Mechanical Alchemy

[P3nT4gR4m]

Congratulations primate you've broken out of the Black Iron Prison. You see the walls and the walls fall down. You're free to exist, as you will, in the world that they have created. Welcome to the machine. You know the machine now. It's everywhere you look, from the genetically malajusted , reconstituted animal and vegetable sewage, neatly shrink wrapped on the supermarket shelves, to the intellectual effluent spewing out of the Teevee set in the corner of your living room. As a new primate is born it is absorbed, indoctrinated and trained to function as an element of or slave to the machine.

And when you look upon the machine you see that the machine is bad. The machine operates as a complex series of systems. The Political system, the legal system, the economic system, the education system. Each system functions as a standalone component of the whole. If one component is destroyed the neighboring components will work to replace the missing component. The machine is self healing in the same manner as a biological organism. If, for example, the political system fails, the military system may assume most of the roles of government until a new politic can be established.

The machine is bad but, as I hope I have made clear, it cannot be destroyed. Destroy one component and it will be replaced, probably before you've even begun to destroy the next. You cannot beat the system but this kind of dogma isn't going to stop you trying right? You have to fight it because it's wrong, correct? So you want to beat the machine, you want to tear down the walls of the BIP and liberate your fellow primates, most of whom do not wish to be liberated and will, in fact, oppose you with all their will.

So what's the plan? How do we destroy that which cannot be destroyed? Let me first explain a little about the concepts of destruction and creation. As a physicist once said:

"Every action has an equal and opposite reaction."

You cannot destroy something without creating something else. Destroy a building you create a pile of rubble, destroy a government you create anarchy, destroy an army you create a mountain of rotting meat. Destroy a component of the machine you create a new component. Devoting ones time and energy to destroying a component of the machine is, at best, a hit and miss affair - who knows what kind of component the machine will fabricate to replace the missing one. In many cases is will be something far worse. But, if destruction creates is it not true that creation destroys?

Sure as hell is. In creating fire you destroy wood, in creating words you destroy silence, in creating ideas you destroy preconceptions. So my advice is thus: Destroy the machine by creating new, better components. You tell me politics is wrong then run for office and do it right, you tell me the teevee is wrong then make your own show and make it right, you tell me education is wrong then teach something worthwhile because without politics we will have a shambles, without teevee we'll have nothing to watch, without education our kids will grow up ignorant.

Sounds like a tall order for sure but you're not alone. There's thousands of us now and more each day. If every discordian did a something positive instead of something negative then all those tiny contributions would soon mount up.

So do everyone a favour - quit fucking breaking things and do something constructive.

Or kill me

[Messier Undertree]

 

[LMNO]

Nice, but a problem....





... You never completely break out of Prison.  A true initiation never ends, and all that jazz.

[East Coast Hustle]

nice theory, but most of the people that rant is addressed to do not have access to the financial resources that would allow them to compete on the CoN's playing field.

you got the money to produce a TV pilot?

you got the money to run a successful political campaign?

I ran for public office last year and lost because I couldn't afford to spend the thousands of dollars my opponent spent on advertising and banners and lawn signs.

not to mention all the help he got from other rich people who felt threatened by the prospect of someone like me being given even the tiniest amount of power.

you cannot beat the CoN at its own game. In this repsect, trying to use the media as a complicit partner to damage the CoN is no different than trying to storm the castle with torches and pitchforks.

[P3nT4gR4m]

nice theory, but most of the people that rant is addressed to do not have access to the financial resources that would allow them to compete on the CoN's playing field.

you got the money to produce a TV pilot?

you got the money to run a successful political campaign?

I ran for public office last year and lost because I couldn't afford to spend the thousands of dollars my opponent spent on advertising and banners and lawn signs.

not to mention all the help he got from other rich people who felt threatened by the prospect of someone like me being given even the tiniest amount of power.

you cannot beat the CoN at its own game. In this repsect, trying to use the media as a complicit partner to damage the CoN is no different than trying to storm the castle with torches and pitchforks.

It's usually best to think outside the box. That said I'm sure there are some high profile, financially strong discordians/sympathetics in existence. Enlightenment sneaks throught the normal media channels, like rennaissance art. You're looking for a massive flash in the pan. Wake up - that aint gonna happen but a film like the matrix will introduce a concept into the herd psyche that cannot be undone, only expanded upon.

The rich guys stranglehold on the teevee's days are numbered convergence of internet and normal media channels is almost complete. We can broadcast to a mass audience like never before. Look at Jackass - couple of skatepunks and a camcorder started that one.

Cancer spreads one cell at a time. Subversion works the same way. Wake up one sleeper and there's two of you, wake up one each and there's 4. Small steps will get you there. Sure it'd be great to wake up tomorrow and it's all fixed but, back in the real world, I'll settle for waking up tomorrow and it's better than it was, however slightly. Your defeatist attitude is how the Con controls subversives like you. Make you angry, make you desperate, make you snap and walk into macdonalds with a bomb strapped to you, make the whole thing blow up in your face.

[Triple Zero]

i let the stuff you said in another thread about the demiurge and the machine-in-the-abyss pass through my mind a bit more, and that rant you just wrote spoke kind of exactly the conclusion i drew.

well, except for the "congratulations you broke out" bit, on that part i agree with LMNO, but i gathered that was just an introductory bit.

to ECH, i believe that people have in fact more power than you indicate in your post. and i think you know that, as well, otherwise you would have never tried (a lot of things).
especially with the internet nowadays, if people know how to handle it properly, they have a LOT of power (e.g HIMEOBS).
i think it's more a question of people realizing they actually have power, and taking it into their own hands. sure there are a lot of areas where you can't beat the CoN at their own game. but that doesn't mean there aren't lots of different other possibilities. thinking out of the box, or just plain persistence.

[P3nT4gR4m]

i let the stuff you said in another thread about the demiurge and the machine-in-the-abyss pass through my mind a bit more, and that rant you just wrote spoke kind of exactly the conclusion i drew.

Yeah the rant was a sort of distillation of those thoughts

[Triple Zero]

Yeah the rant was a sort of distillation of those thoughts

it was pretty sudden actually, i was explaining that stuff about the machine-in-abyss to a good friend with whom i like to discuss these things (ok not in a smokey bar, more some extremely hip yet reasonbly priced lounge place), and suddenly it hit me, i even wrote some keypoints down, but your rant says it much better
it's basically a re-wording of "a better world starts with yourself" kind of philosophy (kind of). we need more jailbreakers, more awake people, more conscious people, more aware people ..

wait a minute, in fact this rant is pretty much the opposite of that apathy-rant you wrote a while ago! care to explain that?

[Jenne]

Nice, but a problem....





... You never completely break out of Prison. A true initiation never ends, and all that jazz.

...I was gonna say...

[Jenne]

OH, and, good rant.  Very locker-room-go-get-emish!

[Benaclypse]

Nice, but a problem....





... You never completely break out of Prison. A true initiation never ends, and all that jazz.

...I was gonna say...

You can never completely break out of prison, but you can hannibalize the warden.

[Jenne]

Nice, but a problem....





... You never completely break out of Prison. A true initiation never ends, and all that jazz.

...I was gonna say...

You can never completely break out of prison, but you can hannibalize the warden.

Mind the chianti bottles and fava bean shells, then.

[Benaclypse]

Nice, but a problem....





... You never completely break out of Prison. A true initiation never ends, and all that jazz.

...I was gonna say...

You can never completely break out of prison, but you can hannibalize the warden.

Mind the chianti bottles and fava bean shells, then.

[Jenne]

Nice, but a problem....





... You never completely break out of Prison. A true initiation never ends, and all that jazz.

...I was gonna say...

You can never completely break out of prison, but you can hannibalize the warden.

Mind the chianti bottles and fava bean shells, then.

Yes, good flavor for the beans.

[Dr. Cow Ass]

Nice rant, but some of the things you mentioned are to impractical. When it comes to politics, your not going to win with your "enlightened" ideals as your campain platform. Even if somehow you do win (you could always cheat), you'd have to deal with the other shit that comes along with politics, plus, you can't think as an individual when you get involved with politics, you can think for the individual, but this means different things for different indivduals, which is why it's best to avoid politics altogether, not go against them, but just ignore them(damn that was alot of commas).

I agree new mediums such as youtube and other websites could serve as a crippling blow to the mass media, but the trick is turning the masses on to such an extreme, or at least different, type of program.

Like Pete Carrol said (or mabey it was phile hine) the biggest, most impenatrble belief in todays modern culture, even more the non-pagain religions, is the material cauality. By destroying this you are left with a, um, non-material casuality. I'm not entirly sure what that means ("material casuality," wtf), but it seems very important in this discussion and hopfully someone smarter can tell me/us how it applies.


EDIT: BTW, cool title.