From the SSOOKN FIELD SURVIVAL HANDBOOK

[tyrannosaurus vex]

BASIC STAGE-TWO NAVIGATION: PROFILE OF THE ENEMY

THERE IS MUCH to be learned from understanding where you stand, now that you've taken a couple of steps away from the mental funk you were stuck in back in your original Prison cell.  Out here, you understand that "Reality" is a word that really shouldn't have to be in the dictionary, but because it is, people feel obligated to give it a new definition every five minutes or so.  This is the focus of today's trip down the Cell Block.  You'll find as you navigate through the Prison that not all of the bars standing in your way are simply stubborn reflections of your own inhibitions.  Some of them have been deliberately put there by something else, and it's our aim here to define, or at least sketch a rough diagram of, what that something else is.

Most people wander around like apes trying to find the perfect banana tree.  You're well aware of this behavior, usually, except in those unfortunate moments when you succumb to it yourself.  As they stumble about -- running into their own inhibitions, buying up the latest fad craze, taking out personal loans so they can pay somebody to make them go broke -- there is, as you might not automatically expect, a tendency to herd themselves and their lives into trend-rivers and oceans of idle, stagnant consumption.  If everyone were just following their own bullshit interests all the time, you might expect to see them scurrying around crazily, but not pouring themselves after any particular trends or lumping their unthinking corpses-to-be in with big herds.  Yet, that's what they do.  So, they must not just be following their own bullshit interests all the time.  Welcome to the age-old Tendency of Humanity to Fuck Itself -- the THFI, or, for pronouncibility reasons, the CON.

All you need to know at this point is that the CON is a mysterious force that permeates the universe and causes organisms that otherwise show signs of intelligence to clump together in herds and jump off of tall buildings or amass themselves into enormous armies in order to commit mass suicide.  It may or may not be intelligent, but it's almost certainly not the Great Big Conspiracy that you think it is.  We know that the Illuminati aren't behind it because it's much more successful at what it does than anyone from Bavaria could ever be.

The CON operates on a number of organizational scales, but becomes most evident when large, segmented populations are viewed from a historical or time-accelerated perspective.  Our intent here is not to create an all-inclusive, hyper-abstractualized definition of the CON, but rather to provide a practical framework for organizations (or, by definition, disorganizations) that find themselves for whatever reason at odds with the CON.  Mentioning the scope of the CON is only to reinforce in your mind the fact that it is based on, rooted in, and inseparable from Human society as a whole, and any attempt to "destroy" the CON is going to result in madness, death, wasted time, or new profanities; but it will never end in success.

For those who wish to resist the CON, individualism is the best answer.  The CON is much too large to worry about random individuals living outside its imposed one-size-fits-all meta-grid.  But there are those individuals who insist, probably foolishly, on maintaining some kind of camaraderie and fellowship with other individuals, with the intention of sharing information without becoming dependent on that exchange.  This requires networking, and the CON fucking hates networks outside of its control, because they circumvent the CON's rigorously enforced and painstakingly implemented meme bases.  So the CON will actively seek to nullify such networks, and its method of doing that is threefold:

1. Convert and Dissuade.  The CON sets up artificial reference points (think BIP Bars) that draw potential members away from emerging threat networks.  These groups become uncool or extremist and are portrayed as dangerous.  Their ideas cannot be entertained as serious options, and their members are laughed right out of any meaningful discussion as soon as their membership is revealed.

2. Co-Opt and Assimilate.  When a group withstands the barrage of exclusion and neglect, usually because it has found a useful marketing ploy, the CON will recruit the entire movement, slowly so that the movement itself hardly notices.  Then, the threatening network can be dismantled and its individual pieces isolated and made into Products for the consumption of the masses.  This has happened to a number of recent networks.  See: Punk-Rock, Democracy, MTV, the Enlightenment.

3. Destruction.  The options here are incalculable, but it happens less frequently than you'd think.  Most groups never make it past the Assimilation phase, which only goes to show you how weak-willed even the strongest revolutionaries usually are.

Coming up next:  What the Fuck does this mean for MY MOVEMENT?

[LMNO]

This is fucking good.


also:

We know that the Illuminati aren't behind it because it's much more successful at what it does than anyone from Bavaria could ever be.

Permission to record, sir?

[The Good Reverend Roger]

What does SSOOKN stand for, again?

[LMNO]

Semi-Secret Order Of Kabbalistic Navigators.


Yeah, it has little to nothing to do with the post.  I noticed that myself.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

I needed an acronym and POEE just seemed wrong.

LMNO: permission granted, as long as you leave me out of the credits.

[LMNO]

You got it.

[LHX]

banger

[Mangrove]

i didn't know we had a field survival handbook.

but now i'm glad we do.


nice work vex.