Robert Anton Wilson comments on rightwing clichés (from Trajectories #13, 1994):
‘I have about 23 laws, which I won’t bother reviewing. Most of you have encountered them in my books. But of all the right-wing clichés, the one that annoys me the most is that you can’t solve problems by throwing money at them. The idea that you can’t solve problems by throwing money at them seems to me literally the extreme stupidity of the right wing, which is renowned for inventing stupid ideas.
‘Let’s take an ordinary bloke – like me – in an ordinary month. One of my problems is to keep a roof over my head and not land on the street. I do that by throwing money at my landlord, and that solves the problem. Then there’s the matter of getting groceries into the house. I do that by throwing money at the supermarket. They won’t settle for goodwill, or philosophical observations, or right-wing clichés. They want coin of the realm. If I need medical attention – prescriptions filled, and so on – the pharmacist wants money. Every time Arlen or I go to the doctor, he wants money.
‘So far in my life, every serious problem I have confronted, I have been able to solve by throwing money at it. The only problems I couldn’t solve were those where I didn’t have enough money to throw at them – and some of those problems are still haunting me. Some of them I got partly destroyed by and had to recreate myself. But I just can’t imagine a problem that can’t be solved by throwing enough money at it.’
Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Robert Anton Wilson, from 1976. I include it here because I find it the clearest, most concise summary of RAW’s thoughts on these matters that I’ve read. I think he retained this basic outlook over at least the following two decades:
RAW: Of course, my position is based on the denial that money does store wealth. I think it’s a semantic hallucination, the verbal equivalent of an optical illusion, to speak at all of money containing or storing wealth. Such thinking should have gone out with phlogiston theory. The symbol is not the referent; the map is not the territory. Money symbolizes wealth, as words symbolize things, and that’s all.
The delusion that money contains wealth is the mechanism by which the credit monopoly has gained a stranglehold on the entire economy. As Colonel Greene pointed out in Mutual Banking, all the money could disappear tomorrow morning and the wealth of the planet would remain the same. However, if the wealth disappeared — if squinks from the Pink Dimension dragged it off to null-space or something — the money would be worth nothing.
You don’t need to plow through the dialects of the debate between the Austrians and the free credit people like Tucker and Gesell to see this; any textbook of semantics will make it clear in a few hours of study. Wealth is nature’s abundance, freely given, plus the exponential advance of technology via human intelligence, and as Korzybski and Fuller demonstrate, this can only increase at an accelerating rate. Money is just the tickets or symbols to arrange for the distribution — either equitably, in a free money system, or inequitably, as under the tyranny of the present money-cartel.
RAW frequently cited Benjamin Tucker when discussing this subject, but I always thought his framing on money/wealth owed more to Buckminster Fuller’s futurism. (Fuller’s Critical Path wasn’t published until 1981, but Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth and Utopia or Oblivion came out in 1968 and 1969 respectively).
You can read the full interview at The Anarchist Library. The interview originally appeared in New Libertarian Notes/Weekly 39, September 5, 1976.
RAW semantics 
Leave a comment