There’s a line from Mayor Richard Daley during a press conference about the Democratic Convention Riots in 1968 when a reporter asked about the police inciting the rioting. He said, “The police are not here to create disorder. They are here to preserve disorder.” I often find that my role, and that of the Temple, is similar around “confusion.” The task is not to eliminate confusion but to cultivate a higher quality of confusion.
There are lots of real and genuinely confusing things about self, others, and nature. I sometimes get a little baffled why people fixate on either “game rules” confusions mistaken for “real things” or double-down on some absurdity that once alleviated a bit of cognitive dissonance that they are trying to prove is “true” for fear that they might have to face confusion again.
That last issue was where I learned one of the most critical things from Robert Anton Wilson. A friend interviewed him on a tiny little radio station in the 90s. All this friend wanted to talk to him about was Cosmic Trigger and his ideas circa 1975 that there was a secret communication between aliens and humans going on for thousands of years. However, RAW never gave him an opening to get to it on air, so he asked about it during a commercial break. RAW said, “Oh, I haven’t believed that in decades and am far more interested in other topics these days,” to which my friend then wanted to pivot into a conversation about why RAW no longer held those beliefs. RAW said, “Well, it seems that the book acts as an important gateway for some people, and while I no longer agree with it, I’m not interested in destroying that for them.”
(The quotes are paraphrases for the sake of storytelling rather than perfect transcripts.)
I’ve seen RAW fans go to extreme lengths to concretize those mid-70s “Shit I needed to believe in getting over my daughter’s murder” ideas from him, buying into obvious horseshit dealers in the hopes of not having to face that this bit of ancient astronautism might not be the final solution to all of live’s problems. The irony is that the genuine mystery that that kind of thing points towards, how humans are so startlingly different than the other species on the planet, is the exact thing they are trying to avoid thinking about by having a single fixed solution.
Penn Jillette’s “Fire Eater” speech from a tour where Penn & Teller were doing revival sideshow acts has always stuck with me about this kind of thought-stopping/confusion avoidance beliefs as being tools against real mystery:
“Now I want to make this very clear to you: by ‘not accepting mystery,’ I am not talking about scientists, and I am not talking about skeptics. ‘Cause I’m a skeptic, and I’ve always felt that skeptics love the mystery, and that’s why they don’t want to believe anything. They don’t want to have any faith. They either want to have it scientifically proven over and over again, or they want to leave it alone. ‘We’ll get to it. Let it go.’ The kind of people that cannot accept mystery are the kind of people that, when there’s a mystery there, they just believe the first thing they’re told for their whole life, or they pretend to have an open mind, so they’ll believe anything that’s popular that comes along, or they’ll make up something that makes sense to them and they’ll just believe it. Just anything to shut the mystery out of their heads and stop them from really thinking.”
Penn jillette
The Wayback Machine for the full text. https://web.archive.org/web/20060810115506/http://pennandteller.com/sincity/penn-n-teller/articles/fire-eating.html
Setemheb 