Prometheus Unbound

In a recent addition to the Libertarian Tradition podcast series, part of the Mises Institute's online media library, Jeff Riggenbach uses Objectivist Robert Bidinotto's novel Hunter as a launchpad to discuss Objectivist subculture and fear.

You can also read the transcript below:

In a recent conversation with a younger libertarian, I heard something that I found somewhat surprising and somewhat disturbing at the same time. But later, on reflection, I realized that what I had heard should not have surprised me, however much it may still disturb me. My young friend had said, and I paraphrase here, that he was surprised to learn that I thought of Objectivists as libertarians at all. Based on what he had seen of the positions they took on political issues, especially foreign policy, he had concluded that they were just another kind of neocon.

I refer to this younger libertarian as “my young friend,” but the fact is, he's no kid; he's in his early 40s, which tells you how long the situation with respect to Objectivism that I'm going to describe and deplore has been going on — that a man in his 40s cannot remember a time when leading Objectivists didn't talk in such a way about questions of US foreign policy (and about other questions as well, as we shall see) that they become hard to differentiate from certain kinds of conservatives and hard to see as any sort of libertarian.

But before I get further into that depressing theme, there's a new book I'd like to commend to your attention. It's a novel entitled Hunter: A Thriller, and it's the work of the prominent Objectivist writer Robert Bidinotto. Now, a word of caution. What follows is not properly a book review, because what I'm really interested in talking about here is not Bidinotto's thriller in its capacity as a novel, an entertainment, a work of “popular art,” but rather what it can tell us in its capacity as a cultural artifact.

As Ayn Rand said, “The art of any given period or culture is a faithful mirror of that culture's philosophy.” But of course, no culture has a “philosophy,” really, at least if by that we mean a thought-out set of principles about the central questions any thoughtful person must be led to ask about the human condition. What a culture has is an implicit philosophy, what Rand liked to call a “sense of life.”

Rand argued that it was the artist's “sense of life,” his “implicit view of life,” his “generalized feeling about existence,” that “controls and integrates his work, directing the innumerable choices he has to make, from the choice of subject to the subtlest details of style.” An artist, Rand argued, “selects those aspects of existence which he regards as metaphysically significant — and by isolating and stressing them, by omitting the insignificant and accidental, he presents hisview of existence.”

Also, as we have seen, the artist, by doing all these selfsame things, holds up a “faithful mirror” to the sense of life that dominates the culture or subculture he best fits into in the society in which he lives. And it is with this in mind that I want to discuss Robert Bidinotto's Hunter. It is, I think, pretty faithful in the way it mirrors the sense of life of the subculture we know as the Objectivist movement.

Hunter begins with Annie Woods, a recently divorced Washington, DC–based CIA agent engrossed in the case of a fellow agent, now gone rogue, who has been selling secrets to the Russians, outing US undercover operatives in the process and getting them killed. At a friend's funeral, she meets a rising local journalist, Dylan Hunter, who specializes in writing investigative pieces about crime.

Through his new friend Annie and through the widow of the mutual friend at whose funeral they met, Hunter learns about a crime victims' support group and attends one of their meetings. He then interviews the various individuals in the group who have lost loved ones to criminals, often only to see those criminals acquitted on technicalities or released early from prison sentences that had never been properly proportionate to the seriousness of their crimes in the first place.

Hunter begins writing a series of Sunday articles about these and similar local cases. And he attracts many readers, some of whom are, shall we say, more serious about what they read than others. Some of them, or so it soon begins to appear, are what you might call “deadly” serious about what they read. For someone — or some group of someones — has begun systematically tracking down each of the leniently treated criminals profiled in Hunter's articles and killing them, leaving a copy of the relevant article pinned to the chest of each bloody corpse.

Meanwhile Annie and Hunter have become something of an item, though she is intermittently troubled by her inability to find any information at all on her new boyfriend that goes back any further than two or three years. Who is executing these criminals? And who is Hunter?

Bidinotto's tale is very cleverly put together. It kept me reading on the edge of my seat, so to speak, for two full days. But, more to my present point, what does it suggest about the current state of the Objectivist subculture? What sense of life does it project?

I'm sorry to report that it projects a sense of life dominated by the emotions of fear and vindictive anger. It projects the sense that the individual is alone and, too often, defenseless in a scary, dangerous world in which other people are out to get him — out to take away from him what is rightfully his, and to assault and torture him just for the fun of it, and to kill him if that turns out to be convenient.

Some might wonder at this point just why these murderous people are so, well, murderous — why they are so intent on committing crimes of this kind. But in the world contemporary Objectivists see when they open their eyes and look around, it is vain to ask such questions. In fact, it is worse than vain; for any inquiry into the reasons — good, bad, or idiotic — that someone might have had for doing what he did implies (somehow) that there may be some excuse for what he did. These criminals do what they do because they are “animals” and “dirtbags.” It is in their nature. The only thing any decent individual can do is hope that these subhuman creatures are locked up in the darkest available hole and never let out. Or maybe they should just be exterminated like rodents or roaches.

It is clear from their views on US foreign policy that most Objectivists today live in the very same frightening world that I have just described. Bidinotto himself made the connection between these two issues, domestic crime and international peace, in a notorious series of attacks on Ron Paul back in 2007 and 2008 on his personal blog and in the New Individualist, the monthly magazine he was editing back then for the Atlas Society. Some people claim that Bidinotto lost his job as editor of the New Individualist as a direct result of these articles, which allegedly offended some wealthy Objectivist Ron Paul supporters.

He wrote on his blog in November 2007, for example, that there was “an interesting parallel between [Ron Paul's] view of America's foreign enemies, and the common liberal view of America's domestic criminals.” For

the same sort of arguments advanced by many libertarians … to “explain” the anti-American actions of foreign terrorists, also have been offered by liberals to “explain” the heinous acts of common criminals. Read any sociology or criminology text, and you'll find endless laundry lists of “causal explanations” for crime: poverty, neglect, poor parenting, lousy schools, poor “socialization,” inadequate pre-natal care, hunger, disease, bullying, racism, police brutality, social stigmatizing, untreated psychological disorders, victimless-crime laws … you name it.

To Bidinotto, back in November 2007, in what he now describes as “a post of which I'm particularly proud,” it seemed clear that these two positions were very closely related. “Just as many libertarians like [Ron] Paul treat the actions of al Qaeda and other terrorists as ‘blowback' for the sins of American society against them,” he wrote,

liberal social-science professionals treat the actions of home-grown criminal thugs as “blowback” for the alleged sins of American society against them. These bloody acts are never the terrorist's or the criminal's “fault” (responsibility), you see; rather, they are all our fault, for “driving him” to do his dastardly deeds. You may remember that during the Cold War, precisely the same sort of “explanations” were offered by liberals and, later, by left-libertarians such as Murray Rothbard to lay the blame for Communist aggression at the West's (especially America's) doorstep. It was our imperialist provocations around the world that were “driving” the Soviet bloc to “respond” by conquering and butchering millions, building weapons of mass destruction, constructing the Berlin Wall, etc. It was our economic and cultural “imperialism” that was driving indigenous peoples everywhere into the arms of the communists. I defy anyone to draw a rational, meaningful distinction between such “explanations” for criminal or terrorist aggression, and “excuses” for it. After all, “causal explanations” for human actions aim at exonerating the actor for committing them, by treating those acts as if they were not under the actor's conscious, volitional control, but as if they were instead deterministically driven “responses” to external provocations or “causes. ” Just as I reject the liberal “excuse-making industry” that denies volition and rationalizes the acts of criminals, I am totally fed up with the disgraceful foreign-policy perspectives of those libertarians who portray the United States as the causal agent of every evil on earth — thus rationalizing the atrocities of foreign terrorists and despots.

Well, I guess if I were assigned the task of composing a detailed reply to this indictment, I'd probably begin by pointing out that neither Ron Paul nor any other libertarian I've ever encountered, in print or in person, has ever said that the 9/11 terrorists — or anyone else in the Middle East — has ever been victimized by “American society.” Some liberals do make this claim about criminals, but no libertarian makes it about people abroad who have grievances against the US government. The US government is not “American society.”

One receives the definite impression that few if any of these leading Objectivists have ever met a war they didn't like.

Further, neither Ron Paul nor any other libertarian I've ever encountered, in print or in person, has ever said that the 9/11 terrorists — or any other terrorists anywhere — were not responsible for their actions, or that “those acts … were not under the actor's conscious, volitional control.” Of course they were. Of course the terrorists are responsible for what they chose to do. Does this mean it is useless to inquire into their reasons for choosing as they did?

Is it more useful, more helpful, to instead angrily denounce them as “savages” or “animals” and then attempt to blow up anything and everything within a radius of 50 miles or so from the spot where “we” think they may be hiding? Is making war really the best response to a terrorist attack like the one that took place on September 11, 2001? So one would deduce from the public pronouncements of leading Objectivists over the past decade.

One receives the definite impression that few if any of these leading Objectivists have ever met a war they didn't like — or, at least believed, with the grim, firm-jawed determination they felt was appropriate to a Randian hero, was somehow “necessary.” A war is a campaign of mass destruction and mass murder carried out by governments. In what morally coherent sense could such a thing be deemed “necessary”?

Ayn Rand herself was never so simplistic about war as her followers of today are. “Wars,” she wrote in 1967,

are the second greatest evil that human societies can perpetrate. (The first is dictatorship, the enslavement of their own citizens, which is the cause of wars.) When a nation resorts to war, it has some purpose, rightly or wrongly, something to fight for — and the only justifiable purpose is self-defense.

As I hope most libertarians of today do remember, Rand could see no such justification for the US presence in Vietnam. She called the war the US government participated in for nearly two decades in Southeast Asia “a war in which American soldiers are dying for no purpose whatever.” There was a sense, though, in which Rand saw the Vietnam War as no worse, no more blameworthy, than any of the other wars the US government had been involved in during the 20th century. “There still are people in this country,” she wrote in 1974,

who lost loved ones in World War I. There are more people who carry the unhealed wounds of World War II, of Korea, of Vietnam. There are the disabled, the crippled, the mangled of those wars' battlefields. No one has ever told them why they had to fight nor what their sacrifices accomplished; it was certainly not “to make the world safe for democracy” — look at that world now. The American people have borne it all, trusting their leaders, hoping that someone knew the purpose of that ghastly devastation. The United States gained nothing from those wars, except the growing burden of paying reparations to the whole world — the kind of burden that used to be imposed on a defeated nation.

There was a dark, pessimistic side to Rand's sense of life, certainly — think of We the Living and of the opening chapters in Atlas Shrugged — but Rand never seemed completely consumed by fear and vengeful anger in the way her contemporary followers do. And this is a tragedy, because Rand and Objectivism were such an important force for good in the early history of the contemporary libertarian movement. There was a time when it seemed that most libertarians were Randians. And even if that's a slight (or more than slight) exaggeration, the Randian influence on the early contemporary movement was undeniably substantial.

When the Society for Individual Liberty did a study of Libertarian Party members in the early 1970s, they found that more than a third of them were self-described Objectivists. As recently as 2008, the Liberty Poll, conducted by Liberty magazine, reported that “the thinker who most influenced our respondents' intellectual development was Ayn Rand.” And though, as I've said, her outlook on things did have its dark corners, Ayn Rand was basically an exponent of a bold, adventurous, confident sense of life, the sort of sense of life you'd expect to be associated with libertarian ideas.

Rand's heroes weren't generals or people in law enforcement; they were engineers, inventors, designers — people focused on what they could do with their lives, not people preoccupied with the supposed menace to all their hopes and dreams posed by a vast army of almost unimaginably vicious antagonists who seek to destroy them for no reason at all. One is reminded of Benjamin R. Tucker's observation that libertarian anarchists of his stripe were just “unterrified Jeffersonian democrats.” If Tucker thought the Jeffersonians were terrified because of their determination to cling to the institution of government, what would he think of today's Objectivists?

Of course, Robert Bidinotto and his fellow fear mongers will tell you that they're terrified with perfectly good reason — after all, haven't “we” been victimized by terrorist attacks in the last decade? Did not thousands die? But the events of 9/11 did not terrify the Objectivists. They were already terrified for no reason long before that; they merely use the 9/11 attacks as a pretext, in an effort to make their terror look less irrational and absurd than it actually is.

Bidinotto told me via email that he doesn't advocate the sort of vigilantism that figures in his novel. He wrote (and I quote this with his permission),

The vigilantism in the novel is intended solely as a fictional device to highlight and dramatize the complete absence of justice in the current legal system. I deliberately crafted the [vigilante character] in the novel to hold a clear, specific code of honor regarding his illegal actions. He only kills killers; he does not target public officials with violence, but only with “poetic justice”; he takes no actions that will threaten innocents; and he would rather be arrested than use violence against cops. But in the real world, vigilantism would never be subject to such honorable constraints. Instead, it would degenerate into a violent competition of reprisals and vendettas unlimited by any moral or legal principle.

Does Bidinotto not see that this is an excellent description of exactly how his beloved “War on Terror” has worked out in practice — and of how it must work out in practice? The US government claims that its warmaking is “subject to honorable constraints,” and that it strives to avoid taking “actions that will threaten innocents,” but this is the real world, and in the real world, whatever high-minded platitudes politicians and military people may mouth, war is never anything but “a violent competition of reprisals and vendettas unlimited by any moral or legal principle” — a competition in which innocents are maimed and killed and their property is senselessly destroyed.

Can anything be done about this unfortunate development in the evolution of Objectivism as a movement and as a subculture? Perhaps not. In a very perceptive blog post, written just this past April, Bidinotto wrote about what he called the “form [in which] we really encounter and accept our foundational beliefs about ourselves and the world around us.” We first encounter and accept these “foundational beliefs,” according to Bidinotto,

early in life, and in the form of stories — or what I call Narratives. The myths that we learn in childhood, at Mother's knee, in church, in schools, in films and novels, represent primitive, fundamental interpretive stories about our world: how it works, what it means, what is right or wrong, who are the Good Guys and the Bad Guys. These Narratives are pre-philosophical; in fact, they are acquired in their germinal forms while we are still far too young to subject them to critical analysis. They thus actually tend todetermine which abstract philosophies, ideologies, economic theories, and political policies we later find appealing. These latter “feel right” to us largely because they mesh with the myths, fairy tales, parables, and stories we already absorbed during childhood. Moreover, the more deep-rooted the myth — either personally and/or culturally — the more desperately we cling to it. We cling to it even when it may sometimes be utterly false, and lead us over a cliff. We cling to it because to challenge or criticize it means to unravel a lifetime of investments in values, choices, relationships, careers, emotions, and money. And who wants to do that?

Who indeed? Not, I think, Robert Bidinotto. He confesses, in this blog post, that

Robert Bidinotto (Photo (c) by Debbie Scott)

I've found it to be increasingly pointless to argue philosophy, economics, and politics with most people. Why? Because we are talking past each other. You may prove a point with unassailable facts and irrefutable logic. However, the other person replies, “Yes, but…” Those words usually signal that you've reached the ultimate barrier to further reasoning and communication: You've challenged his Narrative. And in my experience, that is ground he'll rarely, if ever, concede.

I think everyone who has read up to this point knows what sort of narrative defines the world for Robert Bidinotto. You can get a taste of it in his new novel, Hunter. It makes for an absorbing read, as I've indicated. But as a guide to real life and the real world, it is sorely skewed. It's too bad, really. From what small dealings I've had with him, I'd say that Robert Bidinotto is a good guy. He's highly intelligent, with a genuine knack for putting words together, and, on top of that, he has the good sense to grasp the truth about the importance of private property and free markets to civilization. It's damned inconvenient for the rest of us in the libertarian movement that he and so many others like him are so damn terrified.

[This article was first published online as a Mises Daily article and is transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode “Robert Bidinotto's Hunter.”]

Jeff Riggenbach is a journalist, author, editor, broadcaster, and educator. A member of the Organization of American Historians and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute, he has written for such newspapers as the New York Times, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle; such magazines asReason, Inquiry, and Liberty; and such websites as LewRockwell.com, AntiWar.com, and RationalReview.com. Drawing on vocal skills he honed in classical and all-news radio in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Houston, Riggenbach has also narrated the audiobook versions of numerous libertarian works.

In a recent addition to the Libertarian Tradition podcast series, part of the Mises Institute's online media library, Jeff Riggenbach discusses the life of Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007), author of the Illuminatus! trilogy.

You can also read the transcript below:

Robert Anton Wilson was born January 18, 1932 in Brooklyn. He grew up in the section of Brooklyn known as Flatbush and, later, after his father lost his job on the waterfront, in a much poorer section of Brooklyn known as Gerritsen Beach. “Rents were very low” in Gerritsen Beach, Wilson recalled in his book Down to Earth, the largely autobiographical second volume of his Cosmic Trigger Trilogy, “because only the poor Irish Catholics lived there.” At another point in the same account, he refers to his old neighborhood as “an Irish Catholic ghetto.” Not that all Irish Catholics were poor, mind you. “My father had relatives in Brooklyn Heights,” Wilson wrote in 1991,

who actually owned a big two-story house, instead of renting a bungalow, and I think they had central heating, too. We referred to them as “lace curtain Irish.” Only when I was much older did I discover that they called us “shanty Irish.” But none of us knew any of the half-fabulous “cut glass Irish,” who existed only as a romantic rumor … people who, even though Irish, lived as well as the Protestants. These semi-mythic beings, the cut glass Irish, lived in New England and drank cognac.

In Gerritsen Beach, as Wilson recalled it, there was no cognac, no cut glass, not even any lace curtains. “When I remember life in Gerritsen Beach in those days,” Wilson wrote in Down to Earth,

I define it chiefly in negatives. Most readers born since 1945 cannot imagine the ignorance and brutality of those days. Many middle-aged women had goiter, a disease creating an ugly lump in the neck, which looked like a cancer.… People regularly died of tuberculosis, which is now normally cured in its early stages, and children had dozens of diseases now abolished. I myself survived measles, German measles, mumps, flu (still a major killer in those days), rheumatic fever, whooping cough, diphtheria and polio.

The Gerritsen Beach Wilson remembered

had no paved roads and nobody had central heating … the bungalows were heated with coal, when we could afford it, but more often with driftwood we picked up on the beach in the summer and stacked in the yard to dry until we used it in the winter. Only the center of the house (living room/kitchen) got heated that way, and a trip to the bathroom in January or February was like a journey to the Pole with Scott of the Antarctic and twenty dog-sleds. People were always dying of influenza and pneumonia and other diseases related to lack of heat in winter. Every head cold created minor panic because it might develop into one of these killer diseases. Knowledge of medicine was primitive.… People were always expecting the worst because all they had known in all their lives were deadly diseases and grinding poverty.… One year after my birth, President Roosevelt declared that “one third of the nation” lived in conditions as bad as, or worse than, what I have described.

On the other hand, Wilson wrote, “nothing in my childhood ever led me to suspect that the overwhelming majority of the human race was … living in conditions far more deplorable than the Shanty Irish in Gerritsen Beach.”

Attentive readers will have noted that one of the childhood diseases of his era that Robert Anton Wilson personally survived was polio. The story is worth recounting, for reasons that will become evident as we go along. “When I was diagnosed as having polio at age two,” Wilson wrote in Down to Earth, “the doctors told my parents I would never walk again.” But “my mother fought back against the medical verdict.” She and Wilson's father, “after giving up on the doctor who said I'd be paralyzed for life … and just by blind chance … found one of the few doctors in the United States who thought the Kenny method was worth trying.”

The Kenny method was the method advocated by Elizabeth Kenny, an Australian physical therapist and nurse who had reported extraordinary results in working with polio patients who had been told by medical doctors to expect lives of paralysis. Her method had won many adherents in Australia by the time it was used on Robert Anton Wilson in 1934, and it would win many more adherents in this country a decade later, during World War II, but it faced an uphill struggle both Down Under and in the United States. As Wilson wrote in 1991,

the A.M.A. and the whole organized medical profession at that time had denounced Kenny and all her works. She was only a nurse and therefore couldn't discover anything of importance; she was only a woman, also, and therefore could not understand medicine, which requires male brains; her technique of treating polio, we were told, was dangerous nonsense and hogwash and “witchcraft.” Thus the major event of my early childhood consisted of being cured of a major crippling illness that left most of its victims permanently confined to wheelchairs, by a method that all recognized experts denounced as unscientific and useless. This instilled in me certain doubts about experts.

Wilson, who would “never walk again,” walked for the rest of his life, though with a bit of a limp when fatigued and sometimes with a cane.

If he had ever had anything that could be described as an attitude of reverence toward authorities, however, it never recovered. There are careers that seem custom designed for such people. And so, by the time he was old enough to go to high school, he knew he wanted to be a writer. By this time, his family was considerably more prosperous, for Wilson started high school just after the end of World War II, which had brought increased work for longshoremen and warehousemen and new employment for his father, at higher wages than he'd ever earned before the Depression started. And after the war, the prosperity had not only continued; it had actually grown.

Wilson's father remembered his long years of unemployment, however, and was determined that his son would train for a career that would continue to pay him, even in tough times. Writing was an impractical dream; what his son needed was a career like … engineering. So the family moved to the section of Brooklyn known as Bay Ridge and young Bob enrolled in Brooklyn Technical High School. It is not recorded whether any lace curtains were purchased for their new home, but Wilson recalled that, after the move to Bay Ridge, they “were living so well, compared to the Depression, that I imagined we were lace-curtain Irish at last.”

From Brooklyn Tech he went, in 1952, after a couple of years of working and saving his money, to the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn (now a part of New York University), where, about a decade later, Leonard Peikoff and Murray N. Rothbard would be teaching. He studied engineering and worked in that field and as a medical orderly and as a salesman, among other jobs he regarded as meaningless dead ends. But he was also, in his spare time, writing.

“The really superior man, just because he is intelligent enough to know the limitations of his knowledge and the fallibility of his judgments, has no taste for the ruthlessness that is essential to the exercise of power.”

Gradually, he began to sell some of that writing, and gradually that began to open a few doors. He got a job as a copywriter at an advertising agency. And then, in 1962, when he was 30 years old, a small, Ohio-based magazine he had been writing for offered him a job as an editor. He eagerly accepted the offer. But when he arrived in Brookville, Ohio, about 15 miles northwest of Dayton, to take up his duties as “coeditor” with Mildred Loomis ofBalanced Living magazine, he arrived under what you might call an assumed name.

A few years before, when he first began earning money by writing, he had decided to use the name Robert Anton Wilson as his professional name. He had been born Robert Edward Wilson, but he wanted to reserve his “real” name for the serious literary works he would write one day. The “Anton” he had adopted to replace “Edward” on the ad copy and journalism he might write in the meantime had come from his maternal grandfather, Anton Milli of Trieste.

As Wilson later told the tale in Down to Earth, his grandfather “had left the Austro-Hungarian Empire to avoid military service, and … was proud of the fact, as a sign of his sagacity. The best thing about America, he told my mother, was that we had no compulsory military service here.” Wilson admired his grandfather, he wrote, because “the old guy was brave enough to be a draft-dodger and sail across the wild Atlantic in a crude wooden ship to try to find a free country. I wish there was still a free country here, for others like him.”

In the end, of course, Robert Edward Wilson never wrote any serious literary works; instead he gradually became Robert Anton Wilson. And so we return to the main thread of our story.

Balanced Living, the small magazine of which Robert Anton Wilson became coeditor in 1962, was published by an organization called the School for Living, which had been founded nearly 30 years before, at about the same time the two-year-old Robert Edward Wilson was being treated for his polio by a practitioner of the Kenny method. The founder of the original School for Living on an estate outside the village of Suffern in Rockland County, about 35 or 40 miles north of New York City, was a man named Ralph Borsodi.

Borsodi had been born in New York City in the mid 1880s, had grown up there and entered the advertising business there, enjoying some success. He gradually became convinced, however, that, as he put it in his 1933 book Flight from the City, those who chose to stay in the city — any big city — were choosing to be

financially insecure … never [knowing] when [they] might be without a job … lack[ing] the zest of living that comes from real health and suffer[ing] all the minor and sometimes major ailments that come from too much excitement, too much artificial food, too much sedentary work, and too much of the smoke and noise and dust of the city,

all the while living “lives [that] were barren of real beauty — the beauty that comes only from contact with nature and from the growth of the soil, from flowers and fruits, from gardens and trees, from birds and animals.” Borsodi wanted to offer, he wrote, “a way out for … men and women who desire to escape from dependence upon the present industrial system and who have no desire to substitute for it dependence upon a state controlled system.”

Borsodi had read his Henry George, you see, and also some Josiah Warren, some Lysander Spooner, and some Benjamin R. Tucker. He was skeptical of the ability of the state to solve anyone's problems. As he put it in his 1929 book This Ugly Civilization,

We are born into a political status. We have no choice about the matter. We are … born under the dominion of politicians.… We can change our political status by emigrating from the subjection under which we are born to some other which we may think more desirable, but we cannot free ourselves from subjection to government altogether. In this respect we have somewhat less freedom today than even with regard to religion. We can avoid tithes, in many states, but none of us can avoid taxes. Public opinion has progressed to the point where it recognizes that abandonment of the church is not in itself an evil however sinful it may be from the standpoint of the clergy. But it has not yet arrived at a point where it recognizes that the abandonment of the state is equally free from evil.… But while we may have to consent to a political status and to contribute to the support of the government, we do not need to over-estimate the extent to which politicians and the political state contribute to our comfort. For government is, at best, a necessary evil. It does not become less evil because it seems necessary.

Borsodi gets better. “There are three needs of mankind,” he wrote,

and therefore three functions, which seem to justify the existence of governments. The first is the protection of society as a whole, and of the law-abiding members of it, from the illegal, and sometimes antisocial activities of individuals. The performance of this function has brought into existence the police powers of the government: law, law enforcement, and the courts of law. The second function is the protection of the government itself from the attacks of other governments, and by virtue of what is presumably the corollary of self-defense, the function of attacking other governments that may for some reason — good, bad, or indifferent — interfere with the activities of the attacking government. The performance of this function has brought into existence the war powers of the government: armies and navies, international law, and diplomacy. The third function is that of rendering various social and economic services that seem, like our schools, too important to entrust to private initiative, or that seem, like the issue of money, too dangerous to entrust to private monopoly. The performance of these functions has brought into existence the social activities of the government: public schools, postal service, streets and roads, fire protection, water supply and a myriad of similar municipal and national activities. If we admit, for the moment, that these functions are essential to mankind's well-being, it does not necessarily follow that the only way in which they can be provided is through the agency of political government. History, which is one long record of the imbecilities and the injustices of governments, furnishes us good grounds for seeking some alternative solution for them. And the comfort that we as individuals seek makes it very desirable that the alternative should be controlled as far as possible by us personally and not by the community as a whole. We develop government because it is an agency that generates social control, when we should develop institutions like the family that are agencies for generating self-control.

At times, Borsodi sounds amazingly like Murray Rothbard or Robert LeFevre. “What we call a government,” he wrote in 1929,

is after all nothing but a group of individuals, who, by a variety of sanctions, have acquired the power to govern their fellows. The sanctions range from the fraud of divine right to that of sheer conquest; from the imbecility of hereditary privilege to the irrationality of counting voters. In most cases the extent to which these sanctions produce capable legislators, judges, and administrators will not bear critical examination. Nominally, government exists and functions for the public. Actually it exists and functions for the benefit of those who have in one of these absurd ways acquired power to govern. It is accepted mainly because of the sheer inertia of great masses of people. Ostensibly, of course, it is accepted because it confers a sufficiency of visible benefits upon society to make the officials who operate it tolerated in spite of the selfish and idiotic exercise of the powers conferred upon them.

Borsodi thought it absurd to fasten any serious hope on the idea of getting “the right people” or even “better people” into government. “The really superior man,” he wrote,

just because he is intelligent enough to know the limitations of his knowledge and the fallibility of his judgments, has no taste for the ruthlessness that is essential to the exercise of power. For government officials must, first of all, maintain power. Only by maintaining power can they have the opportunity to exercise it. Their preoccupation with the arts that lead to power and that enable them to maintain it after they have secured it is inescapable. The ambitions that should animate them and the purposes for which their power should be used have to be subordinated to “practical politics.”

Thus, if an intelligent and well-meaning person attains political power,

he is almost compelled to sacrifice the ideals to which he may originally have been genuinely devoted in order to maintain power. He is almost certain to sacrifice them unless his tenure of power is accompanied by a social convulsion that carries his ideals into force almost in spite of what he himself may do. Ordinarily the task of maintaining himself, and his party, in office is so great that the inclination to make wise use of whatever power he secures rarely survives the ordeal.

In the face of these facts, Borsodi recommended economic independence. “Economic independence,” he wrote,

cannot, unfortunately, completely free us from government. But it can enormously reduce the field of activity for government as a whole.… Dependence upon the public services furnished by the government itself or by quasi-governmental institutions operated upon franchises, can be materially lessened. We can furnish our own water supply; our own sewerage system; our own fire protection; our own schooling. Some of these things for which we now turn to the public services we can do completely for ourselves. Others we can do only in part. To the extent to which we enable ourselves to do them, we avoid the annoyance and escape the incompetence of having them performed by the state.… Support of the government through the taxes we pay we cannot avoid, nor can we entirely escape from such forms of government support as military service and jury duty.… Fortunately, we have progressed to such a point that it is possible to yield to these various forms of duress without too great suffering. Perhaps philosophy can reconcile us to paying the taxes imposed upon us, even though we see every day how the taxpayers' money is wasted by those who hold political office.… Voluntary contributions to the work of government, such as voting, party work, officeholding, and agitating, educating and organizing reform movements — these can be reduced to almost nothing. An occasional effort in this direction may be justified, but earnest devotion to these contributions to government is almost certain to disillusion and disappoint us.

To Borsodi, it was clear that what was “supremely important” was the freedom “to experiment with our ideas — all the ideas that occur to us. We must put ourselves into a position where the ideas that interest us can have real opportunity to function.”

So far, I have quoted Ralph Borsodi more extensively than I've quoted Robert Anton Wilson, the ostensible subject of this article. But I have done so because it is crucial that we understand Borsodi in order to understand Wilson. Clearly Wilson had read Borsodi before he showed up in Brookville, Ohio in 1962 to assume his editorial duties on the School for Living's magazine. Or at least so one would most likely infer upon learning that, as Wilson himself puts it in Down to Earth, “The first thing I did was change the title of the magazine [from Balanced Living] to [A]Way Out, which I hoped would attract a younger, hipper readership.” That phrase — “a way out” — figures in one of the passages I just quoted from Borsodi's books.

Wilson had also read Ayn Rand before he arrived in Brookville. And he had doubtless read at least some of the writing produced by his fellow contributors to the magazine, who included Murray Rothbard, Timothy Leary, Robert LeFevre, Frank Chodorov, and Paul Goodman. Still, he was somewhat surprised — pleasantly surprised, of course — to discover that, as he put it,

the School of Living … had a great library of radical and off-beat literature. It was there that I found and read all the issues of Liberty, the individualist-anarchist magazine edited [1881–1908] by the brilliant Benjamin R. Tucker (“the clearest mind, ever, in politics,” [James] Joycecalled him). I also read all the issues of Mother Earth, the communist-anarchist magazine of Emma Goldman.

Wilson didn't stay long in Brookville, only a couple of years or so — just long enough, really, to read his way through the library and learn the basics of magazine production. Then his career took off. As the early sixties became the midsixties, he moved on to Ralph Ginzburg's Fact back in New York, and then to Hugh Hefner's Playboy in Chicago. He stayed there seven years, longer than he ever stayed in any other job in his life. He wrote of the experience in Down to Earth that Playboy

paid me a higher salary than any other magazine at which I had worked and never expected me to become a conformist or sell my soul in return. I enjoyed my years in the Bunny Empire. I only resigned when I reached 40 and felt I could not live with myself if I didn't make an effort to write full-time at last.

The biggest success of his subsequent freelance career was Illuminatus!, a three-volume satirical novel written in collaboration with fellow late-sixties Playboy editor Robert Shea. To the extent that it is possible to say coherently what Illuminatus! is about, it's about conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists, but it also mixes in the sixties counterculture, the libertarian movement, and a number of other arcane topics, along with what would later become Wilson's trademark agnosticism and skepticism about not only all authorities, but also all claims to Truth, especially Universal Truth.

Robert Anton Wilson freelanced for the rest of his life, nearly 35 years altogether (he died in January 2007, just a week shy of his 75th birthday). Things weren't always easy financially (though it became a cult classic, Illuminatus! did not make him rich), but he became extremely well known. Nonetheless, he never let his fame go to his head. He continued to write for small, low-budget periodicals, including libertarian movement periodicals like Sam Konkin's New Libertarian, of which he was a contributing editor from sometime in the late 1970s through the 1980s.

He also showed up now and then at libertarian gatherings of various sizes and types. I still remember how startled I was one day in 1981, when I was chairing a panel on civil liberties at the national Libertarian Party convention in Denver. I had been chatting with my fellow panelists and letting them know how I'd be managing things, and I hadn't been paying much attention as the room filled up. So when, at last, I stood to make a few introductory remarks and looked out at the crowd that had gathered, I almost jumped out of my skin when I realized that the man sitting in the middle of the front row, virtually under my nose, was none other than Robert Anton Wilson, then in his late 40s and at the height of his fame.

Illuminatus! won the Libertarian Futurist Society's Hall of Fame Award in 1986. This award has also been won over the years by such works as Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged andAnthem, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four andAnimal Farm, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Eric Frank Russell's The Great Explosion, C.M. Kornbluth's The Syndic, Ira Levin's This Perfect Day, Ursula K. Le Guin'sThe Dispossessed, Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, A.E. van Vogt's The Weapon Shops of Isher, Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, and J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Winning the Hall of Fame Award amounts to a kind of official recognition: this work is a true classic of libertarian science fiction or fantasy. Robert Anton Wilson was never much for official recognition, of course. But I have every reason to believe that he was pleased by this particular instance of it.

[This article was first published online as a Mises Daily article and is transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode “Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007).”]

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In a recent addition to The Libertarian Tradition podcast series, part of the Mises Institute's online media library, Jeff Riggenbach discusses the brief life of C.M. Kornbluth (1923–1958) and his novel The Syndic.

You can also read the transcript below:

The late Samuel Edward Konkin III was a firm believer in the power of science fiction to spread the libertarian message. He himself had been converted to libertarianism partly by reading the works of Robert A. Heinlein, and Heinlein remained his favorite science fiction writer for the rest of his life. Every July for years, he threw a joint birthday party for himself and Robert A. Heinlein (Sam's birthday was July 8; Heinlein's was July 7). The last and largest issue of his magazine,New Libertarian, was devoted to Heinlein, as was a sort of mini-conference he held, also in the late 1980s, under the auspices of his Agorist Institute. This mini-conference featured presentations by Sam, J. Neil Schulman, and yours truly, along with much spirited discussion.

But if the works of Robert A. Heinlein topped Sam's list of great libertarian science fiction, they were far from the only titles on that list. He was also a great admirer of Eric Frank Russell's Great Explosion, for example. He expressed enthusiasm for A.E. van Vogt's fiction, especially The Weapon Shops of Isher. And, he told me more than once in conversation, he held C.M. Kornbluth's 1953 novel, The Syndic, in high esteem and considered it lamentably little known and much underappreciated among libertarian science fiction novels. I suspect part of the reason Sam never wrote about The Syndic was that he felt any public display of approval on his part for a writer like C.M. Kornbluth would require at least a bit of explanation. You see, Kornbluth was a Futurian, and libertarian science-fiction fans back in Sam's heyday — the 1970s and '80s — were almost always critical of the Futurians, if not openly hostile to them.

Libertarian science fiction fans of today care a good deal less for such ancient controversies, I suspect. Libertarian science-fiction fans under 40 are probably at least a little unclear on just who or what the Futurians were. Those old timers like me who know who they were have now lived long enough that we wonder whether it really matters who they were — whether it mattered even at the time.

Briefly, mercifully, the Futurians were members of a science fiction club in Manhattan in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The club membership included a number of young fans who later became very influential as science fiction writers and editors: Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, James Blish, Damon Knight, Judith Merrill, Donald Wollheim, and C.M. Kornbluth. All these people were born in the decade following the beginning of World War I — between 1914 and 1923.

The Futurians had broken off from the Greater New York Science Fiction Club in 1938, because they held certain political views they wanted to see emphasized in science fiction — what most people would call “leftist” political views. Some of the Futurians, like Wollheim and Pohl, were members of the Communist Party of the United States of America, if only briefly. Others, like Judith Merrill, were Trotskyites. Still others were New Deal Democrats of what I suppose you might call the Henry Wallace strain. More or less all of them were therefore, in the eyes of libertarians like Sam Konkin and Eric Raymond, traitors to the very spirit of science fiction, which both Konkin and Raymond took to be libertarian.

On the other hand, Sam Konkin thought he spotted something libertarian about C.M. Kornbluth's 1953 novel, The Syndic. And he was not the only libertarian who did so.Prometheus Hall of Fame Award in 1986." rel="footnote">1  Another was Michael Moorcock. Now Moorcock is not a libertarian of our sort. He's a libertarian of the other sort — the kind who imagines a society without coercive government (which is to say, without the State), but in which, by some mysterious magic, no one would be “allowed” to own property or invest savings in a productive enterprise in the expectation of future profit.

In his 1977 essay “Starship Stormtroopers,” Moorcock rails against Heinlein, Rand, and other science fiction writers whom libertarians of our sort tend to venerate. And he writes that “Leaving aside the very worthy but to my mind journalistic The Dispossessed by U.K. Le Guin, it is quite hard for me to find many other examples of sf books which, as it were, ‘promote' libertarian ideas.” Nevertheless, he does come up with a few titles, then comments: “I also have a soft spot for C.M. Kornbluth who to my mind had a rather stronger political conscience than he allowed himself, so that his stories are sometimes confused as he tried to mesh middle-American ideas with his own radicalism. One of my favorites … is The Syndic.”

So what exactly do we find if we open a copy of The Syndic and begin reading? In effect, we find a dramatization of the following quotation from Murray Rothbard. “If you wish to know how libertarians regard the State and any of its acts,” he wrote in For a New Liberty, “simply think of the State as a criminal band, and all of the libertarian attitudes will logically fall into place.”

More specifically, when you open the first pages of The Syndic, you find yourself in the company of a character named Charles Orsino, who lives in New York and works as a bagman for The Syndic. He walks around the 2.5 square miles of the 101st New York Police Precinct (it's in Queens if that matters) collecting protection money from small businesses. Near the very beginning of the story, he drops in at Mother Maginnis's Ould Sod Pub, only to be told by Mother Maginnis herself that “it's the business, Mr. Orsino. It's the business. You'll pardon me if I say that I can't see how to spare twenty-five dollars from the till, not if my life depended on it. I can go to fifteen, but so help me — ”

That's when Orsino cuts her off. “You realize, Mrs. Maginnis,” he tells her, “that you're letting the Syndic down. What would the people in Syndic Territory do for protection if everybody took your attitude?” But he lets her slide with a fifteen-dollar payment this week. Orsino likes it best if things remain pleasant and cordial between him and the people he thinks of as his “customers.” He reflects, after leaving Mother Maginnis's bar, that “it was pleasant to be able to do things for nice people; it was pleasant to stroll along the sunny street acknowledging tipped hats and friendly words.”

These events are happening, by the way, about 150 years from now, sometime in the late 22nd century. Civilization has pretty much collapsed in the world outside North America. Places like Europe have reverted to forest and are thinly inhabited by Neolithic tribes living in caves, lean-tos, and mud huts, and hunting with spears. North America is divided into Syndic Territory and Mob Territory. The Syndic runs things in the East; the Mob runs things in the West.

As Orsino's Uncle Frank, a Syndic higher-up, relates the relevant history: in the beginning, people

demanded inexpensive liquor, tobacco and consumer goods, clean women and a chance to win a fortune; and our ancestors obliged them. Our ancestors were sneered at in their day, you know. They were called criminals when they distributed goods and services at a price people could afford to pay.

Government incessantly harassed these so-called criminals and also adopted various policies that left the people with less and less discretionary income. And ultimately, “when [people had] had enough hounding and restriction, they rose in their might. [They] demanded freedom of choice, [men of talent and ingenuity] rose to lead them in the Syndic and the Mob, and they drove the Government into the sea.” The Government was now “located on Iceland. … The Canaries and Ascencion were outposts.” It was from these islands in the Atlantic that the Government, as Uncle Frank puts it, “still occasionally ventures to annoy our coastal cities.”

In Uncle Frank's view, the Government and the “old-time bankers” who backed it “deserved everything they got. They brought it on themselves,” he tells Charles.

They had what they called laissez-faire, and it worked for a while until they got to tinkering with it. They demanded things called protective tariffs, tax remissions, subsidies — regulation, regulation, regulation, always of the other fellow. But there were enough bankers on all sides for everybody to be somebody else's other fellow. Coercion snowballed and the Government lost public acceptance. They had a thing called the public debt which I can't begin to explain to you except to say that it was something written on paper and that it raised the cost of everything tremendously. Well, believe me or not, they didn't just throw away the piece of paper or scratch out the writing on it. They let it ride until ordinary people couldn't afford the pleasant things in life.

As our story begins, the Mob and the Syndic, under the terms of the Treaty of Las Vegas, signed during the late 21st century, have been at peace for a hundred years. This is not to say that they think highly of each other, or anything like that. As one Syndic bigwig puts it,

I won't pretend I'm happy about the way things are in Mob Territory. … I won't pretend I think the Mob clients are enjoying anywhere near the service that Syndic clients enjoy. I'm perfectly aware that on our visits of state to Mob Territory we see pretty much what our hosts want us to see. But I cannot believe that any group which is rooted on the principles of freedom and service can have gone very wrong.

As for the North American Government, as it rather grandiosely calls itself, the same Syndic bigwig says:

As long as they stick to a little commerce-raiding and a few coastal attacks, I can't say I'm really unhappy about them. They don't do much harm, and they keep us on our toes and — maybe this one is most important — they keep our clients' memories of the bad old days that we delivered them from alive.

But this relatively benign view of the Government is not shared by all the Syndic leadership. As another of them says, somewhat indignantly,

Let me point out what the so-called Government stands for: brutal “taxation,” extirpation of gambling, denial of life's simple pleasures to the poor and severe limitation of them to all but the wealthy, sexual prudery viciously enforced by penal laws of appalling barbarity, endless regulation and coercion governing every waking minute of the day. That was its record during the days of its power and that would be its record if it returned to power. I fail to see how this menace to our liberty can be condoned by certain marginal benefits which are claimed to accrue from its continued existence.

Of course, the Syndic is not held in high regard by the Government either. A Government bureaucrat working in Ireland is shocked — shocked! — at the absence of victimless crime laws in Syndic Territory, and at the absence, as he sees it, of “respect for the home, sanctity of marriage, sexual morality, law and order.” He splutters almost apoplectically to a resident of Syndic Territory whom he happens to meet: “I know how you people live. Are you telling me you don't have sexual promiscuity? Polygamy? Polyandry? Open gambling? Uncontrolled liquor trade? Corruption and shakedowns?” A secret Government agent operating in Syndic Territory and frustrated by his failure to locate someone he is trying to find notes ruefully that “in the crazily undisciplined Syndic Territory it was impossible to trace anybody.”

Charles Orsino's Uncle Frank is adamant on one point: “‘We are not a government!' he always yelled. ‘We are not a government! We must not think like a government!'” And again, in a calmer moment: “The Syndic is not a government. It must not become enmeshed in the symbols and folklore of a government or it will be first chained and then strangled by them.”

After Orsino is sent as an undercover Syndic spy to infiltrate the North American Government, he has many adventures, during which he sees for himself how things are both for subjects of the Government and for those who live in Mob Territory. And the reader comes to realize, by watching over Orsino's shoulder, so to speak, that, partly thanks to Uncle Frank's unrelenting advice on this point, Syndic Territory is the most nearly libertarian of the three more or less civilized societies depicted in Kornbluth's novel.

How could a member of the dreaded Futurians write so libertarian a novel? We should not forget how very young Kornbluth was when he joined the newly formed Futurians. He was 15 years old. He was born in 1923 and was still in high school when he started writing science fiction and crime fiction professionally — that is, for money. When he graduated from high school, in his native New York City, he went off to the University of Chicago for some higher education. But his sojourn there was interrupted by World War II.

After the war, Kornbluth returned to Chicago, finished up his degree, and began working in journalism, a trade he continued to practice after his return to New York in the late 1940s. In those same postwar years, back in his hometown, among his old friends, he resumed contributing to the science fiction magazines that had been such an important part of his life when he was in high school. He also began writing novels. By the time he wrote The Syndic, he was 29 and had seen a little of life and the world. I think he'd seen through the political absurdities he had believed in when he was 15. He had come to realize that the state was just another gang, worse than some but fundamentally no different.

Kornbluth was born with a weak heart. On the first day of Spring 1958, he had an appointment in New York, and when he came out of his Long Island home to jump in his car and drive over to the train station, where he could catch the Long Island Railroad into The City, he found that a rare late snowfall had blocked his driveway. He attempted to shovel his driveway, but ran out of time. He could hear the train coming. He decided to run for it. He made it to the station platform on time, but he never got on the train. He died on the platform of a heart attack. He was 34 years old.

The name of Cyril M. Kornbluth no longer looms as large as it once did in the annals of science fiction. The Syndic is currently out of print — though it can be had as a digital download, its complete text is posted online, and it's easy to find secondhand copies of it on the used book market. Libertarians in particular have good reason to remember this novel and to keep its memory alive.

[This article was first published online as a Mises Daily article and is transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode “C. M. Kornbluth (1923–1958).”]

1. The Syndic won the Libertarian Futurist Society's Prometheus Hall of Fame Award in 1986. ↩

In a recent addition to The Libertarian Tradition podcast series, part of the Mises Institute's online media library, Jeff Riggenbach discusses The Ambiguous Utopias of Ursula K. Le Guin and Samuel R. Delany.

In a recent addition to The Libertarian Tradition podcast series, part of the Mises Institute's online media library, Jeff Riggenbach discusses The Ambiguous Utopias of Ursula K. Le Guin and Samuel R. Delany.

You can also read the transcript, which was published on Friday as a Mises Daily article.

In the podcast, Riggenbach discusses Le  Guin's novel The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia and Delany's novel Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia.

In a recent addition to The Libertarian Tradition podcast series, part of the Mises Institute's online media library, Jeff Riggenbach discusses Friedrich Hayek and American Science Fiction. You can also read the transcript, which was later published as a Mises Daily article. In the podcast, Riggenbach discusses the dramatization of Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek's ideas in William Gibson's novel Pattern Recognition and Alfred Bester's short story “Time is the Traitor.

In a recent addition to The Libertarian Tradition podcast series, part of the Mises Institute's online media library, Jeff Riggenbach discusses Friedrich Hayek and American Science Fiction.

You can also read the transcript, which was later published as a Mises Daily article.

In the podcast, Riggenbach discusses the dramatization of Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek's ideas in William Gibson's novel Pattern Recognition and Alfred Bester's short story “Time is the Traitor.”

When I  wasn't paying attention Jeff Riggenbach did two more audio podcasts on libertarianism and science fiction in his series for the Mises Institute, The Libertarian Tradition. Here is one, a followup on the previous podcast on libertarian science fiction. You can also read the transcript, which was later published as a Mises Daily article: “Some Further Notes on Libertarian Science Fiction.

When I  wasn't paying attention Jeff Riggenbach did two more audio podcasts on libertarianism and science fiction in his series for the Mises Institute, The Libertarian Tradition. Here is one, a followup on the previous podcast on libertarian science fiction.

You can also read the transcript, which was later published as a Mises Daily article: “Some Further Notes on Libertarian Science Fiction.”

In the podcast, Riggenbach discusses Anthony Burgess's novel A Clockwork Orange and several novels by Philip K. Dick (including The Man in the High Castle, which our own Matthew Alexander recently reviewed) as well as two nonfiction books.

In a new addition to the Mises Institute's online media library today, part of The Libertarian Tradition podcast series, Jeff Riggenbach discusses libertarian science fiction. Riggenbach discusses the role of science fiction in keeping individualism alive, the phenomenon of all the best known libertarian novels being science fiction novels, Eric S. Raymond's “A Political History of SF” in which Raymond argues that science fiction has a natural affinity with libertarianism, and the importance of dramatizing our values (pdf).

In a new addition to the Mises Institute's online media library today, part of The Libertarian Tradition podcast series, Jeff Riggenbach discusses libertarian science fiction.

Riggenbach discusses the role of science fiction in keeping individualism alive, the phenomenon of all the best known libertarian novels being science fiction novels, Eric S. Raymond's “A Political History of SF” in which Raymond argues that science fiction has a natural affinity with libertarianism, and the importance of dramatizing our values (pdf).

Reviewed in some detail are A.E. van Vogt's novel The Weapon Shops of Isher and Eric Frank Russell's novel The Great Explosion.

Transcript.