Go Mindfuck Yourself

or

Be the Trouble You Want to See in the World

Celine reared back as if I had waved offal under his nose. "Objectivists?" he pronounced the word as if I had accused him of being a child-molester. "We're anarchists and outlaws, goddam it. Didn't you understand that much? We've got nothing to do with right-wing, left-wing or any other half-assed political category. If you work within the system, you come to one of the either/or choices that were implicit in the system from the beginning. You're talking like a medieval serf, asking the first agnostic whether he worships God or the Devil. We're outside the system's categories. You'll never get the hang of our game if you keep thinking in flat-earth imagery of right and left, good and evil, up and down. If you need a group label for us, we're political non-Euclideans. But even that's not true. Sink me, nobody of this tub agrees with anybody else about anything, except maybe what the fellow with the horns told the old man in the clouds: Non serviam."

Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea, Illuminatus!

Eris loves activists.

Here in the Strange Times, there's a million billion crawly little critters trying to ride you down the river. See, you're floating through chaotic, shrapnel filled rapids. The foamy waters are brimming with symbols and images and squiggles and good causes. It's easy to cling to one like a life preserver and ride it for all its worth. You're clinging to some right now. You are a sticky meme, and you're trying to stay afloat. It's only human.

The first part of the Golden Secret is to Let Go.

You grabbed onto that that symbol and that in-joke and that good cause because they were at the right place at the right time. When you're receptive, it's convenient to get on a raft made of religion or politics or some other made-up ideology. It's easy to assemble an identity out of tastes and values and shrapnel floating by. Over time, some of that stuff stops supporting your weight. Right when you're about to go under, you reach out and grab onto some other piece of shrapnel. You cling to it and use it to hold your head above the waters. At some point, you saw some stuff and met some people, and their shtick appealed to you, and you internalized it, and now you think that stuff is a part of you.

Fast forward to the present: you're riding down the river in a barrel, your knuckles white as they grip your life preservers. Your pockets are stuffed with photographs, and there's cultural water in your ears. Let GO already. You don't need that crap. That's somebody else's crap. Learn to swim on your own.

The second part of the Golden Secret is to Ignite Yourself, While There's Still Time.

I'm advocating activities. Not activism, but activitism. I don't recommend you go find a cause (or some other baggage) to serve, I'm recommending you get up, get out, and DO something. They've got you whipped like a circus lion to watch the world and then react to it. They want you to be a passive observer. The face on the money has you trained like Pavlov's dog. That's how the Machine works. It's made of perfectly predictable parts.

You could get bored. You could get numb. You could be alone in a sea of people. These are the Dangers of Modern Living.

There's something out there which will make you excited just to wake up in the morning, and it's not spending your hard earned money on the latest You've-Gotta-See-This blockbuster. That shrapnel is just a distraction. The voices of the cultural chorus are a distraction too, because really, you're not one of Them.

You're a freak. You're weird in ways not even your best friends can understand. This is the Strange Times, and there are no groups of people, only individuals standing next to each other.

There's somebody in your life who you look to for direction. The one with the plan. The one who has great ideas. The one who seems to know what's going on. Kill him. Take his job. Become him. Quit waiting for somebody else to come up with something fun to do. Quit waiting for rock bottom or some other excuse to change what you don't like about yourself. Cough up all the water in your lungs and BREATHE you'll drown if you don't BREATHE for the first time ever BREATHE.

This isn't a lesson you can learn once and internalize. This is an ongoing challenge to [u]constantly reinvent yourself[/u]. This is a never ending battle you must wage against your comfort and your identity. If you think you've learned this lesson, then you stink of complacency. Initiation never ends.

Keep moving. Stay kinetic.

  Be the trouble you want to see in the world.  

Go Mindfuck yourself.

Hail Eris

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