Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Anton Wilson

Wilson’s sentence reads like a drive-by diagnosis of the 20th century: the “hard” social sciences didn’t liberate the modern subject, they rubber-stamped Joyce’s bleak hunch that the average person is less protagonist than collateral damage. The line’s punch comes from its crowded roll call - “History, sociology, economics, psychology et al.” - a bureaucratic parade of disciplines that are supposed to explain us, help us, maybe even save us. Instead, they “confirmed” a literary vision. That verb is doing sly work: it flips the usual hierarchy, making art the seer and academia the belated note-taker.

Joyce’s “Everyman” isn’t the heroic archetype of morality plays; it’s Leopold Bloom trudging through systems he didn’t design: empire, class, church, gender norms, money. Wilson, a countercultural writer suspicious of institutional certainty, is pointing to a grim convergence: modernity’s explanatory machines keep finding the same pattern - individuals shaped, steered, and sometimes crushed by forces that barely register as personal choice. Calling Everyman a “victim” is intentionally provocative, too, because it irritates the American self-myth of autonomy. It suggests the default human condition under modern bureaucratic capitalism is managed vulnerability.

Subtextually, Wilson is also needling the pretensions of objectivity. If multiple fields “confirm” Joyce, maybe they’re not purely discovering truth; maybe they’re participating in a worldview where people are data points, pathologies, consumers. The sting is that the more we study “society,” the more society starts to look like a machine that happens to have humans inside it.