"Groups are grammatical fictions; only individuals exist, and each individual is different"
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“Groups are grammatical fictions” is Robert Anton Wilson doing what he does best: yanking the rug out from under the mental shortcuts we mistake for reality. The line pivots on “grammatical” because he’s not merely arguing that groups are imperfect. He’s claiming they’re artifacts of language, the way nouns make processes look like things. “America,” “the market,” “men,” “the left,” “Gen Z” - these aren’t entities you can bump into. They’re compression algorithms, useful for talking fast, dangerous for thinking well.
Wilson’s intent is epistemic self-defense. He wants you to notice when your brain swaps a label for lived complexity, then starts treating the label as a causal force: “They did this,” “Society wants that,” “The public believes.” Once you grant the group a single mind, you’ve built a puppet you can vent at, worship, or fear. That’s the subtext: dehumanization often begins as a grammar mistake.
Context matters because Wilson came out of a mid-to-late 20th century stew of propaganda, Cold War paranoia, mass media, and psychedelic counterculture. He watched institutions and movements market themselves as unified beings with destiny and purpose, and he distrusted any story that required individual variance to be edited out. The final clause - “each individual is different” - isn’t sentimental humanism; it’s an antidote to mass thinking. It dares you to trade the comfort of categories for the harder work of attention.
Wilson’s intent is epistemic self-defense. He wants you to notice when your brain swaps a label for lived complexity, then starts treating the label as a causal force: “They did this,” “Society wants that,” “The public believes.” Once you grant the group a single mind, you’ve built a puppet you can vent at, worship, or fear. That’s the subtext: dehumanization often begins as a grammar mistake.
Context matters because Wilson came out of a mid-to-late 20th century stew of propaganda, Cold War paranoia, mass media, and psychedelic counterculture. He watched institutions and movements market themselves as unified beings with destiny and purpose, and he distrusted any story that required individual variance to be edited out. The final clause - “each individual is different” - isn’t sentimental humanism; it’s an antidote to mass thinking. It dares you to trade the comfort of categories for the harder work of attention.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
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