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Entry: Sex, Politics, and Gnosticism Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/sex_politics_and_gnosticism#5958 Post contents: The objectionable thing about the journalistic assumption of familiarity, here as elsewhere, is that it presumes to elevate partial awareness to definite comprehensive knowledge: now isn’t the delusion of a part that that it is the whole something you would say you object to, broadly speaking? I don’t question your sincerity but this piece reads as if it is written as an excuse to flog an ideology, and some moral instinct of mine finds this trait more objectionable the more you presume to know the subject intimately. It might be interesting to reflect on the relation between the sort of ‘knowing’ tone endemic to journalistic hipness (and the hip ethos in general) and the ‘gnosis’ that gets a bee in so many people’s bee-hungry bonnets. But I’ll admit I’m at heart more an aesthetician than a philosopher. Anyway, a couple of minor quibbles (since I don’t have time to address this puppy whole in any detail): The people I know, who knew Wilson, refer to him as ‘Robert Anton Wilson’ or ‘Wilson’; though I suppose they addressed him as ‘Bob’ when he was around. To the best of my recollection he first appeared on the Playboy masthead in June 1967 (about five years after Hefner began writing ‘The Playboy Philosophy’): if one reviews the editorial content of the magazine from this era one notices a very sudden increase in hipness and youth appeal (a stodgy resistance to rock and roll and sixties youth culture suddenly evaporates: one assumes a generational coup transpired in the editorial ranks). Sent at: 2008 08 30