About

What Is This Place?

Guerrilla Ontology is the blog of Peter Heft. On this blog you will find countless posts about numerous divergent, and often contradictory, subjects and ideas. The goal is not to convince you that one way of thinking is “right,” — indeed, see below — but rather to force you to think. I have changed my mind on various topics countless times over the years, but nevertheless I leave most of my old posts online as I feel as if transparency of growth is a good thing. I was once asked “what is your goal in blogging?” My response was simple: I don’t have one. This blog is a place for thoughts, speculations, philosophical bastardizations and portmanteaus, and discussions about whatever I happen to be reading and/or am interested in at the moment. If you came here looking for something specific, I doubt you’ll find it, but I hope you leave with something.

What Is Guerrilla Ontology?

Guerrilla Ontology is a termed coined by the late Robert Anton Wilson in his 1980 book The Illuminati Papers. Wilson defines guerrilla ontology as the approach taken in his books to “mix the elements of each book [so] that the reader must decide on each page ‘How much of this is real and how much is a put-on?'”¹⁾Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminati Papers (Berkeley: And/Or Press, 1980), 2.

In a slightly later interview, Wilson expanded upon the concept of guerrilla ontology by saying the following:

The Western World has been brainwashed by Aristotle for the last 2,500 years. The unconscious, not quite articulate, belief of most Occidentals is that there is one map which adequately represents reality. By sheer good luck, every Occidental thinks he or she has the map that fits. Guerrilla ontology, to me, involves shaking up that certainty. I use what in modern physics is called the “multi-model” approach, which is the idea that there is more than one model to cover a given set of facts. As I’ve said, novel writing involves learning to think like other people. My novels are written so as to force the reader to see things through different reality grids rather than through a single grid. It’s important to abolish the unconscious dogmatism that makes people think their way of looking at reality is the only sane way of viewing the world. My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything. If one can only see things according to one’s own belief system, one is destined to become virtually deaf, dumb, and blind. It’s only possible to see people when one is able to see the world as others see it. That’s what guerrilla ontology is–breaking down this one-model view and giving people a multi-model perspective.[Emphasis added]²⁾Jeffrey Elliot, “Robert Anton Wilson: Searching for Cosmic Intelligence,”Literary Voices #1 (1980), 50-64.

For my own nefarious purposes, I am appropriating Wilson’s view of guerrilla ontology to describe not only the theme of my posts, but also the epistemic model of my writing and thought. I have adopted the ideology of anti-ideologism as “worldviews” necessarily pigeonhole thought into nicely packaged systems where deviation is squashed. As noted above, I do not want to tell anyone what to think nor do I want to say that “X is the right thing to believe.” Both nothing and everything are certain, and that is what makes the world so interesting!