Among the greatest eccentrics of all time lived in the twentieth century:
Karl Hess (1923 - 1994) was an American speechwriter, author, political philosopher, editor, welder, motorcycle racer, tax resister, and libertarian activist. His career included stints on the Republican right and the New Left before embracing a mix of left-libertarianism and laissez-faire anarcho-capitalism.
Karl, believing (as his mother did) that public education was a waste of time, rarely attended school; to evade truancy officers, he registered at every elementary school in town and gradually withdrew from each one, making it impossible for the authorities to know exactly where he was supposed to be.
Hess was the primary author of the Republican Party's 1960 and 1964 platforms. He was a gun-runner for anti-Castro forces with tacit US government approval. He was a member of the left-radical groups Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) and worked with the Black Panthers.
Hess was also an early proponent of the "back to the land" movement, and his focus on self-reliance and small communities happened in part by government mandate. According to a “Libertarian Party News” obituary, "When the Internal Revenue Service confiscated all his property and put a 100 percent lien on all of his future earnings, Hess (who had learned welding at Bell Vocational School) existed on bartering his work for food and goods."
Robert Anton Wilson (1932 - 2007) was an American author, futurist, psychologist,and self-described agnostic mystic. Revered in Discordianism as an Episkopos, pope and saint, Wilson helped publicize Discordianism through his writings and interviews. He was a Playboy magazine editor in the 1960s and close friend of then-Harvard professor Timothy Leary , whom he met on assignment from the magazine. (Though certainly a top-level eccentric, much of the weirdness in Leary's life is not widely known, e.g. his prison telepathic communication with aliens or his kidnapping by both the Black Panthers in Algeria and the FBI in Afghanistan.)
RAW is best known for the cult classic series The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975), which had themes of secret societies, conspiracies and conspiracy theories. It greatly re-popularized H. P. Lovecraft and Aleister Crowley. Wilson and Shea derived much of the material from letters sent to Playboy magazine while they worked as the editors of its Forum. The books mixed truth and fiction in what Wilson called "guerrilla ontology", called "Operation Mindfuck" (OM) in Illuminatus! The book uses the William S. Burroughs “cut-up” technique of calculated shuffling of sections of the text, mostly to confuse the reader.
[I spent more time than I want to admit in my late teens and early twenties tracking down all the allusions in Illuminatus! ; my “Have a Nice Illuminati!” avatar is copied from his old website.
I'm not sure mathematicians would agree that they're experiencing a great stagnation, I get the impression they see their field as accelerating.
"when you live in an age of excess where information flow costs nothing, it's sometimes much harder for someone to be easily and critically known as 'the best'."
Agreed, I think this is a big part of what's going on.
Yeah, Mathematics is the odd one out often in sciences where it's able to build on itself but doesn't require too much in the way of devices or accoutrements. The new acceleration is also partly with the growth of computational approaches from what I know, which is interesting and has a historical parallel to the physical sciences.
"The interesting looking though is that Spengler could credibly articulate that Tolstoy and Karl Marx were world changing figures on par with Plato, he wrote that before WWI had started, not with the benefit of historical hindsight, but in the literal heat of the moment."
I'm curious if there were others that made the same prediction. Or if there were others making different predictions. In 100 years we'll be able to look back and find a bunch of people made correct predictions now, but we'll need to be careful to re-read this post as well to make sure we remember that society as a whole was not confident in those predictions.
Also, were people in full agreement with his predictions about Tolstoy and Marx? Or did they just read and think "yeah, maybe" and move on?
Among the greatest eccentrics of all time lived in the twentieth century:
Karl Hess (1923 - 1994) was an American speechwriter, author, political philosopher, editor, welder, motorcycle racer, tax resister, and libertarian activist. His career included stints on the Republican right and the New Left before embracing a mix of left-libertarianism and laissez-faire anarcho-capitalism.
Karl, believing (as his mother did) that public education was a waste of time, rarely attended school; to evade truancy officers, he registered at every elementary school in town and gradually withdrew from each one, making it impossible for the authorities to know exactly where he was supposed to be.
Hess was the primary author of the Republican Party's 1960 and 1964 platforms. He was a gun-runner for anti-Castro forces with tacit US government approval. He was a member of the left-radical groups Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) and worked with the Black Panthers.
Hess was also an early proponent of the "back to the land" movement, and his focus on self-reliance and small communities happened in part by government mandate. According to a “Libertarian Party News” obituary, "When the Internal Revenue Service confiscated all his property and put a 100 percent lien on all of his future earnings, Hess (who had learned welding at Bell Vocational School) existed on bartering his work for food and goods."
Here's a partial transcript ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Karl_Hess/Archive_1#Gun-running ) of "Subversion for Fun and Profit" an evening with Karl Hess and Robert Anton Wilson, at the 1987 Libertarian Party Nominating Convention. (video: archive.org/details/youtube-kXfbIrLV9W4 ), regarding his gun-running adventures.
*
Robert Anton Wilson (1932 - 2007) was an American author, futurist, psychologist,and self-described agnostic mystic. Revered in Discordianism as an Episkopos, pope and saint, Wilson helped publicize Discordianism through his writings and interviews. He was a Playboy magazine editor in the 1960s and close friend of then-Harvard professor Timothy Leary , whom he met on assignment from the magazine. (Though certainly a top-level eccentric, much of the weirdness in Leary's life is not widely known, e.g. his prison telepathic communication with aliens or his kidnapping by both the Black Panthers in Algeria and the FBI in Afghanistan.)
RAW is best known for the cult classic series The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975), which had themes of secret societies, conspiracies and conspiracy theories. It greatly re-popularized H. P. Lovecraft and Aleister Crowley. Wilson and Shea derived much of the material from letters sent to Playboy magazine while they worked as the editors of its Forum. The books mixed truth and fiction in what Wilson called "guerrilla ontology", called "Operation Mindfuck" (OM) in Illuminatus! The book uses the William S. Burroughs “cut-up” technique of calculated shuffling of sections of the text, mostly to confuse the reader.
[I spent more time than I want to admit in my late teens and early twenties tracking down all the allusions in Illuminatus! ; my “Have a Nice Illuminati!” avatar is copied from his old website.
This text mostly from the Wikipedia articles en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Anton_Wilson and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Hess . It would have hyperlinks but for Substack's incapability.]
Anton Wilson I know well but did not know about Karl. Thank you, very interesting!
I'm not sure mathematicians would agree that they're experiencing a great stagnation, I get the impression they see their field as accelerating.
"when you live in an age of excess where information flow costs nothing, it's sometimes much harder for someone to be easily and critically known as 'the best'."
Agreed, I think this is a big part of what's going on.
Yeah, Mathematics is the odd one out often in sciences where it's able to build on itself but doesn't require too much in the way of devices or accoutrements. The new acceleration is also partly with the growth of computational approaches from what I know, which is interesting and has a historical parallel to the physical sciences.
"The interesting looking though is that Spengler could credibly articulate that Tolstoy and Karl Marx were world changing figures on par with Plato, he wrote that before WWI had started, not with the benefit of historical hindsight, but in the literal heat of the moment."
I'm curious if there were others that made the same prediction. Or if there were others making different predictions. In 100 years we'll be able to look back and find a bunch of people made correct predictions now, but we'll need to be careful to re-read this post as well to make sure we remember that society as a whole was not confident in those predictions.
Also, were people in full agreement with his predictions about Tolstoy and Marx? Or did they just read and think "yeah, maybe" and move on?