Politics & Power Quote by Robert Anton Wilson

Wilson’s line lands like a dare: if your moral north star is “be like God,” and your sacred text repeatedly frames divine violence as righteous, then violence starts to look not like a failure of ethics but its fulfillment. The provocation isn’t theological nitpicking; it’s a cultural diagnosis. He’s pointing at the shortcut by which coercion gets laundered into virtue when it’s backed by ultimate authority.

The subtext is pure Wilson: distrust any system that claims absolute truth, because absolutes don’t just persuade - they permit. “Mass murderer” is deliberately blunt, stripping away the liturgical euphemisms (“wrath,” “judgment,” “smite”) that soften the optics of slaughter. By forcing modern ears to hear the Biblical narratives in contemporary moral language, he exposes a psychological mechanism: people imitate what they worship, and they rationalize what their gods model. If the highest good can drown the world, torch cities, and demand conquest, then human institutions can borrow that logic for crusades, colonization, “civilizing missions,” and even bureaucratic, sanitized warfare.

Context matters: Wilson wrote in the postwar, Cold War shadow where mass killing had become industrial and ideologies - religious or secular - competed to justify it. His target is Western political habit: the reflex to cast conflicts as cosmic dramas with chosen peoples and necessary enemies. The irony is that a tradition preached as a moral anchor can also function as a permission slip, making domination feel like destiny and dissent feel like heresy.