Celine's laws

Celine's Laws are a series of three laws regarding government and social interaction attributed to the fictional character Hagbard Celine from Robert Anton Wilson's and Robert Shea's Illuminatus! Trilogy. Celine, a gentleman anarchist, serves as a mouthpiece for Wilson's libertarian, anarchist and sometimes completely uncategorizable ideas about the nature of humanity. Celine's Laws are outlined in the trilogy by a manifesto titled Never Whistle While You're Pissing. Wilson later goes on to elaborate on the laws in his nonfiction book, Prometheus Rising, as being inherent consequences of average human psychology.

A piece entitled Celine's Laws appears in Robert Anton Wilson's The Illuminati Papers, which features articles written by Wilson under the guise of many of his characters from The Illuminatus! Trilogy alongside interviews with the author himself. One article pulls from another, as well as from the original Trilogy.

Celine, in his manifesto, recognizes these are generalities, but also says that their basic principles can be used to find the source of every great decline and fall of nations, and goes on to claim they are as universal as Newton's Laws in applying to everything.

National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity.

Reflecting the paranoia of the Cold War, Celine's First Law focuses around the common idea that to have national security, one must create a secret police. Since internal revolutionaries and external foes would make the secret police a prime target for infiltration, and because the secret police would by necessity have vast powers to blackmail and intimidate other members of the government, another higher set of secret police must be created to monitor the secret police. And an even higher set of secret police must then be created to monitor the higher order of secret police. Repeat ad nauseam.

This seemingly infinite regress goes on until every person in the country is spying on another, or until "the funding runs out." And since this paranoid and self-monitoring situation inherently makes targets of a nation's own citizens, the average person in the nation is more threatened by the massive secret police complex than by whatever foe they were seeking to protect themselves from. Wilson points out that the Soviet Union, which suffered from this in spades, got to the point that it was terrified of painters and poets who could do little harm to them in reality.

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