Wiggly World

"They say the fittest shall survive Yet the unfit may live Let 'em wear gaudy colors Or avoid display"

This is straight from the Devolutionary Oath, a series of ten (or five, depending on version) contradictory statements by Devo, things like "Fight with your neighbors or untie them. It doesn't matter."

The song is referring to the experience of having an acid trip. People who experience LSD often describe the world as wiggling while they laugh a lot.

I believe “Wiggly World” is a reference to Alan Watts. “ This world is a great wiggly affair. Clouds are wiggly, waters are wiggly, plants are wiggly, mountains are wiggly, people are wiggly. But people are always trying to straighten things out. Look, you see we live in a rectangular box, all the time; look at the bookshelves, see, everything’s straightened out. So wherever you look around nature and you find things often straightened out you know people have been around. They’re always trying to put things in boxes. Those boxes are classifiers, pigeonholes. Words are labels on boxes. But the real world is wiggly, wiggly, wiggly. Now when you have a wiggly system like a cloud, how much wiggle is a wiggle? Well, you have to draw the line somewhere. And so people come to sorts of agreements about, uh, how much of a wiggle is a wiggle; that is to say a thing. One wiggle, you can always reduce any one wiggle into sub-wiggles. Or see it as a subordinate wiggle in a bigger wiggle. But there’s no real fixed rule about it.” -Alan Watts