The Emergent Conspiracy
An emergent behaviour or emergent property can appear when a number of simple entities (agents) operate in an environment, forming more complex behaviours as a collective [...] The complex behaviour or properties are not a property of any single such entity, nor can they easily be predicted or deduced from behaviour in the lower-level entities.
- Wikipedia
“Daring ideas are like Chess men moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game”
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Its hard to say when the “conspiracy” started. Because, the thing is, its not really a conspiracy. Its easy to trace people and interests, child's play really. But tracing ideas...well, that's another matter entirely. Some say it dates back to the Yellow Turban Rebellion, where Taoists eschewed Wu Wei and took matters into their own hands, collapsing the Han Dynasty. Others suggest the Assassins, the mystic-killers who controlled wide tracts of the Middle East, as more likely culprits. More realistically, the secret authors of the Rosicrucian Manifestos are named, setting into motion a fusion of Hermetic philosophy, Renaissance free thinking and opposition to the Vatican. This filtered into radical Masonic lodges, culminating in the exemplar secret society, that of the Bavarian Illuminati.
Others think that looking at the subject too politically may in fact be the wrong way of going about it. Looking to literature and art, we have Baudelaire and Poe, influencing the Symbolist movement, and working its way, via World War One, into Dadaism. From Dada sprung the Situationists and Discordians, among others. And from there, the ball was really set rolling. Discordianism worked an influence on the Church of the Subgenius, and combining with the Beat philosophy of the West Coast and their anarchic interpretation of Situationism, became the Cacophony Society. Neoism also arose, promoting its mixture of experimental art and pranking, paradoxes and various frauds. The avant-garde, constantly evolving to effect the mainstream and better protest against it.
And whichever story you prefer, including the ones you come up with yourselves, there is no denying that the virus is loose. Its hard to define, but that's why it keeps on living. Chaotic, anarchic, artistic and rebellious, opposing the values of the mainstream and with more than a hint of humour (if of the ironic and satirical kind) it is out there. And it keeps on going.
That's why this conspiracy is emergent. There is no controlling group, no command, no figurehead. Many of the groups within the conspiracy have these, but it does not add up overall. It does not even need to. And even better...with no one grouping, with no figurehead, its very, very hard to undo. Its in the soil, and in the air we breathe. To be sure, its hard to catch, or at least thinly distributed, but it is there, and combines with local and global trends to become something new, to change and adapt and unleash itself yet again against the upright, the “proper”, the bourgeois (in the pejorative sense) and in short, living the ideal of Baudelaire, that “the man of letters is the enemy of the world”.
Discordianism, for its own sake, its irrelevant. Well, maybe that's too harsh. It is not necessary, though its certainly very agreeable to my personal tastes and has done a lot in spreading the underlying memes that the emergent conspiracy relies on. Instead, if for whatever reason, Discordianism were to fail (the unlikely scenario of Erisian terrorists, for example), there are avenues for escape, to regroup, and continue on as before, with a few adjustments. The conspiracy, by virtue of the fact that it is not a conspiracy in the traditional sense, lives on, and continues to exert its influences.
The conspiracy does not die. It stands against the values of this culture, this society. Its willing to use unusual and exotic techniques to change it. And no-one can stop those of us in on it. Because...the conspiracy does not exist. But that does not mean you cannot join it.
