 This is Classics of Liberty from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute, narrated by Caleb Brown. Today's classic is Subversion for Fun and Profit with Carl Hess and Robert Anton Wilson. Carl Hess and Robert Anton Wilson are icons of libertarianism and radical individualist thinking in the 1960s and 1970s. Carl Hess was an influential figure among high-level Republicans in the early 1960s. As a speechwriter for many GOP figures, it was often his words coming out of the mouths of the party's elected officials, chief among them Arizona Senator and 1964 Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater. Hess may have been the author of Goldwater's most iconic line. Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. After Goldwater's loss to Lyndon Johnson, Hess continued to write a column under Goldwater's byline. During Johnson's presidency, Hess, among others, was, perhaps not surprisingly, audited by the IRS. His anger at this year's audacity led him to reread the Declaration of Independence and then write a letter informing the IRS that he had abolished the agency for arbitrarily exceeding its authority. He further told them that he would no longer pay their taxes, which led the IRS to effectively confiscate Hess' future earnings. Over time, Hess became more radical, his close associations with both the GOP and broader white-collar society strained and ultimately dissolved. Hess became an anarchist. A short biographical film entitled Carl Hess Toward Liberty won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject in 1981. Hess' discussion partner in this presentation is Robert Anton Wilson, best known for co-authoring the popular Illuminatus Trilogy published in 1975. Wilson and his co-author Robert Shea had been editors at Playboy magazine where they had begun cataloging the letters they'd received describing various conspiracies of governments and secret societies. What emerged was Illuminatus, a sprawling three-novel series that treated dozens or hundreds of real conspiracies and conspiracy theories as true and an equal measure not true at the same time. Illuminatus is often credited with creating the sub-genre of conspiracy fiction. Wilson has been described as maybe a futurist, author, lecturer, stand-up comic, guerrilla ontologist, psychedelic magician, outer head of the Illuminati, quantum psychologist, Taoist sage, and a discordian pope. The wide-ranging discussion presented here took place at the 1987 Nominating Convention of the Libertarian Party. We're supposed to do our version of my dinner with Andre. Oh, my favorite film! Which one of us is going to be Andre and which one will be Wally? I guess I was born to be Wally, so. I would start out by mentioning how I first met the person who introduced us because I think that's a, if I may, a story of some historic importance. When I was active on the New Left and therefore unpatriotic, before I learned what it was like to be really unpatriotic, I'd been approached by this young man who had the most amazing story to tell. He said that although he had appeared to be interested in all of our political activities, what he actually was doing was working for the House Committee on Un-American Activities. But he had concluded after sober thought, that is, the two or three moments he was sober, that the House Committee on Un-American Activities was considerably more dangerous than we, I even knew left. And so he was in his mid-teens at that time. This is one of the absolutely most courageous things I've ever seen a very young man do. He was scheduled to testify as a House Committee stoolie on a certain day with all of the usual things there. And instead he got, he testified publicly, had to do it out in the hallway, that he had been an informer, that he didn't think that the people he was informing on were dangerous and that the committee was violently dangerous. This is a young, very young man. And I think he's just as heroic as anybody I've ever met. He's declined in his later years. Those were great days. I was involved in the peace movement in Chicago in those days and in the 60s. In 1972 it came out in congressional hearings that between the FBI, the CIA and Army Intelligence, there were 5,000 informers in the peace movement in Chicago. And we very seldom had a rally with more than 5,000 people. And I have been wondering ever since was I the only pacifist in Chicago with everybody else intelligence agents? The circulation of the daily work or the Communist Party papers at one time consisted largely of subscriptions from the Department of Justice. And also when I was doing stuff with a new leftist, some of the young bravos in it were very angry at the CIA and they wondered what they could do to irritate them. And so I suggested, well, hell, why don't you go out to the CIA, to the entrance to it and take down every license number of a car driving in and then go to the licensed bureau and check the names and publish them, which they did. And it just irritated the CIA terribly, but I discovered in later years, and I believe there were three young people involved in it, one of them was a CIA agent. There's an old European, middle European proverb, when four sit down to conspire, three of them are government agents and the fourth is a damn fool. That's my experience. I could tell people wonder why I write so many novels about conspiracies. That's because I'm convinced conspiracy is one of the continuous constant elements in human life. Not that I believe there's one big conspiracy controlling everything. Only hardcore paranoids are able to twist the facts enough to fit that theory. But there are multitudinous conspiracies. When I was in the peace movement, we had 5,000 agents spying on us in Chicago alone, as I said. When I was in the Leary Defense Committee in the 70s, that was a committee to attempt to get across to the American public an idea that was so radical, we could hardly get into print with it. And it still is an unpopular idea in most places. The idea that locking up scientists is not the best way to settle scientific questions. Most people still don't understand that idea. But while I was in that, everybody in the Leary Defense Committee came to me at one time and told me somebody else was a government agent. And usually the person denounced one day would be around to denounce somebody else the next day. And I remain sane all through that because I have this basic attitude that life is either great adventure or it's nothing. So I refuse to get paranoid. I just enjoy the sense of mystery. I was at a meeting one time and this fellow after the meeting had offered to drive me home. And before that he said, come to the rear of the car, he opened it and inside he had a Schmeiser submachine gun. And he said, would you like to have this? Well, I don't know. I've been relatively violent, I guess, all my life. And the possession of any submachine, I only had one. And the idea of having another one appealed to me very much, but it suddenly occurred to me this was a very strange offer to make. And so I rejected it out of hand, reminding him that it was illegal. And again, some time later he came up to me and he said, I've got something strange to tell you. Thank God here it comes again. He said, I'm working for the FBI. And he said, I have concluded that they're more dangerous than you are. That's a terrible blow to a radical's ego. Now I got a friend whose name was best not to mention at this point. And he has been urging for some years the formation of a guns and dope party. And some people think that's what the libertarian party is. His attitude is the people who do dope and the people who are gun collectors who want to have guns to protect themselves, the group generally called the gun nuts. If you add the two of them together, they make a majority. And he's got statistics to prove this. But so many of them are in the 101st Airborne. Yeah, there is that problem. Yeah, the smoke problem. I remember one day sitting around his house. He had piles of guns, including Tommy guns around that he was selling. He's in the gun business illegally and illegally, depending on how the laws are written that year. And he also deals grass. And I was sitting there looking at him and there's all these guns and pot on the floor. And I said, Bill, all you need is a teenage girl and some counterfeit money to be the ideal bust for any cop. I was, come to think of it, a little too short of my delicate name. I was in the gun running business for a time. And it was a curious thing. We see the free market at work. It makes everything so pleasant. I was more of this evil stuff. Good God. Oh. Too late. Too late. I saw a party of prosperity. But while I was, this was getting guns for a fellow in Cuba whose name was Carlos Avia. He was an engineer, which endeared him to me. And he wanted to overthrow Fulgencio Batista, which seemed like a sensible idea. And so he hired me to get him some automatic weapons and some napalm, which I did fairly successfully. But while doing it, I noticed when you deal with these arms merchants, how wonderfully matter of fact they are about something that the Pentagon tries to turn into a drama. How many mortars do you want? Israelis are very big at selling mortars to people. We can get you this many. Would you like a tank? So I want to describe just briefly what happened in my illustrious career as a gun runner. The guns went fine. And so did the napalm, because I convinced the company that makes the saponifying agent that I wanted to burn off 52,000 acres of land and needed an awful lot of napalm. But this stuff isn't, you know, you think it might come already mixed up, but it comes as a powder. It's soap powder, roughly what it is. I thought, my God, there's got to be some proper way to mix this. And how am I going to tell a bunch of Cubans after we get it there how to mix it? So I went to a chemist friend of mine at Shell Oil who wrote out all of the instructions for me very seriously. And at the end, after spacing it, it simply said, and then run like hell. But the highlight of my revolutionary activity was dropping the propaganda pamphlets over Havana. Well, I don't know if you all panic easily, but when you're trying to figure out where was Florida, how are you going to get back there? And how are you going to explain that you've been in all of this restricted area? And everything goes through your mind. So we had a lot of pamphlets to dump out over Havana. And so we dumped them out in bails of 5,000. Yeah, and it occurred to me, my God, I've bombed some, I've bombed Havana. So I really feel bad about that. I think that constitutes some sort of a trespass on the pamphlets wouldn't have been so bad. Anyway, it was wonderful. I'm beginning to feel I've led a rather sheltered life. I have a couple of other friends who were gun runners, but I've never done that myself. The closest I ever came is when the Chicago Red Squad was investigating me as a gun runner, which is an amusing story in itself, at least it amuses me in retrospect. I was working for Playboy at the time. And people wonder how my novels get so complicated about conspiracies, within conspiracies and so on. This was one of the crucial incidents in the development of my philosophy of mammalian politics. I was working for Playboy in a chap whose function was never clear to me, although he was very close to Hefner. I came into my office and closed the door. I was an associate editor. He closed the door. He pulled a chair over close to my desk and he said, this is serious. You're under very close surveillance by the Chicago Red Squad. They got a tap on your phone and we think they're doing a mail cover on you, too. I said, what the hell's that all about? I mean, I was involved in the peace movement, but I didn't think that they went that far, just from watching around with a sign saying, eat what you kill. I said, what did I do that got the Red Squad so intense? And he says, they think you've been running guns for the Black Panthers. I said, running guns for the Black Panthers? I don't remember doing that. I mean, we get to feel a little bit like Ronald Reagan must have felt recently. Did I do that one day? I was so stoned. I don't remember what I was doing. Oh no, I never did run guns for the Black Panthers. And the more I searched my memory, the more I realized that I had been on platforms with Black Panthers on three occasions at peace rallies. And I said, how did the Red Squad get the idea I was running guns for the Black Panthers? And this chap said, well, they got an informer in the Black Panthers. And he says, you were bringing guns down there to the headquarters on the south side. And I said, you know, I think what happened is the informer saw me with Black Panthers at times. And that wasn't good enough to excite his superiors at the Red Squad. So he improved the story a little. A Playboy editor on a platform with Black Panthers is of moderate interest. A Playboy editor running guns for the Black Panthers is of greater interest. And so I think that's what happened because I swear. I think the statute of limitations has run out. If I were running guns, I would admit it now. I was not doing any such thing. But that's probably still in my file with the Chicago Red Squad. So I lived for quite a while with the knowledge that my phone was tapped and I was wondering what was happening to my mail. But I was more concerned with how the hell did Playboy know about this? And so I asked the person whose name I am carefully not mentioning. I asked him, how does Playboy know what the Chicago Red Squad is doing? And he said, well, we got a fellow with police headquarters. He tells us when an investigation is being opened on anybody who works with Playboy. Later on it turned out there was another member of the Red Squad who was being paid by two rich liberals in the Chicago Northern suburbs where the rich liberals live, will met, Winnetka, Glencoe, that area. These two rich liberals discovered this cop was in their peace groups. They recognized them as a cop and they approached them. And he was very glad to go on their salary. They paid him regularly to be informed of what the Red Squad was doing. So that's two agents I have personally found out about in the Red Squad. Well, there were 5,000 agents from the Chicago Red Squad, the FBI, the CIA and army intelligence watching me. That's the kind of world that we're living in, whether most people realize it or not. And it depends on the side you're on really, because I was actually running guns. And the FBI knew every single thing I did, but of course I was approved. You can be an approved gun runner. And so there was never any problem about it. That leads to another of my paranoia inducing stories. Some of you may remember about three years ago, the head of NORRAID stood at NORRAID, that's the aid for Northern Ireland. The head of NORRAID stood trial in New York for running guns for the IRA. They were theoretically collecting money for the widows and orphans of the war, but they were actually buying guns for one side. That's just prepayment. Something like that. That's right, it's prepayment, yes. And his defense, the head of NORRAID, his defense was that he didn't believe he was committing any illegal acts. He found it incredible that he was arrested. He still didn't understand what was going on because he was getting the guns from the CIA. And the government tried to squash that line of defense, but his lawyer managed to persuade the judge it was a legitimate defense. So they brought in the evidence and proved that the CIA was running guns for the IRA. And so I asked Sean McBride, who some of you may know as the founder of Amnesty International, he also won the Lenin Peace Prize, the United States Medal of Justice, the Lenin Peace Prize, the Dog Hammershow Medal of Honor of the United Nations. And in Ireland, of course, with all those honors, he's still best known as the son of John McBride, who was one of the revolutionaries of 1916. I got to interview Sean McBride and I asked him about that. I asked, why would the CIA be running guns for Marxist revolutionaries? And he said, when you get into the machinations of intelligence agencies, anything is possible. Norman Mailer's description of it is that it really is like an onion. And you can peel it endlessly. And you'll never get there because there is no thing right there. Funny business, funny business. But it's wonderful if you really want a career in high level mischief. And I must say, it really is fun. I mean, God, blowing up things and stuff, it really is fun. I don't think people understand that too richly or too enough about war and why people, there's so much support for it. It isn't part of a conspiracy, it's a part of an excitement. It really is exciting. Yeah, well, people go to see horror movies. They go to see Charles Bronson blowing people away in the subway. They go to see Clint Eastwood. And they say, violence is all in the other people. I'm a pacifist, I'm a nice guy. Oh, those folks, yeah. It's a part of human nature. Of course, people enjoy it. If nobody enjoyed it, nobody would go to Clint Eastwood films. Some people are not satisfied seeing it on the screen. They want to act it out. It's just amazing how you can be an official outlaw in this country. And I must say, it has some advantages. If you are the state's radical, you are like methadone. You are the state's narcotic. And they'll help you out and do all sorts of good things. Just as a, for instance, the fellow who worked for the FBI, who was my nurse or whatever, that this person said that the reason he had volunteered, volunteered, get this, to become an informant for the FBI, was that they had offered him to take his young daughter suffering from a very severe ailment to the National Institutes of Health or Walter Reed or any place to have her worked on. So in order to save his daughter's life, a nice deal that the FBI made with him, he decided to be an informer. I don't think there's any depth to which they'll sink. At least I've never thought so. Let me just say one thing about that just occurred when I say IRS visions begin flashing. To indicate what lovely people these people are, when my tax rebellion was added zenith, which is when I had any money to tax, the IRS went to my mother, who was quite elderly, and said that they wanted to check on her health. And she inquired why. And they said, because we want to make sure that when you die, you don't leave anything to your son, or if you do, we get what he owes us. I think that's villainy beyond belief, isn't it? And my mother, she later, in talking to this young man, the agent said to her, why is your son doing this? And she said, young man, don't you read the newspapers? He's written more about it than anybody I know. But it doesn't do much good, does it? Except sometimes it may. I've mentioned several times that recently I met a guy in West Virginia where I live, and he said, I have a nasty shock for you. He said, I work at the IRS data center, which is oddly enough about nine miles from us. And he said, I'm about to retire. So I've been keeping in fairly close touch with this fellow because I can't think of anybody more interesting than a libertarian working at the IRS central computer who is about to retire. Malaklips, Malaklips the younger author of that mortal sacred scripture, Kipia Discordia, how I found goddess and what I did to her after I found her is now the head of the computer department of one of the largest banks in the United States. You will be happy to know. And very rich, I trust. Very powerful. But your stories about the FBI remind me of another colorful friend of mine, John Draper, a.k.a. Captain Crunch. He was ripping off the phone company with all sorts of cute electronic devices he invented himself, including the simple device of using a whistle from a Captain Crunch breakfast cereal which is how he got his nickname. And after years they finally made a major case against him and he was convicted in San Jose and sentenced to about five years in prison at which point he told his lawyer to contact the FBI and he had a conference with a couple of FBI agents in which he told them how he had figured out ways to tap the allegedly untappable wires of the CIA, the FBI, and the White House and how he had worked out methods of transferring money from one bank account to another by telephone and how he had worked out a way to fire the nuclear missiles in Colorado and start World War III. And he gave them full and explicit details on all of these little pranks he hadn't had time to carry out yet because he was a busy man ripping off the phone company 24 hours a day and they went back and they checked every damn thing he said was true and they had some kind of executive level decision and the FBI entered the case as a friend of the court and persuaded the judge to give John instead of five years, three months with weekends off and he could go home at night too. He was only in the prison in the daytime and he had weekends off too. And he served three months in return for informing the government how to get around, how to install fail safes against his devices and after he got out of prison he went around telling everybody in Silicon Valley the joke was of course that the fail safes he had told them about he had already figured out how to get around and what he can do there are 10,000 other genius level pot heads in Silicon Gulch you can also do and they are the people who are designing 90% of the Star Wars technology. I don't know, these people don't appreciate my jokes my jokes are too morbid for them, that's because they're true. Somebody remarked recently, Ross Overbeek as a matter of fact remarked that although it has been possible for a long time for them to listen in on everything we do that it's now possible for us to listen in on everything they do because the technology is clearly on our side for a change but I think it will continue to be another hopeful sign it seems to me you had spoken a lot about stupidity and its central activity as a tool of evolution and I think that's an interesting thing to toy with there is such a stupidity today that it seems to me it is forcing for survival brighter people to do extraordinary and new things because they understand they simply can't survive the weight of the stupidity that's my theory is that stupidity is an evolutionary driver it forces the intelligent to get even more intelligent to survive boy, isn't that wonderful my sons are going to be smart wait till I tell them that was Subversion for Fun and Profit with Carl Hess and Robert Anton Wilson this episode was written by Caleb Brown and produced by Mark McDaniel if you like the podcast you've heard today please rate it and review it at iTunes and of course find more classics of liberty at libertarianism.org