From SNAFU to FUBAR and Back Again: Robert Anton Wilson, Magic and Hope. (With ADDED FUBAR...)

I was invited to write the following piece by one of the editors at Hilaritas Press, as an Afterword for their new collection of RAW short pieces, Maybe Magic. I was delighted to do so. 

He disliked it because I made some fairly critical comments about Elon Musk. Neither was he happy that I'd mentioned 'climate crisis'. 

Quote: 'I'm far from convinced that there is a climate crisis'. 

Well, judging by pretty much everyone I've ever met on the Discordian scene, I'd assumed anyone handling RAW's legacy would be fairly politically Left, and on board with proper climate science. That editor himself mentioned that he expected their potential readership would be Left-leaning; but it appears that doesn't apply to their editorial policy. 

One of their other editors then got in touch and said they might still use it if I removed all references to 'Musk and friends'. Having got to that point, I wasn't sure that I wanted to be published by climate denialists, with the unsavoury political baggage that usually entails, but I thought it'd be interesting to check out what their problem actually was. So I sent them a new draft, with no Elon to Thiel in it. 

They didn't like that one either, and managed to find themselves another author whose piece mentioned 'hope', but seemingly not the things they found politically distasteful. 

How sad, that RAW's legacy is in the hands of people deluded enough to deny the climate crisis, and who seem to love the Parasite Class. 

Hail Eris! I'm sure She knows how to deal with them.

The draft below is the original one. 

From SNAFU to FUBAR and Back Again: Robert Anton Wilson, Magic and Hope

Robert Anton Wilson showed me what a certain kind of liberation looks like. After my teens, I traded in being an unemployed acidhead for studying at university and getting a science degree. Some years later, I’d reached the limit of my career ambition in that direction and was hungry for change: Magic was calling me back. In honour of RAW, I’d like to share something of how his work helped me live a magical life.

I met Wilson’s ideas via Illuminatus!.  It was the first novel I’d read which explicitly depicted magic happening in a believable world, not as a fantasy in some world where magic is commonplace, like Discworld or Middle Earth or any of the fabled lands of sword and sorcery. Here was a narrative which tempted us to consider that magic might actually be real, and I took the bait, allowing myself to believe just that, for the first time in years. Illuminatus! achieved this literary trick partly by using multiple viewpoints within a single character – a person may think in magical terms, then switch to physicalism or police procedure. 

This gave me permission to dive full-time into a multi-model view of experience which included magic; I’d written myself an exit visa from the prison-planet of Scientism, the uncritical acceptance that a ‘scientific’ worldview is the only allowable one. Two years later I was a founder member of the first Chaos magic group in the UK, together with the most significant writer in early Chaos magic, Peter Carroll. 

Around that time I read Cosmic Trigger, with its cartoon featuring two panels - a lab-coated scientist and a stoned-looking hippie. The caption was: ‘Hey Man, Are You Only Using Half Your Brain?’. I saw how that was me, how, having found the Chaos current I was living that reality - a former acidhead and recovering science kid discovering how to ride the weirdness of living on both sides.

The Chaos current emerged in the 1970s, influenced by writings that stretch back at least a decade before that. CM attracted me and many others because it does not require that you abandon scientific thinking. Rather, you grow accustomed to switching between viewpoints, depending on which is the most useful for what you want to achieve. So it's OK to 'believe in' say, subtle energies if that is what it takes for you to get results in that area. After your energy magic practice, you can go back to the physics-based view that there is no evidence for such energies. CM was the first approach to magic that faced up to the challenge of culturally-ingrained scepticism.

Before this kind of thinking, magic had been in the doldrums for some years, with a tendency to reduce everything to psychological models. The reason for this is pretty obvious: as a population increasingly conditioned into Scientism, we had no room for magic in our belief-worlds. So magic retreated to the esoteric end of psychology. Even a giant of scientific imagination such as Einstein found it too big a leap to believe in some aspects of quantum physics because they implied the possibility of ‘spooky action at a distance.’ Few people encultured in the modern world can easily bring themselves to believe in magic. But Wilson’s Multi-Model Agnosticism made it much easier.

MMA was one version of that foundational Chaos magic idea. In the UK, the stage was set by Lionel Snell’s 1974 book SSOTBME. This book presented as magical the idea of viewing life through different belief systems. CM also had in its semiotic DNA two themes that overlap with Illuminatus! and Discordianism:  the paradoxical statement ‘Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted’, and the number 23. Both of these came via the writings of William S Burroughs, who was an active member of the Chaos magical order the Illuminates Of Thanateros in the final few years of his life.

Another core CM idea was its pragmatic focus. It’s not a philosophy for armchair magicians; rather, just do something and see what happens. It was inevitable that someone would then come along and form these ideas into something that could be used in practical wizardry. 

Chaos magic crystallized as a current with Peter Carroll’s Liber Null. The central insight of this 1978 book was that magic is dependent on two things: an extraordinary state of consciousness or ‘gnosis’, and a shift in the way the practitioner sees the world, usually coded as ‘belief’. First we assemble the symbolic vehicles - sigils, rituals, songs, images, stories and so on. Then we get into an extraordinary state, maybe with something as simple as gazing or gentle breathwork, or something as intense as drugs or sex. Then we are able to leave behind the inertia of our mundane worlds, shift our beliefs about what the world is, and launch ourselves into a different reality where our spell succeeds. The idea of belief itself as a magical tool is Chaos Magic’s core technical innovation.

I came to specialize in techniques that help us change our state of consciousness. I qualified as a breathwork coach, and then I studied Neuro-Linguistic Programming for a while. In that context I encountered RAW again, talking on stage with Richard Bandler in London in 1997. When Wilson came on, he announced that the chair he sat down on, a rather fancy one that had been put in place for him, had a history: it had been sat on by Marilyn Monroe. He declared that Marilyn was an avatar of Crowley’s archetype the Scarlet Woman, and by sitting on it, according to the Bell-Aspect nonlocality effect, he was now linked across space and time with that incarnation of Babalon. 

From SNAFU to FUBAR…

Magic grew into many things for me, one of which was a toolkit for making a better world. A few years back I co-organised with magical composer George Rogers a group spell of the above name at a Discordian event called ‘Catch-23’. This was the beginning of the creation of an egregore entity called WABRI (details in end link (1)) whose intent was and is: weapons of mass destruction are never used. Those two military acronyms were perfect for our purpose: Situation Normal, All Fucked Up seems to be exactly what is happening now, and Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition is what we wanted to happen to any plan to use WMDs. 

Wilson’s magical thinking gives us other kinds of hope as well, but they need reexamining for the 21st century. He was instrumental in developing the Eight Neural Circuits model from Timothy Leary’s original framework. In 1997 I used the Eight Circuits as a set of categories for different areas of magical practice in my book Chaotopia! Wilson had articulated a set of practical exercises for developing each Circuit in his book Prometheus Rising; that book came out in 1983, and in it he predicted that in ten years’ time war would have ended, by becoming obsolete. Elsewhere in the present collection he predicts that all of humanity will have been awakened by some time prior to that.

Those blazing banners of hope have been the most difficult things for me to process in Wilson’s writings, in this era when, at first glance, the world seems to be going to hell in an even faster and more capacious bucket than it was in the 70s. So where do we find hope?

RAW advises us to link up with our natural tribe, ‘neurogenetically wired up to be going in the same direction as yourself.’ This is what we are doing when we go out and Find the Others, when we find other magicians to explore advanced ideas and better lifestyles with. 

But it’s not easy to frame the world, on larger scales, as looking so good. We can’t help but notice ecological crisis, ‘post-truth’ politics, growing inequality and constant war with more automated and inhuman weapon systems.

…And Back Again

However, there are things we can do about that. For starters, how do we get the idea that things are even more even dismal than they were? And where is that apparent evidence coming from? Obviously, what we see in the news is not everything that is happening, and much of it is no doubt false. Beyond that, don’t lose sight of the fact that all information presented to you from outside of your own bubble of immediate experience comes with an agenda. 

So why are we being led to think that the world is doing so badly? There’s an old saying, bad news travels fast. That saying comes from the same wisdom about human psychology that tells us we never want to read stories where there’s no jeopardy. How boring would a novel be if nothing bad ever happened to any of the characters in it? Professional news people (and their bots) exploit this human tendency, to generate sales and online clicks. Which gives that slant on the world, that jaundiced vision, much more reach than good news could ever have. 

This is helpful to the holders of political power, because the worse the world looks, the less likely we are to feel we have any agency in making things better. This background hum of hopelessness is allegorized in Illuminatus! with the idea of fnords, nonsense words embedded in all news that create a vague unease in the reader. But the powers that hurt don’t need fnords; our own desire for bad news is enough. There’s even a term for this effect: learned helplessness.

So should we just kick back and ignore what’s going on? Not at all; that’s another response that benefits those who would keep us ignorant. Rather, seek out evidence that some features of the world are actually improving. Read up on how terrifying problems can and are being solved. Explore news that shows that even the worst ‘leaders’ are often powerless to prevent progress. 

Such evidence is actually not difficult to find. One way to start is to subscribe to online newsletters that deconstruct news and highlight the best bits. Here are just a few examples of good signs in the world (2). 

Climate: nobody who hasn’t sewn their eyelids shut denies we are in a climate crisis. However, the means of solving it are accelerating way beyond predictions even from a year or two ago. Figures show that, for the first time, and despite glaring government attempts to undermine solar markets, Americans are getting more of their electricity from the sun than from coal. In Texas, the USA’s largest energy market, clean energy has surged ahead of fossil fuels. It’s been said that ‘the economics have officially overtaken the politics.’

One of the delightful ironies of this progress is that it’s been assisted (accidentally of course) by some of the worst world ‘leaders’: Putin’s imperialistic war on Ukraine has tanked gas demand, and Trump’s ‘oh-look-over-there-I’m-not-a-pedo’ war on Iran has given an unprecedented boost to the installation of new solar capacity. Two outstandingly grotesque ‘leaders’ have blundered into being climate heroes!  

How about pollution? Very recently three Indian teenagers invented a cheap, sustainably-produced system that removes microplastics from water. Species of bacteria have been found living in the tiny water droplets in fog, making a living by eating pollutants such as formaldehyde. 

And public health? It seems that globally, substance addiction is in decline. The mainstream news would have us believe that it’s getting worse, everywhere. However, that’s only actually true for North America. Remove the regional bias, and the picture shifts a lot. And even in the USA, recent data show that overdose deaths fell in 2025, and this is the third consecutive year of decline. 

Teenage birth rates in USA have also been in decline, thanks to decades of increased access to contraception and reproductive health services.

And the global suicide rate has fallen by around 40% since the 1990s.

Global refugee numbers are also falling, despite there being patches of the world where wars still cause a lot of people to be displaced. 

Even with such a subjective variable as ‘personal freedom’ there are good signs. Worldwide, over the last two decades, more people in the world than ever before report feeling free to choose what to do with their lives. (This is a measure of day-to-day freedom, not necessarily political rights.)

I could go on, through recent medical breakthroughs in treating dementia, cancer and other death-sentence illnesses, but I’m sure you can see where this argument is heading: despite their best efforts to make things worse, the sociopathic puppets we refer to as ‘leaders’ are having far less evil effect than their favourite news services would like us to think. 

And what about the puppet masters, the billionaires who are pulling their strings? A first glance at mainstream news reveals James Bond villains like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel as men who don’t care what damage they do, because they are insulated from the worst effects they create. They fantasize about escaping this lush planet to the freezing, airless radiation-scarred desert of Mars. Or escaping personal death by uploading their consciousness into some computer. Yeah, right, good luck with that. FUBAR? It certainly looks like it.

These villains appear to head up an economic-political hierarchy that knows full well that keeping people poor and poorly-educated works; that, conned by their promises, enough citizens will keep on voting for leaders who work against their own interests. The hyper-rich got hyper-rich on the back of environmental irresponsibility, strip-mining every ecosystem in modern versions of the mediaeval land-theft known as the Enclosures. They spend their money on vanity projects and yet bigger yachts, rather than endowing libraries and buying land for public parks like the the rich of the past did. FUBAR? Yep. 

However, by using the SNAFU concept as a tool, let’s tilt this dismal picture a little. RAW outlined the SNAFU Principle as: Communication is only possible between equals. The more powerful someone in a hierarchy becomes, the less true information they have at their disposal - because everyone lies to them to curry favour. All the information they get is twisted; they are dissociated from the world everyone else lives in. 

A fine example of this principle in action can be found in Elon Musk, possibly the richest man who has ever lived. In terms of his knowledge of the real world he is a total victim of his own vast riches. This means we can reappraise our idea of how much power Musk actually wields. And it is likely to be a lot less than he thinks. After all, they do say that knowledge is power, and Elon’s world-class SNAFU means he has less of that commodity than anyone else on the planet. 

Elon’s dissociation from reality is compounded by his heavy use of ketamine. K is classed as a dissociative anaesthetic; it is a drug that blocks the N-methyl-D-aspartate channels in the central nervous system, the very subcellular setup that keeps the brain informed about what the body is sensing. So ketamine cuts the brain off from embodied feelings; the brain is holed up, partying in a vacuum, unable to make sense of the world. Except in terms of its own fantastic illusions. This is molecular-level SNAFU. 

Now, instead of a Bond villain (or as well as a Bond villain?), we have a disoriented man-child, caught up in trying to look like some kind of edgelord by making Nazi salutes. Yes, he can still do a lot of damage. But he shouldn’t be as important in our lives as his media coverage suggests; he and those like him are ultimately peripheral to our lived experience. They’re characters in some of the weird stories we tell ourselves to make our lives more exciting, more like the thrillers we enjoy. Stories in which we imagine other people have much more power over us than they actually have. These villains are desperate, operatic clichés who parade their monstrousness because they have a very poor idea of what is actually happening.  

There is no substitute for immediate experience. We are embodied. Our world is local and specific, not part of a mass aggregate. Our lives are relational, embedded in the signals we exchange with other humans, with animals, with plants and fungi, with rocks and sky and waters. The news is just the thinnest foam on the surface of the astonishingly rich world we really inhabit, the world in which we make our home. 

This awareness is a starting point, one of the threads in the web we communities of magicians are weaving day to day, to build worlds that aren’t ruled by hate and fear, and where there is room for something better. Robert Anton Wilson was a supreme technician of conscious change on many levels. His message is all the more relevant decades after his death; his work is telling us we need to update our take on what could be the most important yoga for the present day: the yoga of hope.

1. WABRI: https://chaotopia-dave.blogspot.com/2024/01/egregore-against-weapons-of-mass.html 

2. Mostly sampled from ‘Fix The News.’ They’re not perfect, but what is? Check them out at https://fixthenews.com/