Wit & Attitude Quote by Robert Anton Wilson

Certainty is Wilson's real target, and he skewers it by pairing two identities nobody wants: the zealot and the idiot. The line works because it refuses the comforting idea that conviction is automatically noble or earned. "Totally convinced" sounds like moral strength until Wilson twists it into a cognitive liability: the mind so sealed shut it functions like stupidity, even if it arrived there through intelligence, education, or charisma.

The subtext is classic Wilson: skepticism as self-defense. "Too much in common" points to shared behaviors rather than shared IQ - the refusal to update beliefs, the allergic reaction to ambiguity, the need to turn messy reality into a single story. "Totally" is the trapdoor. It's not belief he's mocking; it's totality, the absolutist posture that treats doubt as weakness and complexity as betrayal. By ending with "not ... accidental", he suggests a structural resemblance: dogmatic certainty and stupidity aren't just neighbors, they're often the same mental habit wearing different outfits.

Context matters. Wilson emerged from mid-century America where Cold War binaries, religious fundamentalism, and ideological cults competed to offer complete explanations. His broader work (Illuminatus!, Cosmic Trigger) treats reality tunnels - the stories we live inside - as both unavoidable and dangerously persuasive. This sentence is a warning label for all belief systems, including your own: when your confidence hits 100 percent, you may have crossed from understanding into automation. The sting is that it implicates smart people first, because they're best at building airtight justifications for being wrong.