Stolen Chaos Marxist Aphorisms

[Cain]

BASIC CONCEPTS


1.  YOU ARE WHAT YOU DO. If you want to be something else, do something else.

2.  Belief follows action.

3.  You are NOT a Beautiful and Unique Snowflake. Nor are you the Chosen One.

6.  Politics, magick, psychology, advertising, propaganda are ALL THE SAME THING – attempts to describe and alter consciousness.

10.  Destroy your own icons and enabling narratives. They will keep you safe and neutered. Most people would rather destroy life, limb or property than do this.


THE ENEMY IS LIFESTYLISM

21.  If you're entirely hung up on your own "lifestyle", so determined to surround yourself with a fortress of The Right Kind of Stuff that you're incapable of thinking beyond your own self-image, then you're part of the problem.

22.  Consumer culture is the opium of the 21st century masses.

23.  "I am the Chosen One" is the opium of 21st century niche markets.


CHAOS MARXISM IS MATERIALIST

34.  You can stay in your ivory tower and change your own reality infinitely. Until, of course, you need to go to work or deal with anyone but your immediate friends. That's the point where nasty reality cuts in. And nasty reality cuts in more and more the less money and internet access you have.


CHAOS MARXISM IS COLLECTIVIST

47.  The more I looked at the mystics and the psychonauts, the more I realised that for them "Question everything" meant "Question everything except the idea that individual consciousness is a thing unto itself which can be worked on in isolation".

48.  If you start saying that people are not individuals - that they are created by their upbringing and the role they play in real, nasty, going-to-work-in-traffic society - then you open the door to the idea that only a social revolution can actually solve the real problems with humanity.

51.  If the subconscious, unseen and cultural levels of the world are the ocean, then magick is all about being able to dive, swim, and get back on dry land safely. Eventually, we should be able to become psychic and cultural surf-lifesavers – a role that will be integral to a new society.


THE NECESSITY OF ACTION

54.  Since you are what you do, you will have to DO to BE. There is no substitute for doing.


THE PAINKILLER OF THE MASSES

65.  Religion, like any other painkiller or hallucinogenic, can be used for good or evil purposes. It can encourage you to lie around and stare at the ceiling, or kill your family, or it might take the edge off enough to allow you to accomplish something in the real world.

69.  Most people do not base their actions on rational thought related to material reality. They base their action on stories which they partly pick up from their culture and partly make up themselves.

70.  People who base their lives in images and narratives expect those images or narratives to be "morally true" – or "truthy" - not physically true or even logical.

71.  Even if I know on an intellectual level that X is bullshit, if I act like it's real it becomes real for me at least.

72.  People will happily swallow lies if it enables them to maintain the narratives that they live by.

74.  Basing your life on images and narratives rather than the hard facts of material existence is much, much, much easier. And it will virtually ensure that you don't ever change anything.


CULTURAL REVOLUTION – A DO IT YOURSELF GUIDE

75.  To put it in magical jargon, we start with the memes and thoughtforms which arise spontaneously from anti-corporate activity, transmute them magically to give them the best chance of survival and replication, and then release them back into the infosphere of the activity where they were born.

76.  Metaphorical, narrative language can help people understand real although intangible forces better than intellectual jargon.

77.  An effective political or advertising slogan has all the same characteristics of a meditative mantra.

78.  The most effective advertising does not say "Brand X has qualities Y and Z"; instead, it presents a meme which associates X with Y and Z and leaves it up to the recipients to connect the dots. All the most virally infective memes require that the readers/viewers/listeners do some work to make some sense of what they are given – they are "pull" rather than "push" marketing.

79.  Make your memes open-ended in possible meaning.

80.  If you're not being misunderstood, you haven't been properly understood.

81.  If you're not being attacked, you won't be supported.

83.  If you don't have a party, a mystic order or a scene, you have to start one.

84.  A meme will spread if it fills a niche in the materially existing noosphere.

85.  A successful memetic operation will work backwards in time - in other words, pick a possible future, and attempt to make it a real present.


HACK YOUR OWN PERSONALITY

87.  The rationality you were taught to survive in this world is often diametrically opposed to the rationality you will need to change it. Drugs or religion may create the "altered state" necessary to build an alternative rationality. Or they may screw you up.

92.  Arguments over what is 'good' rest on arguments about reality, even if they seem not too. 'Ought' does rely on arguments about what 'is'.


THE WORLD AS IT IS

101.  The "Green Zone" in Baghdad is the most effective microcosm of the World-As-Is.

102.  Less bread means more circuses – the less food and shiny consumer items there are to hand out, the more lies and spectacles must be provided.

103.  Corporate politics and management are memetics combined with brute force. Memetics are generally cheaper and have less unpleasant side effects than brute force, but need to be continually updated to remain effective.

104.  Corporate (or Black, or brute-force) Memetics works through a barrage of constant mutually reinforcing impressions.


DON'T CONFUSE THE LEVELS


111.  The map is not the territory - that symbols are only useful in so far as they serve the actual purpose on the ground. Ideology is an imaginary solution to a real problem – an attempt to "live in the map".

112.  If you try to live in the metaphor you constructed, rather than using it as a guide to action, you will at best create just another religion, and at worst, create an internet subculture that people will laugh at.


THE FUTURE


117.  Revolutions are not predictable. People don't wear nice colour coded symbols in a real revolution. They get drunk and smash shit up and in all other ways go over the top.

121.  Culture-from-below is always free, and often illegal – mainly because it subverts the intellectual property laws. The new world will have different definitions of property and reward.

[hooplala]

Are those paraphrased?

I'm not a huge fan of #3, but otherwise I like.

[LMNO]

good stuff, that is.

[Cain]

Are those paraphrased?

I'm not a huge fan of #3, but otherwise I like.

Nope, that was exactly how they were layed out.

I'm reading a fair bit of the Chaos Marxists writing, and will appropriate anything I think we can make work (because, after all, they are Marxists and many of us here reject a lot of how Marxism thinks society should be).

[hooplala]

This is very interesting - where did you find it?

[Cramulus]

yeah I dig these. Some of them make me uneasy, but I'm intrigued nonetheless. If it's KopyLeft we should yank some of it. Or maybe we should just do that anyway - these people don't believe in property, right? 

[Cain]

http://chaosmarxism.blogspot.com/

One of them's an ex-Subgenius, I don't know about the other.

[barumunk]

those be damn cool! 
so far i like #54 de mostest

[Verbal Mike]

Thanks! Many of these are beautifully relevant, somehow.

[Triple Zero]

thanks for the summary, cain. good stuff.

[Jasper]

They yell the same things we do, pretty much.

I'm experiencing cognitive dissonance from identifying with self-styles "Chaos Marxists" though.

[TheLastLump]

72.  People will happily swallow lies if it enables them to maintain the narratives that they live by.

I wondered about this when I read that Kerry Thornley had been suspected in JFK's assassination, and that he'd begun to believe Discordianism was a tool of the government to create a school of assassins. I wondered, what if Discordianism WAS a lie? What if it was just a lie we were given to follow so we'd feel like we had somewhere we belonged, so we'd feel we could do something. That we were enlightened.

Then I realized I was high, told myself to shut the fuck up, and went back to playing Halo.

[Nast]

Oh, no, you were right. Discordianism is a pile of crap.

The only thing keeping us from becoming a roving band of patchouli-soaked Chaos Madgickians is a dry sense of humor and half-decent introspection.
And even then.

[hooplala]

Plus, according to Thornley's own timeline he and Hill came up with Discordianism before he came into contact with the so-called CIA agents.  But it does seem likely they influenced heavily the Law of Fives, which was a later addition to Discordianism.  That makes one think.

[TheLastLump]

Anyone know anything about what happened to Thornley during that time? I'd hate to think they stapled a FNORD to his brain or something. Did he still believe Discordianism was falsified by the Machine afterwards, or was it just a minor phr34k0u7 because of his being accused of assassinating someone? I'd hate to think it left him scarred...