Principia Discordia > Literate Chaotic

Insightful Post Dump

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Manta Obscura:
A rant from Jack of Turnips in the thread titled "All things having been said." I think this is one of the most poetic and insightful rants I've ever read:


--- Quote from: Jack of Turnips on October 12, 2008, 05:44:29 pm ---All things having been said, and repeated, and repeated again until the bile rises in the throat...now the only sensible action is to destroy the government.

The Capitol should be ruins, a grassy rock-scattered place where children go and their parents tell them, "This was where the bigwigs approved torture, this is where the fat men legislated their robberies, this is where they voted for war and left the poor and sick to die. This is where the ones in power proclaimed that all the money will go to the rich and everyone else can eat dirt." That's what the parents, those who knew and who put the dynamite under the foundations, that's what they will say.

And the children will pick dandelions in the ruins of Washington, DC.

Yeah, America's dead. She has been dead for fifty years now. Nationalists still love her, still kiss her dead lips; they are making love to her corpse even as you read this. But she's dead. Get over it.

Your allegiance must be elsewhere. Your allegiance must be to a new life. It is 07:30 and the October sun bursts in a flood of orange light through the window. What the hell are you going to do about it? Get the guitars and the djembes, the harmonicas and the fiddles; get your crazy trousers and your hat with the ribbons; walk on stilts and let the dogs run free. Dance for your life, you bastards. Dance and sing and work and fuck like you mean it. It's all that's left.

For fifty years money has been lavished on corporate barons while legislators deny food and basic medical care to the poor. For fifty years America has used lies to wage wars of aggression. The killings -- Vietnam to Iraq -- number in the hundreds of millions, a holocaust. A murderous American holocaust. For fifty years the US secret police have operated without restraint of law, and they have been set loose to imprison and torture at will. America's Constitution is a joke, ignored in practice and mocked daily by the actions of the government.

Dance like you mean it, brothers. Spit on everyone in power. I heard there was a man who said that no matter whether McCain or Obama gets elected the inauguration should be the same: a hollow-point bullet to the forehead. To be immediately followed by the execution of each and every congressman and senator. I did not say that, I don't know who did. It is illegal to say that, illegal to write it, illegal for an American to think it. (Just as it was illegal for a Soviet in Stalin's day.) I don't know who would say that.

Spit on everyone in power.

We will learn this or die: the only tribe is the human tribe. The streets and parks and fields belong to us. We own the sunlight on the grass, a bottle of warm wine in our hands and a cheap guitar hung 'round our necks. We own life. Late at night, alone: frost forming on the windows, a 40-watt bulb in the bedside lamp -- the one without a lampshade -- and a thin book by Jim:

"The bullet tumbled toward the girl's head at 1250 feet
per second. She wasn't the president, you say,
too young for politics. Despite theological gooseshit
the gods don't keep time in light years. We're slowed
to the brutality of clocks. Listen to the alarm.
Wake up."

That's it, then: wake up. Every one of us will die, but we will continue. We can't go on, but we will go on. The chain of souls sings in our blood, in the only tribe there is, the human tribe. There is a reason the officials are on top: it is because scum floats. And therefore be no respecter of government. Subvert the powerful. Mail your congressman an envelope of spit. Your allegiance is to humankind, not to the corpse of America or the stinking remains of a nationalist fantasy. Grow up. And learn to sing.


--- End quote ---

Manta Obscura:
Cain's initial post from his thread titled "The Emergent Conspiracy." This is a really thoughtful piece that raises some good points about the emergence of trends and the endurance of movements:


--- Quote from: Cain on October 28, 2008, 11:13:29 am ---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.

--- End quote ---

Manta Obscura:
Oh, and once again because I didn't make this super-clear in the initial post for this thread: anyone feel free to post insightful or provocative pieces that they find, if that sort of thing strikes your fancy.

I've been getting really into archiving lately, so I hope you'll forgive my seeming lack of originality in simply dredging up old posts.

Manta Obscura:
Post by Cram in the topic "Compromise/Collaboration," wherein he provides an alternate metaphor of the BIP as a dream within a dream within a dream (et hoc genus omne):


--- Quote from: Cramulus on March 19, 2007, 04:33:05 pm ---Okay here's my Take One.


Within a Dream

We talk to ourselves incessantly about our world. In fact we maintain our world with our internal talk. And whenever we finish talking to ourselves about ourselves and our world, the world is always as it should be. We renew it, we rekindle it with life, we uphold it with our internal talk. Not only that, but we also choose our paths as we talk to ourselves. Thus we repeat the same choices over and over until the day we die, because we keep on repeating the same internal talk over and over until the day we die. A warrior is aware of this and strives to stop his internal talk.
-Carlos Castaneda

It's a Dream Within A Dream
within a dream
within a dream


The difference between a regular dream and a lucid dream is that in the lucid dream you're aware that you're dreaming. These dreams are more memorable. Despite awareness of the illusion, the experience of seems more real. In a lucid dream, you have control over what's going on. When I realize I'm not in the real world but in a dream world, I will myself to escape it, to fly away into a cooler place.

You can teach yourself how to have lucid dreams. To do this, you learn to make constant reality checks. Some people say you should try flipping a light switch on or off (notoriously useless in dreams), or try to read printed text. They provide clues to your mental state and can wake up your forebrain enough to take the reigns of your consciousness

within a dream
within a dream

See in dreams, your forebrain isn't usually working. Inside your brain, there's a lizard, a monkey, and a human all in competition. The human is winning, but only by a little. It's an uneven balance at best. In dreams, it's mostly the monkey and the lizard at the wheel. They hold up these images and symbols and memories and lick them and bang them on rocks and shake them up. Then we wake up and it doesn't make any sense to us because those other two lobes weren't trying to make sense. They're irrational by their very nature. When we dream, they drive.

The waking world is a lot like that too. People only use their human brain for a small portion of the day. The rest of the time the monkey and the lizard are driving. That's why people are territorial, that's why they get defensive, that's why they do the same stupid shit every day and never question why.

Now I'm not saying that the human brain is better or more important than the other two brains you have. That lizard brain keeps you safe. That monkey brain gets you laid. The forebrain - the human brain - is easily confused and conflicted. From an evolutionary standpoint, it's still very new - not fully baked. Millennia from now, maybe humans will have different brains, keener and more efficient. Today, we've got to try to make good use of what we've got.

There are times in my life when I realize that I'm in a terrible rut and it's No Fun. We walk around with monkey and lizard brain on, just doing things repetitively, ritualistically. These are the best times to make reality checks. This is the best time to ask "Am I actually awake?"

That reality check is about evaluating which elements of the rut are necessary and good and which should be stripped out. For me, the escape from the rut usually involves me picking up a new hobby, doing something drastically different, or in some way altering my day-to-day me. It's sort of like waking up from a dream

within a dream
within a dream

But instead of waking up into reality I'm really just waking up into another dream. Because that new hobby will one day get boring, and that new me is in no way the ultimate me.

See, it's not enough to be lucid briefly and say (for example) "hey, I'm miserable because I surround myself with morons", and then get new friends. You've got to keep that spark lit. You've got to shine its light on everything you do and think for yourself all the time. Upon self-examination, I've realized I have hundreds of opinions and attitudes that are borrowed from somewhere else. To some extent, that's the human condition.

People read movie reviews because they want an opinion about the movie before they even see it. People listen to pundits vivisect the body politic because they want to know what supposedly educated, well informed people are thinking. People religiously watch TV shows that they don't actually even fucking enjoy. There's a mass hypnosis going on here. The collective consciousness is standing on higher ground than individual consciousness. We're being blown around like leaves, and the wind is fashion, is politics, is culture itself

within a dream
within a dream

It's not just about escaping the rut. Learn to wake up, in general, and you'll become aware of all the parts of your life that are a dream. Learn to think for yourself and be lucid.

See I believe reality is what you make of it. All the parts of this dream are your creation. Think of something important. Think of something boring. Think of something exciting. The importance, the boredom, the excitement, all these things only exist in your mind. They're things you actually do have control over.

Once you realize you're dreaming, you can change your dream from a nightmare to a wet dream. Once you realize that, say, your morning commute is boring as hell, you can engineer ways to make it less so. You've just got to awaken your forebrain enough.

If you're in a nightmare, realize that it's a nightmare. Realize that it's YOUR nightmare. Realize that YOU are the one who is making it awful, YOU are the one who is dreaming it bad.

So wake up and change it - it's a false awakening, but an awakening none the less.

The point of learning how to wake up is not to find the top-level reality, but to achieve lucidity

within a dream
within a dream...


--- End quote ---

Manta Obscura:
An amusing story by Iptuous in "WOMP-ertainment":


--- Quote from: Iptuous on November 11, 2008, 07:57:10 pm ---when i was in 7th grade i had this crazy bible thumper friend that went on vacation and entrusted me to take care of his pet hampster, to which i agreed.  I was always more of a guinnea pig type kid, but what the hell, how much different could it be?  well....that little shit escaped his cage and got lost, and i frantically searched for him for hours. it in fact became so frantic that i was rushing around, and in my haste failed to notice the little bugger dart out from under the couch before i stepped on him.  now, i didn't step on him full force, mind you.  i was in my socks and i only stepped on him with my big toe.  it was strong enough that poop came out both ends of him, however.  I didn't tell my friend when he came back.
this picture is now karmic consequence of that ancient transgression....

--- End quote ---

And the picture in question:


--- Quote from: Burns on November 11, 2008, 07:43:09 pm ---


--- End quote ---

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