Rant 28: Paranoia?

[Irreverend Hugh, KSC]

Rant 28
Paranoia??s Cure

?¨M¬?m strach ze s?åly z v?åry pt¬?t ?ªe se nikoho nikdo nemus?å.?Æ
-U?ª jsme doma (trans. ?´I fear both faith and power because they need not question.??)

?¨The State which schools us all to sink beneath the event-horizon of a tedious ?´usefulness??.?Æ    -Hakim Bey

An old Chinese revolutionary turned tyrant once said ?¨A single spark can start a prairie fire.?Æ The smallest action can be multiplied by seemingly inextricable forces into world shattering proportions. The same can be said of the words we speak. Who??s to say that a slip of your tongue tomorrow doesn??t start a chain of events that leads to the entire species finally getting rid of its old enemy, the State? Who??s to say that a single word won??t reveal that the civilization we live in is a sham? Who??s to say that a single snow flake pirouetting through the sky over Nepal won??t be the cause of your insanity?

The taste of chaos is your sense of freedom, but it has been kept hidden from you all this time by language, culture, religion, politics, and science?ñall just dogmatic pathways that eat their own vomit. Only someone with a short memory could believe that they would liberate anyone. The taste of chaos is glimpsed by you many times throughout your life but you have been trained well. You turn from that taste in abject horror, nauseated by the possibility that your sense of order has nothing whatsoever to do with the nature of the universe??that there is no nature of the universe. You become afflicted with a brooding paranoia manifested as anxiety which possibly grows into depression. And your society, knowing this, has trained you to consume all sorts of wonderful capitalist products in order for you to regain some sense of wholeness. But?ñhas this training worked? Are you cured of your creeping paranoia? Do you feel safe, fulfilled, satisfied?

If you are one of the lucky ones, activities such as breeding/family-raising, a career, or religious vocation, will serve to stave off the underlying paranoia for an entire lifetime. Failing that, you could use god, drugs, magic or other distractions. And there is always suicide for those who realize that there is no inherent meaning to the universe and believe that this is cause to be afraid. A few people end up as Buddhist adepts and learn to dance in chaos but they mostly keep to themselves. Some people learn to use chaos to their advantage in magical operations and are branded witches. Some people get turned onto Discordianism and learn to appreciate the taste of chaos. And you may be one of these. Or you may be something else. But the taste of chaos underlies everything regardless of whether you are afraid. Your fear of chaos is unnatural and has been socially and culturally inculcated in humanity by authorities since the dawn of Statist civilizations.

The paranoia serves to keep people in power over you. You are an easy being to manipulate when you are afraid. You will be less likely to think creatively for yourself. You will make choices in life, and think thoughts, which you will believe falsely to be your own. But you are only doing what you have been told. You have been led to believe falsely that chaos is death and that you should fear that. But chaos is not death only. It is life. It is sex. It is birth. It is you. It is these words. It is also those who don??t want you to even taste it. Is that paradoxical?

Your ?´instinctual?? fear of the unknown is not instinctual, but socially inculcated. Think back to when you were a child still learning your mother tongue, were you afraid of the unknown then? Or were you in awe? Since that time, what has happened to that childlike wonder? (You could blame Grayface but that is one of the oldest Discordian jokes ever.) You have become buried under an impression of paranoia, neuroses, and idiotic beliefs about the ?´true?? self??a true self which is, of course, threatened by change and chaos. You have been given a collection of rules by which to judge yourself, along with the anxiety of not being able to measure up to those rules. This keeps you forever in control.

Your questioning mind is sidetracked with expressions like ?¨Mother knows best?Æ or ?¨have faith in God?Æ or ?¨He is our president, after all?Æ or ?¨The Lord works in mysterious ways?Æ or ?¨Capitalism is the pinnacle of social evolution?Æ or ?¨Greed is the natural motivator of humanity?Æ or ?¨Socialism is the principle of rationality in economics?Æ or ?¨it??s in the bible/oracle/stars?Æ or ?¨smash the state?Æ or ?¨Just believe in it until you understand it?Æ and other such dismal excuses for poorly thought out ideas. You are always being told that the reason for your paranoia is that you don??t fit in. If you could just have faith and learn to fit in somewhere??anywhere, you would be fine. (But once bit by the taste of chaos, how long can you rest in the dull precepts of order, hmm?) The option of freedom is never discussed in any concrete way.

Frankly, you are paranoid because you are enslaved. But you have been trained not to see it as slavery. You refuse the cure for your paranoia, which you know deep down inside is the freedom that the taste of chaos will bring. You think yourselves free already. Okay. Tell me how free you are. What can you say ?´no?? to? Try asking yourself that and then listing all the things you can really say ?´no?? to, and you will see how enslaved you are. Just because the chains are made of god-money as opposed to steel, doesn??t mean those chains are any less real. If you start to taste chaos, you will begin to come up with ways to use those chains to your advantage. You will unlearn slavery and become free. It will take time and your paranoia won??t just disappear over night. (Unless you are lucky enough to fall into a Discordian cabal where it can be pranked out of you.)

The cure for the paranoia: Explore that which you are afraid of. Taste the chaos. Taste life. Question that which appears so obviously true to the faithful slaves of ideas, religions, gods, and philosophies. Question that which appears to be truth to you. This seems simple until you actually begin doing it.

(Chaos 12th, 3170)

Note: Aleister Crowley??s  ?¨Book Of Lies?Æ has been misspelled. The correct spelling is ?¨??Æ

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Bump.

Because I am bored.

[hooplala]

You bastard.  This gives me an idea of a suggestion for Suu's Chicago trip...