Rant 169: It Rolls On

[Irreverend Hugh, KSC]

Rant 169
It Rolls On

"According to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle, chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organized."
-Terry Pratchett (from "Interesting Times")

Our great excommunication machine known as the Discordian Society rolls on and on, despite our best intentions and to spite our frivolous bouts of forgetfulness and memory-hole blaming. It doesn't even matter if you get attacked by pigeons in the middle of the park for eating bunless hot dogs. It doesn't even matter if you stand there under the street light at four in the morning and shout to the passing taxis filled with drunken club goers on their way to greasy spoons to try to eat their way out of half-assed hook-ups and vodka-red bull cocktails. It doesn't matter that the world at large doesn't believe in Eris, She certainly returns the favor.

While it rolls on and on, provoking laughs and hoots and the occasional exclamation of "what the ring tailed rambling hell?" the murder machine of Patrick Pearse's nightmares is also still rolling on and on. Pearse looked upon the education system of his day and called it the Murder Machine. People laughed and thought he was just being a maudlin Irishman, possibly drunk on wine (though Pearse himself was not a drinker). "Education a murder machine?" they'd say, "How daft!" When Pearse was a boy, the mass starvation of his country was still fresh in the minds of survivors and perhaps he thought, a bit over-optimistically, that humanity would stop getting ground up by one another, if only people would remember. (A shame that most of the victims of that genocide spoke a language most Irish don't use these days. So, instead of accounts and memorials, the horrors just appear as a historical footnote.) Unfortunately, Pearse went and got himself killed by firing squad for being a leader of the Irish uprising in 1916, so we have no more comment from the man. (Grayface seduces even the smartest people, it seems.) Maybe it was for the best though, since he didn't live to see the murder machine flex its muscles all across the 20th century world. (The Holocaust, Cambodia, the Cultural Revolution of China, the destruction of Tibet, Rwanda, Bosnia, the Soviet gulags, and so on and sickening so forth.)

The modern world and all of its progress and betterment and education still keeps its murder machine rolling on and on. (Well, humanity is still under the Curse of Grayface and his ugly face shows up everywhere, even in Slayer songs.) It's not even about fighting for the right to call someone the prettiest anymore. It's about "let's get them before they get us" or "let's just get them. why? well, because they are them." Or it's about "well, I rather fancy buying cheap products at cut-workers-throat prices." It's about people believing that they are the best and some other group is an impediment to their progress and/or happiness. People say that education will help solve this problem and make people more open-minded and not so keen on the idea that killing thousands of other people can make the world better. But that is not what is happening now, is it? The question, which Pearse and others have long raised, is what sort of things are being taught to people during their education? Pearse warned that education can be used for evil as much for good, but no one believed him because humans are always in denial that their methods of progress or betterment can be used for horror and destruction, even as we sit here and sift through the evidence. Pearse's conclusion was that education in his country was being used to murder the Irish people. (And in retaliation for the near slaughter of the Gaelic people, the Irish gave James Joyce to the world as a stunning example of what sort of education was going on there. They also thought Mr. Joyce's ramblings a good example of what the Irish thought about being forced to speak English.) No one at present really knows why Grayface and his minions had it in for the Irish, but I suspect it was because, as poor and oppressed they were at the time, they were still having fun and they still thought of themselves as deserving of fun. (The Church, Protestant and Catholic versions, made quick work of those ideas after all the fun people were starved or exiled.)

It blows the minds of humanity to realize that education can be just as effectively hijacked by the murder machine as a group of Discordians can get hijacked by offers of cheap beer and hot dogs. (But what does humanity at large know about all this since they aren't even aware that Grayface is pulling their legs out from under them.) Oh yeah? Some of you are thinking. "Well, that sort of shit never happens where I am from. This is America (or Japan, or Italy, or some other 'advanced' post-industrial nation)." But just remember that Germany was one of the most advanced nations in the world with a highly educated population when many people there decided that killing other people would be a good idea for Europe. Can't happen in America? So you think, but America's past had several episodes of its own outbreak of murder machinery. (You think about the so-called Indian wars now and remember that what was happening was a large nation was conquering smaller ones and calling it manifest destiny.)  

So what does this have to do with our great rolling roiling Discordian Society and its excommunication machine and all and sundry forms of Operation Mindfuck? Perhaps it's all about staying free from the viral meme-infections which lead people to funny ideas where they reserve soft-spots in their hearts for "getting rid of them." The Murder Machine (Grayface's greatest invention if it could ever be called that) must be stopped. Piece by piece, if need be. Maybe it is a futile endeavor because of the odds, but we have better than odds here. We have oddballs and outcasts and fruits and nuts...people who try, at least occasionally, to get a breath of fresh and free thought. Why should we even care about what most of humanity chooses to do with one another? Because we are participants in the whole story regardless of our personal views to the contrary and thus our fingers should point at ourselves first. (Also because much of what some parts of humanity do to one another includes them doing it to us, if they can.)

Think about it. Our irreligion demands no sacrifices (excepting that little idea known as sanity), and cares little to nothing for the fact that the neighbors worship in different, odd, and silly ways...because we like different, odd, and silly things and they should be encouraged. We Discordians don't care if someone is white, black, brown, purple, or even from America. We don't care about the gods others call upon. (Much of the time we don't even care much about the Goddess we call upon, since She can take care of Herself, mind you.) This sort of tolerance and encouragement is a gem in the trash-heap of the long sordid and horrible recent history of our species. It is a spite and truck-loads of spit in the face of anyone suckered by the incessant whining of Grayface which gets them to say "See. Look at what you made me do." Perhaps we can put a few cracks in the edifice. Maybe we can remember to help subvert education systems that turn people into dutiful cabbages. In the worst case scenario, we will still get the last laugh, not only that but the first laughs as well. The world can be a sorrowful enough place as it is, what with hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and shit like that going on. So I ask why people insist on making it a hellish nightmare for other people? Not because of some programmed biological instinct. Not because of some mystical stain on our collective soul. But because we, as a collective species, simply choose to make it so.

We, as a species, are, quite frankly and literally suckered and seduced by the seemingly powerful notion that ideas and plans are more important than life itself.

It is often claimed that the Aztecs practiced human sacrifice and other cruelties, and we rightly denounce such idiocy. But then we, collectively, turn around with our millions of dead on the altars of progress or purity or ideology or religions, and have the audacity to say that we are better than the Aztecs. (Even though they invented tortilla chips!) Those Aztecs would probably see us as the savage murderers and probably not only savage but all too stupid too (think about just the lives we humans willingly give up for the sake of modern transportation). Although the Aztecs were just as much suckered by Grayface as the rest of the population on this planet, they were probably not as suckered in as their future conquerors were.

Well, the Discordian Society isn't putting up with this sort of nonsense. (Especially when our own sorts of nonsense make us go giddy.) We need no lives sacrificed on any altar for any reason. We don't even need dedication to any mystical abstracted mysteries culled from the secret recesses of magical occult books on sale at Borders. We don't even need the world to acknowledge us (and what a horror if they did). What do we need? Perhaps a little bit of memory. Perhaps some idea of the results of people who take their ideas too seriously. (The results being what I just called the murder machine.) So maybe we should, right at this moment, go out and sacrifice ideas and truths and lies and denials for the cause of chaotic and untrammeled lives. (It's hard to imagine even living freely when one's life is being trammeled. And I don't know exactly what a trammeler is but I don't like the effects.) We need to sacrifice the murder machine...

We also need our laughter. It helps to watch the forces of order try and try again to impose more order and to have it all end up with only the same damned chaos. Perhaps some of these orderlies should have given themselves the gift of reading old Lao Tzu. The only problem is that many people and organizations then start blaming other people or groups when they realize that all their attempts at order is so-much pissing in the wind. We Discordians piss in the wind too, but we know this, enjoy it, and get our yucks in without ever having to stop in that pathetic state where we need to blame and maim others for our silliness. You would think that most of these groups would actually take a look around them and back at history and see that no matter how many millions have been killed for whatever reasons, the same damned chaos is there. Life itself cannot be stopped no matter how many individual beings get stopped. And in the end, Eris laughs all the same at the fools who insist on their ways as being better even as they prove themselves to be more savage and cruel than those they hate.

And we'll still be around insisting that there is no need for all that drama and that snuffing out all those people is the worst sort of sanity in the annals of the short-lived concept. Why? Because, and I am being very hopeful here, we Discordians really dislike people being used like so much fodder for any idea. It goes back to that deeply rooted mistrust for authority, not because an authority is naturally any less trust worthy, but because authority as an idea should never be taken so seriously. The fact that it takes itself rather too seriously gives us the creeps, as it well should.

Does this make us better than the rest of humanity? Depends on your definition. (I don't think anything makes us better or worse except our actions.) But maybe we have do have an inkling of something here. Some way of being or some way of approaching life that at least ensures we can enjoy it while we are here. (Even if some of us keep getting reincarnated and all that. Well, Eris does have a sense of humor that makes even some civilizations cry.) We even have stumbled upon the idea that we can enjoy our lives while we are here without having to destroy other people. Authority (the Murder Machine, trans-dimensional soul suckers, or purveyors of three-headed mind pollution, among other names) hates you personally, if you start thinking crazy things like this.

Regardless of the murder machine's track record and it's amazing ability to keep duping people into believing in any of its causes, our Discordian Society is far older (and has a fine pedigree of the most bastardized mongrelizations ever, and we should know...we made up the certificates just yesterday) and it will far outlast humanity's best attempts at self-destruction simply because we don't discriminate on the basis of species or planetary origins. It's not as if the fnords are needed to eat people's souls and destroy their joy, human beings do a fair job of it all on their own and perhaps that is the point people tried to make when they invented the whole fnord idea. If that makes any sense, I swear it came from somewhere else.

So keep your heads up. The sensitive are the ones who usually have the greatest survival skills (probably through no merit of our own, it's just that we tend to read the writing on the wall a little bit quicker than most others and thus jump out of the way sooner). And if you are reading through all this now, chances are you one of these survivors. It seems hopeless now because stupidity is reproducing faster and exponentially, but do remember that evolution didn't get us this far, (actually it didn't get us anywhere...more like it got us certain things like two legs and large amounts of gray matter and such as that) only to have it all get ground up in the cogs of stupid viral memes. Our Great Lady of the Rollicking Ha-Ha ensures us that some of us will always be around, if only so She can say "See. I told you fools this would happen if you licked that yellow button."

I find myself agreeing with the line from the old Principia Discordia that says "Humanity has been on a bad trip for some time now." We need to stop tripping. Or tripping better. Or something else. But don't listen to me if you want to be told what to do, especially not when I am wearing a silly hat and going around ranting and all that. Listen to yourselves. If we all jump out of the way of the murder machine in different directions, we have the best chance of getting through it all. Even after we feel hungover from all the golden apple rolling and all of our rollicking circus acts.

In closing, this rant should be considered the excommunication notice to the murder machine. We'll create our own methods of madness, thank you very much. And frankly, even when the MM claims to be about freedom, all it really does is all it ever does. It rolls on. Can I get some help pushing a bus into it's path?


Discord 72nd, 3172 / May 25th, 2006
-Irreverend Hugh, KSC;
Episkopos of the DSSS/PMM, Arch-Drunk in the Church of Eris, Sub-Underling of the Hoshi Church, Chairperson of the Dept. of Pigeon Evangelism for the Gerfrickdan Sect,
and (Con)Founder of the Flaming Church of Baby Jesus on a Motorbike.
(Failing these, there is always witchcraft. You know, pins and dolls and odd-tasting stews.)