The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science QUOTES

1 " The tenth planet beyond Pluto, in this instance, will be discovered, or won't be discovered, when the space telescope goes into orbit in the near future. The existence of advanced life-forms beyond Earth may not be verified or refuted for a thousand years or longer — or it may be verified tomorrow, if the "Space Brothers" beloved in UFO lore suddenly land en masse — but at present it remains similarly indeterminate. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

2 " The Buddhist says: the mountains are real. The mountains are not real. The mountains are both real and not-real. The mountains are neither real nor not-real. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

3 " By the New Inquisition I mean to designate certain habits of repression and intimidation that are becoming increasingly commonplace in the scientific community today. By New Idol I mean to designate the rigid beliefs that form the ideological superstructure of the New Inquisition. By the New Agnosticism I mean to designate an attitude of mind which has elsewhere been called "model agnosticism" and which applies the agnostic principle not just to the "God" concept but to ideas of all sorts in all areas of thoughts and ideology. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

4 " The fruit is orange, to ordinary perception. The fruit is not orange, to Galileo's analysis. The fruit is both orange and not-orange, to those who recognize that the existential and the scientific grids each have a kind of validity. The fruit is neither orange nor not-orange, to those who recognize that all grids are human inventions. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

5 " The agnostic principle refuses total belief or total denial and regards models as tools to be used only and always where appropriate and replaced (by other models) only and always where not appropriate. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

6 " We have already explained that, of course — even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Besides, it was only coincidence. (Remember that phrase. It is the self-hypnotic chant by which the New Inquisition banishes all evidence it does not like. We will hear it often.) "

― Robert Anton Wilson , The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

7 " As Charlie Chaplin said once in a morbid context, "Numbers sanctify." The more I pile up such monstrosities, the more likely it is that some readers will start to believe them. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

8 " Since the criminal mentality derives from such hypnosis by a "Real" Universe and the helplessness and rage induced by such metaphors, the criminal becomes, more and more, the typical person of our age. When the "Real" Universe becomes politicized — when the hypnotic model is based on "Us"-versus-"Them" Aristotelian logic — the criminal graduates into the Terrorist, another increasingly typical product of the materialist era. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

9 " And when I tell the story that way I remember, alas, that space-time events do not come before us flaunting labels that say "FACT" or "APPEARANCE" — that we make that judgment, every second, and thus create our emic or existential reality — and that this is not just true of lesser mortals like you and me but of the High Priests themselves, maybe even including the High Priests of the New Inquisition — "

― Robert Anton Wilson , The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

10 " Against all this mechanized barbarism, existentialist psychology and humanist psychology — aided, perhaps not coincidentally, by the metaphors of quantum physics — suggests that other models of human existence are possible and thinkable and desirable. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

11 " EMIC REALITY: the unified field made up of thoughts, feelings and apparent sense impressions that organizes our inchoate experience into meaningful patterns; the paradigm or model that people create by talking to each other, or by communicating in any symbolism; the culture of a time and place; the semantic environment. Every emic reality has its own structure, which imposes structure upon raw experience. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

12 " ETIC REALITY: the hypothetical actuality that has not been filtered through the emic reality of a human nervous system or linguistic grid. If you have anything to say about Etic Reality without using words or any other symbols, please send a full description of it to the author at once. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

13 " But Charles Fort argued, at length, that such data is not uncommon at all; it is merely repressed by the same mechanisms of avoidance that Freud analyzed, the mechanisms that allow e.g. Roman Catholics and Marxists to "forget" things inconvenient to their emic realities. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

14 " According to existential-humanist psychology, where the materialist says "I perceive," it would be more correct to say "I am making a bet.” Concretely, in Ames's cock-eyed room, we "make a bet" that we are seeing something familiar to us. If allowed into the room and asked to touch a corner of the ceiling with a pointer, we quickly discover the gamble in every act of perception. Typically, we hit almost everything but the corner in our first attempts — the walls, other parts of the ceiling, etc. A strange thing happens as we go on trying. Our perceptions change — we are making a new series of bets, one after another — and gradually we are able to find the corner we are aiming for. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

15 " INFORMATION: as used in mathematical information theory, this denotes the amount of unpredictability in a message; information is, roughly, what you do not expect to hear. In this sense, information may be "true" or "false," but is always a small surprise. Resistance to new information measures the degree of Fundamentalism in a culture, a sub-culture, or an individual. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

16 " NEUROSEMANTICS: the study of how symbolism influences the human nervous system; how the local reality-tunnel programs our thoughts, feelings and apparent sense impressions. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

17 " The Citadel has a vigorous and versatile propaganda department in the United States called the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal or CSICOP for short. You will not be surprised to learn that Martin Gardner and Prof. Bunge are among its spokesmen. CSICOPs method of "scientific investigation" generally is to wage a campaign of vilification, in the media, against any researcher whose ideas they don't like. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

18 " REALITY-LABYRINTH: existence regarded as a multiple-choice intelligence test; the sum total of reality-tunnels available to an open-minded or non-Fundamentalistic human at a given time and place. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

19 " When we return to the ordinary world of social interactions after such shocks as the cock-eyed room, LSD or meditation, we observe that the same processes are going on — people are making bets about which model fits best at a given time — but they are not aware of making bets. They are — it must be repeated — hypnotized by their models. If the models do not fit very well, they do not revise them but grow angry at the world — at experience — for being recalcitrant. Most typically, they find somebody to blame, as Nietzsche noted again and again. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

20 " REALITY-TUNNEL: An emic reality established by a system of coding, or a structure of metaphors, and transmitted by language, art, mathematics or other symbolism. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science