Rant 31

[Irreverend Hugh, KSC]

Rant 31

?¨The great are great only because we are on our knees.?Æ
-Max Stirner

"Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves."-Henry David Thoreau

"If you spend most of your waking life taking orders or kissing ass, if you get habituated to hierarchy, you will become passive-aggressive, sado-masochistic, servile and stupefied, and you will carry that load into every aspect of the balance of your life."
-Bob Black

?¨That which does not kill me had better run pretty damn fast.?Æ

How many mindfucks are you willing to perpetrate today? A silly question? Not for me. It could be that way because I am insane, but I suspect Eris. I am discordian until proven guilty in a court of chaos. So are you. Try to hide behind your silly charades of grayfaced denunciations of Discordian labeling of people as grayfaced. Try to hide behind some intellectual gibbering about the true nature of chaos. Try to hide behind some fluff bunny white light attitude of magical significance in every little thing. It doesn??t matter how you hide. It doesn??t matter what you hide behind. Go ahead?ñrun off on some pallid adventure of in which you gain excitement by injecting your histrionics?ñor the delusion that everything you do is important to the multiverse. Eris will slap that snot out of your mind, hopefully.

And She will probably use me as the tool to do so. Or one of you.

If you are seeking to find yourself, you are deluded. Look in a mirror, silly. The best poetry is between the lines. The self you seek is in your seeking. Do you really need to try to prove that you need bottled air? How is that different from the rest of society with its DUMB tyranny of the mediocre and normal?ña pallid insistence that equality is in fact sameness when, if you actually felt any emotion at all, your heart would rebel at that nauseating distortion. Skipping away in pseudo-laughter to dodge problems and fluffy silliness is still no excuse for lacking intelligence. No matter what you may wish to think, Discordianism is not here for your consolation. If you want that, go join the New Age or something?ñthey have all sorts of pretty sounding self-consoling teachings which serve to function as convenient escapes from experience. You want consolation? Go and get it yourselves.

If you believe me, that is your undoing. I could be lying in everything I say. This is the post-modern commercialized world after all, so what use is clarity or honesty? Quaint notions left over from times when humans almost had developed cultures that were not dependent on the market. What use is compassion and enlightenment if it can??t be compartmentalized and sold? Or bought? You??re better off going to a spiritual seminar where gurus will tell you all you want to hear than trying out Discordianism. But then again, it??s only a matter of time before the creeping mediocrity of market values infects Discordianism. And we??ll all go along with it because that is what we really are, at heart, economic creatures for sale. Our worth measured in numbers. Our cultures dictated by advertising and fashion planning. Our desires subverted into shopping?ñfor everything and anything. We have become twisted caricatures who have been trained to take pleasure from our enslavement. Can you unlearn how to be a slave? Can you learn to grow up beyond the need for obedience?

And the strange things that can??t be bought or sold or owned at all still remain the most beautiful. Like Eris, like sunsets, like snow falling, like the magic that witches do?ñthe subtle kiss of anarchy that freedom brings.

The most disheartening thing about the commercial culture and society in which we live is that it gives off the appearance of a wonderful chaos while it stifles the very freedom that is chaos. And instead of seeing that space where there is nothing you can own, not even your own soul, you just try to come up with ideas proving that you do, in fact, own chaos?ñor you are chaos?ñor you are intelligent because you realize chaos?ñor you have all these experiences which make you uniquely suited to chaos?ñor something. It??s all gibberish. What individual that walks on this planet does not have the delusion that they are really unique specimens that deserve a unique focus from all those around them? People get this sickening narcissism from advertising which tells you that you are, in fact unique, only after you acquire what everyone else has.

You have freedom on a silver platter. Freedom and liberty are confused much too often. The useful difference is this. You have the freedom to experience your life the way it is now, whether or not you have the liberty to change the circumstances. This is what witches learn, despite all the high-blown talk of occult powers. That is what Buddhist adepts learn, despite all the muddled attempts at incomprehension from those who study the practices. Magic? That??s just the side effect of a mind immersed in freedom. Having liberty is quite useless without freedom. But you can have freedom regardless of liberty.

What good is doing the same thing over and over again for years? Does it mean you have more experience than a beginner, or does it mean you have simply been repeating yourself? What good is doing apparently different things all the time in an affectation of chaos? Either way?ñif you aren??t growing, you aren??t growing. You are wasting your pineal gland in your slow descent towards cabbage-hood. Which is okay, if that is your goal. Go ahead and keep obeying your masters, keep buying their products paid for with money they allow you after you slave away for them.

If the State and our slavery exist because of our compliance and our compliance is based off of illusion, then we are all responsible for cultivating and embellishing that illusion. Taking responsibility for that is the first step towards freedom. Refusing to live in obedience is the way in which you can take further steps. Freedom is not some state you arrive at or attain. It is a way of being and relating. Once you have determined to live freely, there is no telling what your imagination will lead you to. If I sound contradictory and so on, so be it. I am trying to unlearn obedience. I will not speak too much of freedom for it means little as an abstraction. It must be made concrete. And yet as Eris said, we are all free.

But here is a little quote to think about:

"You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid, monotonous work, chances are you'll end
up boring, stupid, and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping
cretinisation all around us than even such significant moronising mechanisms as
television and education. People who are regimented all their lives, handed to work from
school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home in the end, are
habituated to hierarchy and psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so
atrophied that their fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded phobias.
Their obedience training at work carries over into the families they start, thus
reproducing the system in more ways than one, and into politics, culture and everything
else. Once you drain the vitality from people at work, they'll likely submit to hierarchy
and expertise in everything. They're used to it."
-Bob Black (The Abolition of Work)

Let us hope that those of us committed to living the way we wish will keep doing so, despite all the pressures and incentives to take up the old familiar patterns of obedience.

(Chaos 34th , 3170)

Note: This may be the last rant for a while. Changes in life at the moment may pull me on to other things.

[MaxwellsDemon]

"Straw dogs"
         Lau Tzu

I concur good sir, but how may I exit this comercialised world without wearing a ripped overcoat and smelling vaguely of urine?

Interestingly the sanskrit word for freedom, that is, liberation from illusion, 'I', and suffering is; Moksha. Which to me sounds like a tasty cofeee... prehaps caffeine is the key, no?

[mobbing]

I think the key to freedom or liberty or somthing that we can't imagine now because wir too deep in this slavery thingie, is to learn lucid dreaming. and teach it to every person you know. it is not just funny to do things in your dreams that are impossible in the real world it also keeps your fantasy alive and it is maby a little step towards freedom. maby just in your dreams but this is a good training to keep you "alive", it would keep the chaos in your heart alive, even if you live in such a fucking real, normal and damn capitalistic world.

and if you think this is all bullshit, try lucid dreaming it is a lot of fun if your fantasy is not dead yet

[Slarti]

awesome rant hugh..

i always read rants by you and roger and trollax, and the others, and i think 'wow, i really am i slave.. i need to do something about this' but then i do nothing out of FEAR. fear is my big problem that i'm trying to overcome.