Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Anton Wilson

Horror, for Robert Anton Wilson, isn’t a genre; it’s a sanity check. The line lands with the deadpan audacity of someone who’s spent a career treating “consensus reality” like a flimsy stage set. By calling horror the natural reaction to 5,000 years of history, he’s not just cataloging atrocities. He’s taking aim at the stories civilization tells to justify itself: progress, order, enlightenment, destiny. If you look straight at the record - empire, slavery, religious war, famine, conquest, genocide - and feel anything but dread, Wilson implies, you’re not stoic; you’re anesthetized.

The “natural reaction” phrasing is the trapdoor. Natural to whom? A citizen of the victorious narrative, cushioned by myth and distance, can afford to experience history as pageantry. Wilson’s point is that the default emotional response has been socially engineered away. Institutions, media, and schooling don’t erase the horror; they repackage it into acceptable forms: heroism, necessity, collateral damage, “the cost of building the modern world.”

Context matters: Wilson wrote out of the late-20th-century hangover - postwar disillusionment, Cold War paranoia, the sense that technology had outpaced wisdom. His broader project was to destabilize certainty and expose how belief systems manufacture reality. This aphorism works because it’s both accusation and invitation: if horror is rational, then maybe “normal” is the real hallucination, and waking up starts with letting the dread register.