Belief is the Death of Intelligence
Robert Anton Wilson begins his Cosmic Trigger, vol. 1: The Final Secrets of the Illuminati by expressing to his readers his own deep-seated aversion to belief as a cognitive mode of engaging with reality. As he is right to point out, belief closes off possible avenues of investigation by pre-packaging a model of reality that explains reality. A number of postmodern thinkers have correctly suggested that Western scientific rationalism is one of these pre-packaged lifestyle systems just as much as Christianity or Islam. For Wilson, the key is to approach the world from a position of no belief, in which no round observation is leveraged into the square holes of belief.
As evidenced by Daniel Pinchbeck’s 2012: the Return of Quetzalcoatl, this subject position is much easier said than actually done.
