I'm in the Middle of a Lifelong Discordiential Crisis

[Reverend Elvis Pope Pelvis]

I'm a centrist and a rationalist. I value truth and honesty, measure and reason. In other words, I tend to Spock where others would Kirk. Except when I don't.

I'm passionate and easily frustrated. I get angry when people fall victim to the parlour tricks of the intellectually dishonest.

I am a poor Discordian.

I should delight in people being fooled; in believing nonsense, in being confused. But I don't. I feel like we live in a time of such overwhelming confusion and foolishness that people no longer need our help to be screwed with. The world itself has become chaos. The Information Age exhibits it in abundance.

It used to be different. It used to be that people were victims of government propaganda. Today, we're the victims of our own. Anyone with a cause can make up some bullshit infographic that deceptively appeals to the emotions of a whole swath of idiots and the fucking thing will spread like wildfire on every social media platform in existence. We are no longer the purveyors of chaos, my semi-friends. We are usurped by it.

What place does a Discordian have in this Brave New World? If you ask me, the only person "doing the work" is Ken M.

I'm at a loss.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

For what it's worth, it was never different.  Not in the last 50 years, anyway.

[Reverend Elvis Pope Pelvis]

For what it's worth, it was never different.  Not in the last 50 years, anyway.

To be fair, 50 years doesn't go back that far at this point. The Principia Discordia was published 54 years ago.

[LMNO]

Everyone has their own Discordia. If yours amounts to helplessness in the face of erroneous subjectivity, well, that's valid.

[Cramulus]

I should delight in people being fooled; in believing nonsense, in being confused. But I don't.

I think that's more of a SubGenius thing - they don't necessarily care if the pinks get screwed, it's amusing to them to see a fool and his money go their separate ways

In My Discordia, the cabbages and grayfaces and shitheads are the victims of bureaucracy--and if we've actually found a personal route to salvation, we owe it to our neighbors to speak up about it


I'm not into making coleslaw

I want everybody in      my world         to be in   on the joke


The Holy Moment of Confusion
to me, is like
You thought you understood something
but now you recognize what a shithead you were
so you can see that 'understanding' is incomplete

Celebrate your OWN confusion, your OWN uncertainty.
It frees you from rigidity!~
It frees you from the psychological traps that surround Being Right



 "Some say he is a holy man. Others say he is a shithead."
         hearing this, the man was enlightened.

It used to be different. It used to be that people were victims of government propaganda. Today, we're the victims of our own. Anyone with a cause can make up some bullshit infographic that deceptively appeals to the emotions of a whole swath of idiots and the fucking thing will spread like wildfire on every social media platform in existence.

this is the big Power question

in the old days, power was hierarchically distributed - some sovereign had it, and if there was no sovereign, there was no law

then the revolutions came - revolutions are great at decapitating power, when it's concentrated.

then the power reorganized itself to be immune to popular revolution -- we got things like juries and democratic representation. Everybody has access to the market. Later, everybody can talk on the internet. The power was distributed to you and me. Which makes it immune to decapitation - to move power somewhere else, you have to break a lot of things that are protected for good reasons.


The world is made of groups, so you can't do much on your own. The individual is just a drop of water in the ocean.

But you can become part of a larger group, a wave, and create the momentum


whatever that means

What place does a Discordian have in this Brave New World?

it's not my place to say what Discordians' place is. There are a lot of 'suggestions' in the lit. We have this great fictional backstory which positions us as revolutionaries and harbingers and dancers of the Strange Times. (But now - revolution probably isn't what we used to think it was.) Some of lot of our spiritual heritage is a western iteration of the rinzai-school. Grand and Glory Old Discordjia's like a gnostic calling - it's your experience, it's not for me to say you're right or wrong.

I think the place is

to think about your relationship to the Chaos,
what you want it to be,
where you want to be in it...

to recognize what's real but actually fake
to see what's fake that's actually real

to let the transformative alchemy of laughter work on us, through us,
and then offer it up as sacrament in communion


take, eat,
this is my cat's penis

[P3nT4gR4m]

I should delight in people being fooled; in believing nonsense, in being confused. But I don't.

I think that's more of a SubGenius thing - they don't necessarily care if the pinks get screwed, it's amusing to them to see a fool and his money go their separate ways

In My Discordia, the cabbages and grayfaces and shitheads are the victims of bureaucracy--and if we've actually found a personal route to salvation, we owe it to our neighbors to speak up about it


I'm not into making coleslaw

I want everybody in      my world         to be in   on the joke

I used to think like that. For years. If I could just spread the word and wake people the fuck up but I was wrong. That's evangelism. That's what everybody's trying to do. One way or another. They have the right to be wrong and nobody, not me, not you, not anybody has the right to take that away from them.

And that's funny. That's the joke. That's why there is a goddess. And she's chaos. And she's laughing her fucking sacred ass off. And so should you. If anything ends up "getting sorted" (for a given definition of fixt) It'll be because it sorted itself. From where I'm sitting things generally seem to trend toward better.

Sit back, get a bucket in case there's piss and laugh at the fuckheads baying for worse. There's nothing funnier than the look on a turkey's face when they've been chanting "What do we want? We want christmas!" and they finally get to meet santa and he's not what they were expecting. Cracks me up. Every. Fucking. Time.

[LMNO]

Take this,
this is my cat's penis

SORRY TO HEAR.

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

Holy shit, Elvis Martini made a useful thread!



To me, Discordia is about learning to accept and navigate chaotic situations, to create order where we want when we want rather than everywhere all the time, and to infect others with the idea as best as we can. It's not Ken M. Disco or Gum In The Turnstiles Discordia, but it's mine and I like it.

Accepting that you're bad at a given uniform you've picked up is a really good step towards recognizing the fact that you are more than your uniforms, and you get to choose what to wear and even learn to sew your own. This is all The Work, too.

[LMNO]

[PoFP]

To me, Discordia is about learning to accept and navigate chaotic situations, to create order where we want when we want rather than everywhere all the time, and to infect others with the idea as best as we can. It's not Ken M. Disco or Gum In The Turnstiles Discordia, but it's mine and I like it.

Accepting that you're bad at a given uniform you've picked up is a really good step towards recognizing the fact that you are more than your uniforms, and you get to choose what to wear and even learn to sew your own. This is all The Work, too.

If I could've read this like 5 years ago, I'd be much better off now, mentally.

And the bolded would have been life changing for me at the same time outside the context of Discordianism.

If only we had a place where we could put hard-hitting snippets like this. Almost like a public feed of some sort. One that anyone would see simply by entering the forum. Almost like a news head-line...

Anyways, I'm sure someone will think of a way to get it out there. 

[Chelagoras The Boulder]

I see discordianism as a means to be my own personal cult leader, I get to define what beliefs are useful to me and give my life meaning. As for what my place is, generally speaking, it's wherever I feel like being. I actually find the part of the Prinicipia that talks about cycles of chaos and order and aftermath pretty comforting these days. Everything's going to shit, all our institutions are proving to be jokes, one after another, this seems like a pretty obvious season of Aftermath, perhaps heading into Chaos, so at least I have the benefit of having an idea of what to expect, roughly, going forward.

I remember in high school I used to struggle with explaining Discordianism to friendsee in philosophical debatea, but now if someone were to ask ask me, "how can you possibly believe that the universe is governed by Chaos?" I can just gesture broadly at everything that's going on like some Zen Buddhist monk, and go "cuz I'm paying attention."