so (as it turns out) the best way to keep them quiet is to eliminate the adjectives from that description: make them non-living, non-breathing human beings– dead.

My only conspiracy theory that I am able to accept regarding the JFK assassination is that “Guido” is dispatched to Dallas on November 22nd 1963. He waits behind wooden fence above the grassy knoll to assist the “fall-guy” Lee Harvey Oswald. He greases the president and returns to Chicago or New York expecting a slap on the back, while LHO kills J. D. Tippett on the run to be later arrested at the Texas Theater (at which I saw film in the 1980’s and minorly freaked when my friend David Platzer reminded me was where he was caught). At the airport “Guido” is met by “Gianni” and “Rocko” who were sent by the “boss” to pick up and because he “ratted”– an unforgivable sin in mob terms. “Gianni” and “Rocko” aren’t bright enough to know anything about “Guido’s” connection to Dallas (he keeps his mouth shut just long enough to die). Later, “Rocko” and “Gianni” meet the same fate at the “boss’s” orders. Nice and neat– all the people aware of the conspiracy besides the “boss” are dead.

This is the only way that a conspiracy is preserved: everybody but one person is dead, and it’s even better if he or she is dead, too.

Loose lips sink ships.

The fewer living lips that can talk the better– thus the conspiracy survives.

There is no fucking way that the freemasons, the Rosicrucians, the Trilateral Commission, the Mormons, the whatever can be secretly running the world. Why? Secret handshakes or not, more people equals more flapping mouths and more chances the conspiracy will fall apart.

The next time you hear some Obama-hater (read “nigger-hater”, because that is all that they are) talking about the imagined socialist conspiracy, remind them that they are racists that are out of their minds. Their imagined nefarious plots out to “destroy ‘merka” are impossible because those activities involve more than one person to execute and will never be able to be kept secret for 20 seconds.

Historically, the Illuminati or “Illuminated ones” were thought of as some beings, whether human or otherwise (aliens? Atlantians? Lemurians? Republicans?), that control the world with absolute authority and capability. Such a group is an impossibility as long as human beings are involved, Q.E.D.

Humans are blabby, ergo no super-secret organizations involving them can exist.

So who or what are the Illuminati? The “Illuminated ones”, the folks who supposedly know what is really going on?

In the process of destroying the myth of the Illuminati or the masters of all conspiracy in the world, Wilson and Shea spent a lot of time in their truly mythic and voluminous book to describe the process of illumination: seeing the world as it truly is, not as an illusion.

If someone were to ask me what I wanted of life when I was 20 or 30, I would have said “happiness” (whatever the fuck that is).

What I want most of all now is enlightenment— to see everything as it really is. To be, by the classic definition of illumination, one of the Illuminati. I don’t want to conquer or control the world, I want to see and experience it as it truly is, without illusion.

To be enlightened is painful, lonely and frightening. It is easy to accept a commercial for a new car on face value and to desire the product offers– to accept its definition of the buyer as a superior person as refinement and ultimate life satisfaction. It’s painful and lonely to recognize the advertisement as a complete sham, its message as an utter falsehood.

It’s frightening to know that all appeals to our purchasing power, to our professional sports team loyalty, our protective instincts regarding our children are manipulations of our base needs.

None of the things we are implored to buy, none of the political loyalties we express in the voting booth, none of the sports we watch, the things we buy, the activities we are socially pressured into performing are genuine, and that is terrifying.

Illusion is everywhere. It is offered in a panoply of disguises we accept with dull acquiescence. To quote Wilson in his later books: “all that is is metaphor.”

Now, I’m going to go way out on a limb here and say that far beyond the social illusion and game-playing that is done to get us to buy things and vote a certain way, there is the illusion we accept at the level of what we call “reality”.

We only know that which our senses (seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling) can perceive. What exists beyond those perceptions? What about the state of reality at the quantum level?

What is real?

That is what I want to know. I have always been somewhat of an oddball because I have always asked that question. I have often been mocked by friends who are stuck in the paradigm of the day-to-day. What is real? What is an illusion?

I have chosen to be  enlightened as opposed to benighted, and for that I will never be normal.

Who the fuck wants to be normal?

I only wish that people were smart enough to control things on a global scale; but I’m afraid we are far too stupid to do so at this point in our development. We are still working on mastering cleverness, and it will be a while before we are prepared to tackle intelligence.