ATTN: Actual Discordians RE: Hodge and Podge

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Ok, I think I see where you're coming from.

What I'm hearing, pardon the paraphrasing, is that you're talking about the Aneristic Illusion, as opposed to the Aneristic Illusion. 

That is, it's focusing on the people who create and demand their easily understood narratives and patterns, who ignore the apparent disorder, and delude themselves with easily digestible order.

If that's not where you were going, apologies; that's where I ran with it.

I think you're on it.

We cannot blame the tyrants.  Who hired/elected/tolerated them?

It is The People who are to blame, they are the only silly fuckers mouthing the platitudes of the anerstic illusion.

There is no anerism.  Just the illusion.  That illusion might be dreary or dismal or deadly, but it's still an illusion.  The only real part about it is the hundreds of millions of people that will kill you for pointing out the man behind the curtain.

[LMNO]

The State™ is a social fiction, but the guns are real.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

The State™ is a social fiction, but the guns are real.

Precisely.

And cops are a social fiction, but the pepper spray in that 85 year old Seattle woman's eyes and throat are real.

[AFK]

Ok, I think I see where you're coming from.

What I'm hearing, pardon the paraphrasing, is that you're talking about the Aneristic Illusion, as opposed to the Aneristic Illusion. 

That is, it's focusing on the people who create and demand their easily understood narratives and patterns, who ignore the apparent disorder, and delude themselves with easily digestible order.

If that's not where you were going, apologies; that's where I ran with it.

Or maybe Aneristic Delusion.  Given that Thornley and Hill were monkeys like the rest of us, I think the actual use of the Pentagon, on some level, might have simply been some political commentary.  I mean, yeah, it is obvious that it is, but I guess what I'm saying is that maybe, perhaps, their thinking or reasoning for using the pentagon didn't really go any deeper than that, but then they made up a bunch of gobbelty-gook to make it look all pinealy and shit.  

I dunno, maybe the human brain should be the symbol.  I mean, that's kind of what that thing was set-up for, right?  To try to make sense of all of the sensory input so that we may react to it accordingly.  

The Gut is the opposite of that.  That thing that yells at you to not pay attention to the brain because it's being a bit uptight and needs to just take five.  

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

I don't know the answer to that... I guess it depends on which came first, the Pentagon, or Starbuck's Pebbles?

On the one hand, the obvious political commentary in the 60's was focused on the War and the Pentagon as the figurative head of the war... but then you have the pagans (which Thornley and Hill were also ripping on) which were venerating the pentagram. The pentagon, as another way to connect the dots and as a political reference makes a double joke.

Then again, they were stoned hippies, so who the fuck knows.

Also, Nigel thanks for pointing that out... I was suffering from being a stoned hippie when I posted.  

[Pæs]

I dunno, maybe the human brain should be the symbol.  I mean, that's kind of what that thing was set-up for, right?  To try to make sense of all of the sensory input so that we may react to it accordingly.  

The Gut is the opposite of that.  That thing that yells at you to not pay attention to the brain because it's being a bit uptight and needs to just take five.  

This is actually kind of where I'm going with this. I'm looking into Hodge and Podge as a possible way of describing System 1/System 2 thinking (or the intuitive and the cogitative, the limbic and the cortical) with Discordian labels. First step was to make sure I knew which was which to start with.

[EK WAFFLR]

I might be totally out of my mind wrong on this but as a symbol of Apparent order:

[Nephew Twiddleton]

I might be totally out of my mind wrong on this but as a symbol of Apparent order:

I kinda like that actually. But it might not work with the mind/gut thing.

An atom would describe the way things are, with no amount of perception changing that fact. An Atom might be a good way of describing the Chaos.

Hmmmm.... I'm riffing here, but what if we have a Lithium atom, with an electron representing fact, another representing organizational perception, and another representing disorganizational perception.... or perhaps, a helium atom. One proton representing organizational fact, another representing disorganizational fact, and the electrons representing perception. We can then superimpose symbols of each relation onto each particle.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Going further, I think I like the idea of using the words organization and disorganization.

Order and Disorder are words that have emotional connotations, at least in English. Disorder is bad Order is good, but there is no inherent moral value when applied to describing organization, and is closer to what the PD was trying to say in the first place, I think.

[Cramulus]

the pentagon image hits a few things:



(1) The Pentagon in Washington DC. This is used as a symbol for American bureaucracy, including McCarthyism and the Vietnam war. The Pentagon building itself, like many of Washington DC's monuments and layout, has been assigned also has mystical significance.
(2) As any 1970s Neopagan will tell you, an upwards facing pentacle is a symbol of, you know, like, good stuff, and an upside down pentacle is a symbol of scary black magic. The pentagon on the hodgepodge is tilted, neither up nor down, letting us know that good, evil, whatever -- those systems of ordering the universe are both equivalent and arbitrary.



and of course, the law of fives is never wrong

[Cramulus]

Is placing an Aneristic symbol on the Aneristic side and an Eristic symbol on the Eristic side supposed to be a meaningful subversion of the balance represented by the yin-yang's shade and light each containing the seed of the other? Is the point that Order and Disorder are in conflict, rather than having a harmonious and flowing relationship? Did those hippies forget which term they were using for which?

Trick question! There are no sides.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

the pentagon image hits a few things:



(1) The Pentagon in Washington DC. This is used as a symbol for American bureaucracy, including McCarthyism and the Vietnam war. The Pentagon building itself, like many of Washington DC's monuments and layout, has been assigned also has mystical significance.
(2) As any 1970s Neopagan will tell you, an upwards facing pentacle is a symbol of, you know, like, good stuff, and an upside down pentacle is a symbol of scary black magic. The pentagon on the hodgepodge is tilted, neither up nor down, letting us know that good, evil, whatever -- those systems of ordering the universe are both equivalent and arbitrary.



and of course, the law of fives is never wrong

As far as the bolded, I should point point out that even within the 1970s, if you were a European Wiccan, the symbol of the first degree was an inverted triangle, the second degree, an inverted pentagram, the third degree, an upright pentagram with an upright triangle crowning it.

[Triple Zero]

Aren't the Hodge and Podge sides the same, except for the apple and pentagon? I'm fairly sure that the first several Sacred Chaos I've seen are the same color/shade on both sides, even though a lot of the depictions are more like the Tao.

Yes, most depictions of the Chao have both sides shaded in the same way, the thin part of the teardrop-shape darker than the round part.

Of course, just because they're shaded the same, and there's two of them aligned all point-symmetrically, doesn't mean they're the same side. After all, one side got an apple, the other a pentagon. But even without those symbols, they'd be two separate shapes in one symbol, that just happen to be isometrically congruent.

What I don't get is how the pentagon is used as a symbol for aneristic stuff.

The pentagon generates more disorder than any other organization on Earth.  It's sort of a factory for LMNO's Principle...and it, in itself, is disorderly as hell, as anyone who has ever been there will tell you.

Yeah, I get your point. My guess is, that on the one hand they were (sort of) wrong, picking the Pentagon (the institution/building) as a symbol for order. As Cram, RWHN and others pointed out, it was probably a political commentary of sorts.

I bet if you'd have pressed them about it, at the time, they'd have said "Aneristic Delusion", which kind of makes sense, imposition of Order transforming into Disorder, which then gets buried under more rules and Order, which makes things even more complex and Disordered, and so on. You'd expect this whole back-and-forth to culminate at some point into a superfast greyish flickering Unpleasantness, which really seems it should happen any day now, but frankly I'm not going to hold my breath

On the other hand, the pentagon is also an equilateral polygon, a geometric figure. Which is very orderly. They picked the five-sided one because of the Law of Fives, and there's the pentagram connection of course, like Cram said.

If I were to pick a different sort of geometric thing to represent order, I would probably go with the Platonic Solids, the polyhedra with faces made up of only identical regular polygons:



Because there's five of them, you see While there's an infinity of regular polygons.

As far as the bolded, I should point point out that even within the 1970s, if you were a European Wiccan, the symbol of the first degree was an inverted triangle, the second degree, an inverted pentagram, the third degree, an upright pentagram with an upright triangle crowning it.

There's many different interpretations of the symbology, of course. Apparently, it was Levi that made the distinction between good (upright) and evil (inverted) pentagrams, while later it was Crowley that subverted this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagram#European_occultism

[Iron Sulfide]

They clearly say that the Apple represents the Podge, and the Pentagon represents the Hodge.  And instead of swapping bits of either for the other side, the two sides are represented in balance.  Remember, Discordia isn't Taoism -- they just stole a lot of the symbology.

Going further, if you didn't have the symbols clearly indicating which side is which, you'd never know what was being represented; all you'd have would be dichotomy.  So we also are able to show how we can only distinguish between order and disorder by LABELLING them as such; without the labels, we would only have swirling Chaos.

I didn't say discordia was taoism. My point was basically what you said: the 'sides' of the Chao have no inherent difference, only a label that arbitrarily differentiates between them.

Yes, most depictions of the Chao have both sides shaded in the same way, the thin part of the teardrop-shape darker than the round part.

Of course, just because they're shaded the same, and there's two of them aligned all point-symmetrically, doesn't mean they're the same side. After all, one side got an apple, the other a pentagon. But even without those symbols, they'd be two separate shapes in one symbol, that just happen to be isometrically congruent.

Just because they're 'separated' doesn't change that they are only part of the same symbol. Without Apple and Pentagon (or whatever symbols you substitute), what I take away from this symbol is that What we call Order and Chaos are indistinguishable, making their division meaningless. Adding the additional symbols only gives you a point of reference, a legend for the map, if you will.

[TL;DR: LABELS]

For my bit, I've always preferred "organic/abstract" as the false dichotomy in the chao.

[Pæs]

I still quite like the pentagon as a symbol for order, so long as we continue to use Starbuck's Pebbles. Together, the two illustrate "apparent Order" quite well.

As far as the point about The Pentagon generating disorder goes, I think that the Law of Eristic Escalation handles it best, unless we think that The Pentagon is intentionally generating disorder?