Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Anton Wilson

Wilson turns comprehension into a kind of violence. The line has the cool, paranoid snap of someone who spent his career needling the idea that reality is stable and that “understanding” is an innocent achievement. In his worldview, to make something discernible is to turn it into an object: label it, pin it down, render it portable. At that point, repetition stops being devotion and becomes redundancy. You don’t keep chanting a spell after you’ve figured out the trick.

The subtext is a warning about what modern systems do to mystery. Once an experience, belief, or symbol is made legible to institutions - the academy, the market, the state - it gets stripped for parts. “We can destroy it” isn’t a melodramatic threat so much as a diagnosis: explanation enables disposal. You don’t have to keep a ritual alive if you’ve filed it under “psychological coping mechanism.” You don’t have to honor a subculture once you’ve translated it into trend reports and product lines. Discernment becomes a tool of control, and control is a cousin of extinction.

Context matters: Wilson came out of mid-century American skepticism, psychedelia, media critique, and conspiracy-as-literary-method. He distrusted single narratives, especially the kind that claim to clarify everything. So the sentence doubles as an attack on the ego’s appetite for closure. The moment you feel you “get it,” you’re already rehearsing how to outgrow it, monetize it, dismiss it, or burn it down.