Natural Law: Or Don’t Put a Rubber on Your Willy is Robert Anton Wilson’s sharpest philosophical broadside — a compact, scalding demolition of every ideology that claims the universe is on its side. The link above goes to the 2022 Hilaritas Press expanded edition, which adds nine essays, two interviews, and a short story to the original slim pamphlet.
I bought this book when it first came out in 1987, published by Loompanics Unlimited, a small press out of Port Townsend, Washington, that specialized in books no one else would touch. Their catalog was a one-of-a-kind artifact of the pre-internet underground: guides to fake IDs, lock-picking manuals, books on how to disappear and start over with a new identity, instructions for smuggling contraband into prisons, how to stage a robbery at a drug dealer’s house, how to grow poppies and make opium in your backyard. A whole literature of radical self-reliance and libertarian mischief, impossible to find anywhere else.
Shortly after I bought it, my wife Carla and I heard that Wilson and Timothy Leary were doing a joint book signing somewhere in Los Angeles. We gathered up as many Leary and Wilson books as we had — which was a lot — and headed over. When I handed Wilson the Loompanics edition of Natural Law, he looked up at me and said, “Where the hell did you get this?“ He seemed genuinely surprised that anyone would own it.
Here was the author, astonished that a reader had found his own book. It confirmed what I already suspected: Natural Law is a deep cut, even by Wilson’s standards. That’s why it’s the first book for our new Deep Cut Edition — subscriber-only posts about books that are obscure, strange, or underrated enough to deserve special attention.
When a physicist says “natural law,” they mean a statistical generalization — Ohm’s Law, the speed of light, the laws of thermodynamics. These are models that have survived repeated experimental testing, always subject to refutation. When a Catholic bishop, a libertarian philosopher, or a neo-pagan says “Natural Law,” they mean something else entirely: a prescription for how you must behave, with the authority of the cosmos behind it. Wilson makes this distinction in the first pages and hammers it for the rest of the book. The natural law of physics can be violated — Ohm’s Law predicts 10 volts when it gives you about 9.9 — and that’s fine; it’s still a useful tool. The theological version allegedly cannot be violated, which is how the Pope can claim that contraception is against Natural Law even as millions of people successfully prove otherwise every day.
Wilson’s most entertaining section describes the trick at the heart of all ideology: the dummy act. The judge says, “It is not I who speaks here; it is the Law speaking through me.” The priest says it is not him but God speaking through him. The Marxist says it is not his choice but History acting through him. Wilson argues that this dummy act is the entire function of “Natural Law” — it allows people to disguise personal preference as cosmic mandate. “Natural Law,” he writes, is a way for people to claim they are not rationalizing their own prejudices but merely serving as conduits for a higher authority. Once you notice it, you cannot unsee it in political discourse anywhere.
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