Schrödinger's Cat 1: The Universe Next Door by Robert Anton Wilson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Statutory Ape

Henny Youngman was the British-American stand-up king of one-liners: ‘Take my wife... Please... etc.’ Wilson is the novelistic equivalent, an author who assembles a series of gags into a gig. The Universe Next Door isn’t a story so much as a comedic monologue.

The comedy covers everything from academic science and literature to politics and the cultural conceits of both the Left and Right. It is necessarily of its time. So, much of it is probably opaque to those not of a certain age. The jokes and allusions are so fast and furious though that there’s enough to keep the young interested if not so incensed as their grandparents.

And their grandparents were incensed - by the kinky sex, and the casual drug use, the glorification of various grubby sub-cultures, and the trashing of liberal sentiment. Wilson hated the Right-wing William F. Buckley but he also hated Buckley’s Lefty opponents just as much. He knew the real problem of the day was fervent idealism: “The Idealists regarded everybody as equally corrupt, except themselves.” So nobody liked Wilson and his nihilistic attitude.

Turns out though that Wilson was fairly prescient. He saw the idealistic terminus ad quem: the inevitability of terrorism and the rise of the anti-idealist leader. And he knew he was watching a revolution in the making. Writing in 1979, he predicted “The Revolution of Lowered Expectations... By 1984 nobody in the country had any higher expectations than a feudal serf.” Economically, he called it exactly right.

He also got some other things correct about what might be called democratic reason: “Sanity had failed to save the world and ... only insanity remained as a viable alternative.” The country elected Furbish Lousewart as its president. Lousewart‘s populist philosophy of “asceticism, medievalism, and despair” formed the revolutionary core. So the desired result was produced: “society is everywhere in conspiracy against intelligence.” Getting even is Lousewart’s (and everyone else’s) motivation. Nihilism has triumphed through the opposition of idealisms, religious as well as political.

Wilson’s one-liners are often as good as Youngman’s: “When you are up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to remember that you started out to drain the swamp.” But the problem with one-liners is that they have no intellectual staying power. They get thrown out by the author and then thrown away by the reader. They’re probably the only authentic way to communicate nihilism but until Twitter they had no lasting impact.

It took Trump and Twitter to realise Wilson’s fears. Wilson was two or three generations ahead of his time. The only positive advice he could give then was ignored but has now become obviously relevant with Trump: “Please listen; it’s vital to your future. We are all … living in a novel” the fact that it’s a very bad novel is what should concern us most.

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