operation mindfuck
operation mindfuck was too successful — r. u. sirius interviewed by douglas rushkoff (part 1 )
@ bogusmagus the right basically stole operation mindfuck from us, weaponised postmodernism. the discordian response is evolving…
om stands for operation mindfuck. it is an ongoing discordian project to challenge existing assumptions and provoke critical and creative thought .
r. u. sirius: yeah, i’m sorry i blew up consensus reality, man. operation mindfuck was too successful. (laughter )
wilson was a leading figure in the counterculture project known as operation mindfuck. this was a form of western zen. seeding our culture with confusion, contradiction and mischief, it was thought, would jolt people out of their illusions. operation mindfuck kicked off in the 1970s and has never really stopped .
the rise of the alt - right, with their use of meme magic, conspiracies and disinformation, led to left - leaning discordians thinking that operation mindfuck had been weaponised against them .
re: operation mindfuck what is the op even talking about? everyone knows our leader is and always has been l ron hubbard. eric bauman was just a pseudonym. : lrhtalking :
operation mindfuck, like the discordian religion which embraced it, was typically politically neutral, or at least clear that the ideologies of both the left and right were equally valid targets. however, the ideas behind operation mindfuck have since become a tool for those with a lust for political power, most blatantly putin’s advisor vladislav surkov, as explained in this short film by adam curtis .
re: operation mindfuck you are saying the thetan (spirit) of l. ron hubbard is really the leader of anonymous? ?! !! ! 1 * head asplodes *: rage :
re: operation mindfuck yea, that would be a good episode to show people when they get out of co $ and are actually allowed to watch critical materials. south park furthers the lull potential here .
i am rereading it, after several years after i read it for the first time, and new stuff pops out. one of the most important bits (for me) is operation mindfuck and its principles .
let & apos; s donate some books to the jail where your uncle & apos; s locked up and sneak in
principia discordia
. give him some ideas for his own operation mindfuck on the guards .
this magical psiop combines ce5, sigil magic and memetic lulz warefare, drawing influence from the discordian operation mindfuck, the dkmu linking sigil, anonymous ethersec and project mayhem 2012 and the first earth battalion' s
evolutionary tactics
.
greetings fellow mutants, rebels, vagabonds, activists, ragamuffins and neerdowells and welcome to your initiation into discordianism and operation mindfuck. soon you too will know the pleasures of raping your own mind and wallow in the knowledge that everything is true .
you don’t need me to tell you that this is currently grim as all hell. but if you take the long term, pragmatic view, it could be that the use of operation mindfuck techniques in this way are, essentially, a trap .
after adopting his discordian persona of creepy the inexcusable, our man floyd anderson wasted no time reviving operation mindfuck (om) by way of the bavarian illuminati letterhead provided here free of charge at historiadiscordia. com, your full service discordian mischief provider. …
in the illuminatus! trilogy the concept of operation mindfuck (om) was introduced and in many ways illuminatus! itself was an act of om, which included the discordians high - jacking the bavarian illuminati mythos and making it their own. the method to …
omgasm stands for operation: mindfuck - golden apple seed missions. it' s a call to action for discordians and any friend of the free - thinking lunatic fringe. it works to get people involved in various fringe projects both on and off the internet .
what is the way forward? readers of robert anton wilson are a useful group to look at here because they have already processed chapel perilous and, judging by the ones i’ve met, there is something interesting happening. it is too soon to definitively label and define, but the designer amoeba has coined the temporarily - useful name operation mindfix. as he says, operation mindfuck is over for discordians because it is unnecessary in the post - 2016 world. from now on, the ongoing work can be considered part of operation mindfix .
now the fun really begins. as a discordian you are part of operation mindfuck, a decentralized, individual driven movement of social change and mockery with the express purpose of shocking or confusing the masses out of the hold they have on themselves. there is no chosen method or doctrine when it comes to the operation, though causing physical injury to others is looked down on. a discordian has no laws and is unbound by what is considered socially exceptionable so do whatever you want .
this magical psiop combines ce5, sigil magic and memetic lulz warefare, drawing influence from the [ [ discordian | discordianism ] ] [ [ operation mindfuck ] ], the [ [ dkmu ] ] [ [ linking sigil ] ], anonymous ethersec and [ [ project mayhem 2012 ] ] and the first earth battalion' s
evolutionary tactics
.
this magical psiop combines ce5, sigil magic and memetic lulz warefare, drawing influence from the [ [ discordianism | discordian ] ] [ [ operation mindfuck ] ], the [ [ dkmu ] ] [ [ linking sigil ] ], anonymous ethersec and [ [ project mayhem 2012 ] ] and the first earth battalion' s
evolutionary tactics
.
re: operation mindfuck this idea not only has aids, it has super aids. the kind that gets transmitted through visual contact. all this would do is make us look stupid and piss off any freezoners who decided to step up to the plate. it' s good that you' re brainstorming, but this one' s a sinker .
and i don’t mean to pin it all on the russians. the contingency of truth — or the multiplicity of realities — is a great way to understand things existentially or ideologically, but it’s impinged too deeply into the area of actual news versus fake news and science denial. that’s probably what i mean when i say operation mindfuck has been too successful .
i have a suspicion that, when we moved from being hierarchical people of the book to networked people of the screen, all this became inevitable. which is not to say that operation mindfuck or the illuminatus! trilogy were unnecessary. they were, in many ways, a training manual for both understanding this particular point in time, and in getting through it .
re: operation mindfuck i think that this being the first really heavy infowar afaik, that there is a theme emerging. that we have the truth and they have lies. i think there are some important people interested in seeing which is the better weapon. and we' re proving that in the right hands the truth can be more devastating than an atomic bomb, metaphorically speaking .
re: operation mindfuck you are focusing on religious beliefs and trying to fuck with them - dont do that. itd be tantamount to claiming that the christians are wrong - jesus didnt come back thousands of years ago, hes actually wbm. there is no way to take that other than being total jackasses who hate a religion. as a morbidly obese man once said
stay on target !
in the last thc before we start the thc plus shows, everyone' s favorite crackpot historian joins me to talk about his new book, historia discordia, the origins of the discordian society, operation mindfuck, and some of the famous enlightened trouble makers who have embodied the trickster archetype: robert anton wilson, timothy leary, terence mckenna, hunter s. thompson, and more! it' s a good time !
re: operation mindfuck anonymous rejects the rpf and physical punishment, which were instituted by hubbard in person. anonymous rejects the disconnection and fair game policies, which were written and implemented by hubbard in person. anonymous rejects the brainwashing and personality - displacement, which were specifically designed by hubbard in person. and you want to say that anonymous is hubbard' s secret weapon? puh - leeze. you owe us internets and cake. lots .
announcing operation mindfuck. in the grand old tradition of very weird and / or subversive lives of such luminaries as kerry thornley and greg hill, and with inspiration from people such as robert anton wilson, buckminster fuller and aleister crowley, i have undertaken to join the fray and started my very own attempt to jolt people out of their everyday existence in a way that — just maybe — might bring about some shred of enlightenment into their dull, padded minds .
in the late 1960s, the group launched a project dubbed operation mindfuck. one prominent discordian, the novelist robert anton wilson, later explained that they wanted to be a
cosmic giggle factor .
they would create
so many alternative paranoias that everybody could pick a favorite, if they were inclined that way .
he added ,
i also hoped that some less gullible souls, overwhelmed by this embarrassment of riches, might see through the whole paranoia game .
following the tactic of anonymous, ethersec and project mayhem, operation intruder was first anounced in a pastebin post. the original pastebin has been lost, but a version with various typos corrected, and social media links added can be found here :
r. u. sirius: probably, yeah. if you follow some of the ideological discourse from people who are really influential in russia, it’s postmodernism and operation mindfuck in the service of amoral raw power and political strategy. i know secondhand that there are people in putin’s mindtrust who have read their leary and their discordianism and so forth and they are following a chaos strategy for disrupting the american consensus… or however you want to phrase the collapsing neoliberal order. and not collapsing towards a good end .
i don' t think it' s a great idea to engage in any type of mindfuck, and here' s why: the leaders of the cult will see it for exactly what it is. scientology is a means of control exercised by the leaders of scientology over it' s adherents. the only people you would be mindfucking are the people anonymous has stated we have no issue with. you can' t mindfuck the leadership - they are the only ones in the co $ that
the discordians created characters —
ho chi zen
and others had pasts and personalities of their own. and they engaged in a haphazard kind of worldbuilding, outlining a constellation of competing conspiracies. two discordians, wilson and robert shea, eventually turned that world into a science - fiction trilogy, illuminatus! , that was published in 1975 and still has a devoted cult following. illuminatus! was not the summation of operation mindfuck so much as a gateway to it. indeed, it included an appendix that more or less urged the reader to join in .
peration mindfuck was a free - form art project–cum–prank–cum–political protest of the sixties and seventies, designed to sow the culture with paranoia. the key figures behind it were kerry thornley, co - founder of a satiric religion called discordianism, and robert anton wilson, a discordian staffer at
the discordians' second descendant is a kind of absurdist prankster politics. they did not invent the politically charged hoax, of course, nor were they the only anti - authoritarian pranksters of the' 60s. operation mindfuck began at about the same time that abbie hoffman, jerry rubin, paul krassner, and the other radicals known as the yippies were doing a somewhat similar set of stunts. (there was some overlap between the discordians and the yippies, and there was some tension too: wilson was close friends with krassner, but he found hoffman
nasty and mean .
)
so, first off, our blogging is going to increase. â by a lot. â secondly, our writers are each going to concentrate on a particular sphere of interest, in addition to using the blog to write about whatever they feel. â so, for example, we will have writers here concentrating on the law of fives and how the brain works, on the art of pranking and operation mindfuck, some idiot dealing with politics and warfare, a guy investigating online subcultures, someone keeping a close eye on the world of religion, someone who can help you prepare for any situation, a guy interested in how maps do not correspond to reality, a biology expert and much, much more .
mindfuck: is the dream world actually separate from so called reality? there was a website (ceased to exist) which claimed dreams where a program for
gods in training
. in those lucid dreams you can create thing out of thin air, those guys claimed it was possible to draw those elements from dream states into what we commonly perceive as reality .
re: operation mindfuck let' s, please, leave rumors and innuendo to the asshats in osa. it' s obvious that strategy is one giant bucket of fail. it' s burning their ass everywhere it' s been countered with truth and facts anyone who cares to can reference. i find it hilarious that their own doctrine chains them to a course of action (lying / slandering) that will eventually be their downfall. no personal attack meant by this, but fail idea is fail. you don' t counter bullshit with more bullshit. you counter it with overwhelming truth. bullshit is * easy * to produce. get to work producing factual, well thought out arguments against the bs the cos pumps out. take the high road .
adam gorightly' s new book is hardcore. the most battle - hardened historian would blanch at writing a history of discordian society. as you can imagine with a society whose major contribution to world culture was a conspiracy called operation mindfuck, telling accurate stories of their origin was not their thing. discordians thought it was far more useful and enlightening to make stuff up. that this book exists is, frankly, something of a miracle. but it was clear from his earlier biography of kerry thornley that if anyone was going to pull this off, it would be adam gorightly. this is a large - sized, coffee table book full of reproductions of original discordian society documents, the holy grail of which is a complete reproduction of the long assumed lost first edition of the principia discordia. only five copies of this were ever made, ironically on the photocopier of new orleans district attorney jim garrison, who would later suspect co - author kerry thornley of involvement in the …
it is my opinion that chick tracts are the project of some secret discordian cabal (which is really special; most discordian cabals can’t keep their fucking mouths shut about their activities to save their nutty little lives) intended to discredit fundamentalist christianity in the minds of almost everyone but the people handing them out. i can think of no resource more likely to turn someone away from fundamentalism than the paranoid ramblings of jack chick. they provoke in me not anger or even indignation, but, at their “best” moments, outright uncontrollable laughter. this is the exact opposite of what the individuals who distribute them (assuming they’re on the level and not part of the discordian plot) want. laughter is far worse than a complaint or a lawsuit. in any case, even if chick tracts are not directly related to operation mindfuck, they serve the purposes of our lady anyway. there is so much aneristic constipation inherent in one of those little comics that it blows out its own asshole and splatters eristic glee about the cosmos. her ways are mysterious, and a little annoying. or something .
it' s quite the mindfuck, this inevitably leads me to ask: how the hell can i guarantee that everything which apparently is not me (people, stuff, animals, minerals and all that) is not just some kind of intense dream state? you know like when you go to sleep and you would swear the damn thing felt so real despite some things being off, like when you dream about places and people you' ve been to and met before and some details are different than so called reality... why on earth does it feel so real ?
re: operation mindfuck or we could not be complete dorks and - we don' t need to come up with extravagant lies about $ cientology and their wacky beliefs - it' s already wacky enough. non - $ cientologist need to be told the truth about that fraud, l. ron hubbard, the lying co $ and the corrupt david miscavige - not to mention the abuses of the rpf, disconnection and how their campaign against psychiatry is actually destroying lives (as seen in the lisa macpherson case) people actually in $ cientology wouldn' t be affected at all by such a ruse, mainly because they won' t ever see it. you keep thinking they have as much access to the internet and the truth as you do... they don' t. they are trapped in a brain - washing cult and their every thought - not to mention every penny they have - is being controlled by their handlers / auditors. all this
plan
would really accomplish is confirming what co $' goon squad, the osa, have been saying along... that the co $' detractors are nothing but a bunch of annoying, lying cyberpunk brats. this idea is full of fail. no offense .
extremely subtle, confusing changes; funny. extremely large, confusing changes; possibly funny, if done with a high level of forethought. i like to plant products in people’s houses, and do shit like replace their half - used jug of milk with a half - used jug of different milk, or put a handful of mayonnaise packets in their butter compartment, just because it’s subtle enough to make them question their own realities. adding magazines to their bedside table or stuffing a pair of socks under the blanket at the foot of the bed, or adding a pair of shoes in their size to their closet, are also good. you can choose things which really do fuck with people’s minds, making it a mindfuck and not just an irritating obvious prank .
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. through every means available, wilson explained in a memo laying out the plan, the mindfuckers intended to “attribute all national calamities, assassinations, or conspiracies” to the illuminati and other hidden hands .
so they planted stories about the illuminati in the underground press. they slipped mysterious classified ads into the libertarian journal innovator and the new left newspaper rogerspark. they cooked up a letter about the illuminati that wilson then ran in “the playboy advisor. ” when a new orleans jury refused to convict one of the men who the conspiracy - hunting district attorney jim garrison blamed for the jfk killing, garrison’s booster art kunkin, of the los angeles free press, got a note revealing that the jurors were all illuminati initiates. the telltale sign: none of them had a left nipple .
“what if there really is an illuminati? ” wilson asked thornley one pot - fogged night in 1968. “maybe they’ll find out about us and be pissed. ”
“i doubt if there is, ” thornley answered. “and if there by some chance is, they would probably be very happy to have wild­ass fools like us covering up for them by spreading bizarre theories. ”
one of the more curious characters (and when i say character, i mean, yeah, this guy was definitely a character) to emerge from the oswald / thornley / garrison rabbit hole was a oddball named a. edward horsey, who somehow finagled his way into …
thanks to charles faris for inviting me take the helm for this week’s cosmic trigger reading. i ended up writing a lot more than i’d initially intended… but sometimes that happens! (i blame it on the dog days .) we pick …
on page 557 of illuminatus! we are introduced to hassan i sabbah x, a character who—it appears—was first conceptualized by kerry thornley in this august 1968 letter to fellow discordian louise lacey (aka lady l. , f. a. b .), all of this part …
an excerpt from my latest book caught in the crossfire: kerry thornley, lee oswald and the garrison investigation, available at feral house and amazon. among jim garrison’s more colorful unofficial investigators (otherwise known as the “irregulars”) was allan chapman who …
guest post by steven adkins prepare yourself (s) for an amazing interview with a largely unknown (until now !) discordian named hope springs (real name mary wheeler) conducted by steven adkins of the law of silence blog. mary—as you’ll soon discover—found herself …
writer, editor, occasional talk show host & vocalist / lyricist. steal this singularity, mondo 2000, open source party, r. u. sirius shows, mondo vanilli…
“sartre said hell is other people. now, hell is other people’s tweets or posts. they just irritate the crap out of all of us. the feeling is mutual. ”
on april 5, i was on douglas rushkoff’s team human radio show. we agreed to get the interview transcribed for possible publication somewhere .
i’ve decided that rather than trying to edit a truncated version to pitch to more popular websites, i’m just going to keep it conversational and run it here. maybe less people will see it, but that’s ok. i get to say what i want .
i’ve added to my own spew as i edited. we hope you enjoy .
douglas rushkoff: i came in contact with your work for the first time at a psychedelics conference in los angeles. albert hoffman and laura huxley [ aldous huxley’s wife ] were there. timothy was there, and i think ram das and ralph metzner. it was the original psychedelics crowd .
and there were a bunch of issues of your first magazine, high frontiers. and to me it was like a calling card from the future .
i was in my early 20’s, and your magazine was an amalgamation of everything that i had been interested in yet had never seen connected before: cultural, scientific, biological, cosmic, spiritual, and pharmacological advances, all in one place. how did physics and math and drugs and music and culture and transgender and cultural alchemy all end up considered part of the same strand of cultural information? how did you come up with that ?
r. u. sirius: in a way, it just came together in my head. i assumed that there were other people out there like me. sort of like what paul krassner said about starting the realist at the start of the ’60s. he put it out to meet the other aliens…
and to me, the generational aspect of it was important. and the cultural aspect of it was important. because even though i was from a generation that had a lot of hippies and deadheads and so on, we were also the people who created the cultures of punk and new wave. i was in my mid - twenties when all that came along and it was a refreshing blast to my pot - soaked mind .
so i was adapted for a very speedy, hyper, futuristic mentality by that, as well as by scientific ideas and psychedelic ideas and so forth .
and by the time we were doing high frontiers in the mid - 80s, one could clearly see the so - called digital revolution coming on, and one could be fairly optimistic about it… actually, radically over - optimistic. (laughter) so all these things just felt like the makings of a truly contemporary magazine .
douglas rushkoff: high frontiers really ran the full gamut of hallucinatory experiences. it was a flag in the sand. leary had said, “find the others. ” and this was saying to a new generation, “yes, there are others. these are our experiences. ”
but then, you turned it into reality hackers and eventually mondo 2000. it became the voice of this 21st century post - television, designer - reality society .
r. u. sirius: yeah, the jetsons on dmt, as mark dery snarkily labeled it .
douglas rushkoff: and then, by the early 1990’s, cyberdelic scene spawned a new cultural phenomenon … the early rave - club - kids. and that helped give it an aesthetic that was more pleasing to young people than the old haight - ashbury world of wavy gravy and tie - dye t - shirts .
r. u. sirius: that’s true. but i have to say that’s where i was a bit of a crusty old rocker myself. i was never that enamored of the musical style, and i would always be the one leaving the rave at four in the morning rather than staying ’til dawn. but sure, it was an incredible flowering of a new kind of hedonic optimism that was very reminiscent of late ’60s hippie optimism .
douglas rushkoff: i always blamed wired magazine and the investment ethos for changing the internet from an anything - can - happen, new human - potential movement that was represented so well by mondo 2000, into the same old expansion of capital through ipos and digital companies. i hate to even term it like this, but what went wrong? why didn’t we get the whole everything changing at once for the human better that we were all imagining up in the berkeley hills in the mondo 2000 living room ?
r. u. sirius: i thought material abundance would come faster. the plan — such as it was — was that ideas and content could be replicated infinitely and therefor couldn’t be hoarded and had to be shared… and this would be matched by molecular technology that would turn matter into data that also could be infinitely replicated. i think that was the underlying utopian narrative. so aside from the ideology of the market, which we didn’t necessarily share with wired, there was the excess of techno - optimism. i have to say that there was always a dark undercurrent with mondo though. critics quote the first editorial that was very woo - woo, but after that, ambiguity and tongue - in - chic were watchwords .
anyway, the logic was that replicability would lead to a collapse of the barriers — of the turnstiles — around what people want and need. and we would have a post scarcity society that would liberate people and allow them to be playful and creative and friendly. i mean, that was the hippieish or post - hippieish aspect of mondo — “the machines of loving grace. ” there was definitely an underestimation of the tenacity of greed and power baked in to the early issues. there was this buckminster fuller notion that the technology changes the situation materially and that humans would response rationally to that. that’s sort of a marxist view too… or an element of it. so the technology failed, the people failed, and the system failed to live up to these fever dreams .
r. u. sirius: there was this vibe among people in the cyberculture of the ’90s that things would change very fast. some of it was inchoate. some of it was… ummm… less inchoate .
a lot of these emerging technological potentials like nanotechnology — we didn’t examine the timelines and the realities as closely as we might have. somebody who spent some time with al gore while he was vice president told me he worried that the singularity was going to happen during his presidency! obviously, neither of those things happened… but that was the sort of thing that was going around in technoculture. and capitalism was there and figured out how and when this online world could be useful and made it more banal. it turned things to crap and also performed some useful services. and that’s the conundrum that we’re stuck with now .
douglas rushkoff: it feels as if capitalism is much more suited for the net than humans or culture are. you know, capitalism is abstract. of the three factors of production — land, labor, and capital — capital is the only one that can expand infinitely. it’s not real .
r. u. sirius: yeah. we don’t even need to have any humans left for the stock market to go through the roof. it can all be done by ais .
if you look at that famous wired magazine issue about the so - called long boom — this idea in the late ’90s that it was all uphill from here — the greatest emphasis is on how the market … the stock market… nasdaq and so forth would grow to these unthinkably awesome numbers. improvements in the lives of humans were almost a footnote .
i almost got sold. if wealth became vast enough, it would actually trickle - down. most everything would be given away for free to everybody. you’d somehow manage to buy a few dollars worth of stock and it’d explode into abundance — or at least that was the sort of capitalist theory of post - scarcity. that theory is certainly still out there, albeit far less popular .
douglas rushkoff: the problem with capitalism is that we didn’t own these networks, so they started extracting more value than they were giving us. so do you think the main problem was capitalism taking over the net or were we not really ready culturally — or did we not have the consciousness — to do what the net was suggesting, to really connect with other people on this new level ?
r. u. sirius: it has as much to do with people as it does with capitalism. the masses, so to speak, came online. and the coming together of the global mind — or whatever idealistic metaphor from the cyber - 90s we might use — did not prove to be as delightful as john perry barlow or whomever might have hoped. what we realized is that – - within the terrain of disembodied minds — familiarity breeds contempt. and lots of death threats! i don’t want to know most people’s thoughts! sartre said hell is other people. now, hell is other people’s tweets or posts. they just irritate the crap out of all of us. the feeling is mutual .
douglas rushkoff: i know. it’s almost as if internet users should have had some kind of a psychedelic training before they went online so they would be better prepared for this level of social interaction .
r. u. sirius: it could help, although there are certainly plenty of intolerant psychedelic users online as well .
that’s a whole other area where i’ve become more critical… that whole thing about psychedelic people believing in bizarre stuff. i found it benign and amusing in the past, but it’s one of the consequences of the psychedelic revolution that i find far more irritating and consequential now .
hippie culture is a folk culture. it’s pre - scientific and memes spread and take over fast. suddenly everybody knows that the rothchilds own everything and that there’s a magical hugging lady on tour .
douglas rushkoff: i remember you and i bonded again 20 years later, shortly after 9 / 11, when some of the more extreme conspiracy theories were going around. we both took a lot of heat for not buying into them. i wrote a piece where i was arguing these were disinformants spreading these stories because they’re trying to keep us from seeing the simple basic truth of what had happened, which is horrible enough .
and it feels like 9 / 11 and the acceleration of conspiracy theory that it spawned, combined with the internet and the ability to connect anything to anything else, has yielded this bizarre world of ontological relativism that we’re in today where people can be so easily manipulated and drawn into these rabbit holes of false truths .
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they would create
so many alternative paranoias that everybody could pick a favorite, if they were inclined that way .
he added ,
i also hoped that some less gullible souls, overwhelmed by this embarrassment of riches, might see through the whole paranoia game .
over fifty years ago, a group of pranksters founded a satiric religion devoted to creating conspiracy theories so insane that nobody would ever believe uncritically in conspiracies again. they called themselves the discordians. and their weird ideas are still influencing us today .
history does not record robert welch' s reaction when he received a letter on bavarian illuminati stationery in 1970. welch was the founder of the john birch society, a conservative group with a paranoid bent, mostly focused on communist conspiracies but also willing to expand its gallery of villains to include other secret cabals. the illuminati are an 18th - century secret society whose alleged efforts to control the world were regularly decried by groups like, well, the john birch society .
welch may have been a nut but he wasn' t a fool, and he was probably pretty sure someone was pulling his leg by the time he saw that the note had been written by
ho chi zen, cong king of gorilla warfare .
but i like to imagine that curiosity compelled him to read on .
we have been meaning to write you for some time ,
the message began. they claimed they had held off until harper' s magazine—which, the letter assured him, the illuminati controlled—had interviewed welch in its august issue. it continued :
all this is in keeping with our new policy of allowing alert and sophisticated persons such as yourself and your followers and associates a more comprehensive review of our activities. for with 96. 5% of the entire world now under our collective thumb, we just no longer see any point in sneaking around behind the scenes all the time .
the letter went on to give welch a list of high - ranking members of the illuminati, among them uncle remus ,
rabbi koan ,
and one of the birch society' s star writers, gary allen .
this prank was the brainchild of kerry thornley (aka ho chi zen), co - founder of the satiric religion discordianism. in theory, discordians are devoted to eris, the greek goddess of chaos. in practice, they' re devoted to a worldview that mixes anarchistic politics, a general disdain for dogma, and an interest in the illusions that emerge when the mind tries to find order in a disorderly world. they are especially intrigued by the mind' s capacity to imagine vast conspiracies, which helps explain their fascination with the illuminati .
besides letters like the one sent to welch, they planted pieces in the media—including one in a teen magazine and another in playboy —blaming the illuminati for everything from the assassination of john f. kennedy to the career of bob hope. they concocted ads for the illuminati too, including one that began ,
how was adolph hitler able to take over a whole country, starting out with only five followers? (have you ever tried to take over even a single city block? it isn' t easy! )
both the welch letter and the hitler ad appear in historia discordia, an entertaining new omnibus of discordian detritus edited by adam gorightly. gorightly, whose other books include a biography of thornley, fills in the details on who the discordians were and how their history progressed, but mostly he lets the documents speak for themselves. what emerges isn' t just a frequently funny collection of put - ons and self - published manifestos. the group also had an earnest desire to break down the boundaries between the real world and fiction .
in these ways, the discordians helped set the stage for two important elements of our pop culture today. one is a wave of stories that refuse to stay on the screen or page, leaking into the outside world in unpredictable ways. this has long been a part of the genre - fiction world .
no weird story can truly produce terror ,
h. p. lovecraft once claimed ,
unless it is devised with all the care and verisimilitude of an actual hoax .
but it has exploded in the internet age .
the most obvious examples are alternate reality games (args). people have been known not just to mistake elements of an arg for the real world, but to mistake artifacts of the real world for an arg. the online horror genre called creepypasta, similarly, appears
in a deeply social environment, getting shared, remixed, embedded, commented upon, edited, and spread around again ,
writes bryan alexander, author of the new digital storytelling .
there are no clear boundaries around the tale, as there would be for, say, a hollywood movie or a novel, making the mythos more mysterious .
that' s one reason some people have managed to convince themselves that slender man actually exists .
kembrew mcleod' s recent book pranksters locates both the discordians and the yippies in a tradition that stretches at least as far back as the early 17th century, when the rosicrucian pamphlets excited european intellectuals by claiming to describe an order secretly working to usher in a new age of enlightenment. the modern manifestations of prankster politics span the political spectrum, from james o' keefe' s right - wing provocations to the anti - corporate hoaxes of the yes men .
some of these hoaxers, obviously, are closer in spirit to the discordians than others. the most mindfuckesque efforts are the ones that try to make a subversive point by disorienting people in a playful way. take the barbie liberation organization, which made a media splash during the christmas shopping season in 1993. in mcleod' s words, the blo
purchased multiple barbie and g. i. joe dolls, switched their voice boxes, and' reverse shoplifted' them back into stores. holiday shoppers brought home barbies that grunted,' dead men tell no lies,' while gender - bending g. i. joes gushed,' i like to go shopping with you!'
eris must have approved .
robert welch didn' t live to see the blo' s infiltration of america' s malls, but he did have at least one more encounter with the discordians. shortly after his letter from thornley arrived, he received another letter, this one written by robert anton wilson and signed
george washington ix .
it too is reproduced in historia discordia .
pay no attention to the recent letter from ho chi zen ,
it began, and then it threatened welch with a libel suit if he dared to quote or reproduce the earlier letter. it concluded by confusing welch with the manufacturer of welch' s chocolate covered fudge bars :
your fudge is quite good with hashish, but even then it sticks to my teeth. any suggestions ?
jesse walker (jwalker @ reason. com) is the author of the united states of paranoia, which includes a chapter on the discordians and their brood .
kinja is in read - only mode. we are working to restore service .
his books (and in particular, the illuminatus! trilogy he co - wrote with robert shea) depict a bewildering world of conspiracies, half - truths, lies, fake news, incompetence and our inability to find anything resembling objective truth. or to put it another way, it describes the world as it is now, ten years after his death .
’ world. it is not so much that the fake news is disturbing. the real gut - kick is when people confidently proclaim that we should return to the pre - post - truth world, and then think about how to do that, and slowly realise that not only is it impossible but that there was no pre - post - truth world in the first place. think of hillsborough, or iraq’s imaginary wmds. what has actually changed is that it is no longer possible to comfortably fall for our earlier illusions. as the saying goes, if you want to be certain, buy an encyclopaedia. if you want to be uncertain, buy two encyclopaedias. our culture has bought a second encyclopaedia .
robert anton wilson talks about the psychological state where you have no way of making sense of what is happening, where all your maps have run out, and where you have no fixed point with which to orient yourself by. he called this place chapel perilous. this is where we are now as a culture .
there are only two outcomes from a visit to chapel perilous, wilson tells us: paranoia or agnosticism .
agnosticism – and here wilson means not just doubt about god, but doubt about everything - requires an acceptance that you are not the only right - thinking person on the planet, and that it is not true everyone else should agree with you. it requires a recognition that you are statistically just as full of shit as everyone else. there are over 7 billion people on the planet and you will never find someone else who shares your views exactly. our reality tunnels are all different because they are shaped by our own unique experiences. none of us know what we don’t know. we need all the help we can get, including science and other people’s perspective, in order to get by. the ultimate goal of the agnostic is not to become right, but to become less wrong .
agnosticism, then, involves humility. it was humility – and an extraordinary act of forgiveness - that rescued wilson from his own stay in chapel perilous. wilson was ultimately able to make a good life for himself with no need for certainty .
but the alt - right don’t do humility. they like strength, and decisiveness, and have a psychological need for certainty. how will they exit chapel perilous with those values? they may have grabbed the ring of power, but are trapped in the postmodern post - truth world, the one place they will never find the certainty and strength they seek. they are like brer rabbit and the tar baby. the more they attack, the more stuck they become. they aren’t going anywhere .
it’s no secret that populist far - right movements never end well. there are no examples in history of them being a good idea. how desperate for a fixed, certain ideology would you have to be to hitch your identity and worldview to one? this is clearly a dangerous time. but look again at the alt - right in chapel perilous, lashing out in all directions, owning the news cycle as they do. see how their contradictions enrage those around them, who react with great energy, which keeps the system running? now imagine those people who feed them gradually finding their own way out of chapel perilous. see how the non - humble flounder and turn in on themselves when their victims move on and there is no - one else left to fight? they are stuck in postmodern, post - truth quicksand from which they are the only ones who can never escape. without humility, chapel perilous is a nightmare jail for the cruel .
all this is happening away from the boxing matches of social media. it needs the coming together of people in the real world, because empathy is rarely found online. there is magical thinking involved, but then, when is there not? it chimes with academic talk about the move from postmodernism to metamodernism, where sincerity and belief are returned to our world not as pillars of identity but as tools for personal use, to be used and discarded as circumstances demand. there are echoes of it in the theatre director daisy campbell ’s attempt “to create a narrative so utterly complex and so thoroughly self - referential that it becomes to all intents and purposes alive. ”
it understands that social media can be used for finding those who chime with us but that there is no point in using it to shout at the different. it comes from a recognition that being a consumer and a critic are not enough, and that we won’t be fulfilled until we step up and contribute in our own individual way. it involves the virtuous circle of people being inspired by people being inspired. it centres of the understanding that meaning exists, but it needs to be self - generated .
it’s the dawning realisation that, by supporting friends and being supported by them, and by taking a leap of faith, every one of us can evolve our own souls .
none of this is a solution to our immediate political problems, of course. near - future politics will be chaos as technology takes our jobs, walls replace bridges and climate change and population demographics start to bite. great change is coming and it is going to be messy. no, this is a larger project: the act of evolving into twenty - first century humans .
the reason for the daily mail' s continued growth is simple. for every story it runs it asks itself ,
how can i present this story in manner that will generate a feeling of disgust in the reader ?
the paper is, by now, phenomenally good at presenting news stories so that they always do generate that emotion of disgust. from that, all else follows. should you think that this is an over - simplification, it would be worth pausing to look again at any edition of the paper with this idea in mind. disgust is not just one of our many emotions. it is bedded deep in the foundations of our psychology. it is largely generated by part of the brain known as the anterior insula. freud linked it to our initial oral stage, and leary & wilson to what they called the first circuit of their eight circuit model. it is not something that is learnt, like higher emotions. all mammals are born with the hard - wired ability to feel disgust, along with its opposite, attraction. newborns feel attr…
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urltoken
operation mindfuck or om is an important practice in the discordian religion . the concept was developed by kerry thornley and robert anton wilson in 1968 and given its name by wilson and robert shea in the illuminatus ! trilogy . it is most often manifested as a decentralized campaign of civil disobedience , activism , art movements , especially performance art and guerrilla art , culture jamming , graffiti and other vandalism , practical jokes , hoaxes , reality hacking , chaos magic , words of power , and anything else that is believed to bring about social change through disrupting paradigms and thus forcing the victim to question the parameters of his or her reality tunnel . 
operation mindfuck or om is an important practice in the discordian religion. the concept was developed by kerry thornley and robert anton wilson in 1968 and given its name by wilson and robert shea in the illuminatus! trilogy. it is most often manifested as a decentralized campaign of civil disobedience, activism, art movements, especially performance art and guerrilla art, culture jamming, graffiti and other vandalism, practical jokes, hoaxes, reality hacking, chaos magic, words of power, and anything else that is believed to bring about social change through disrupting paradigms and thus forcing the victim to question the parameters of his or her reality tunnel.
operation mindfuck or om is an important practice in the discordian religion. the concept was developed by kerry thornley and robert anton wilson in 1968 and given its name by wilson and robert shea in the illuminatus! trilogy. it is most often manifested as a decentralized campaign of civil disobedience, activism, art movements, especially performance art and guerrilla art, culture jamming, graffiti and other vandalism, practical jokes, hoaxes, reality hacking, chaos magic, words of power, and anything else that is believed to bring about social change through disrupting paradigms and thus forcing the victim to question the parameters of his or her reality tunnel.