discordian resistance front

[Ivanovich]

Bit I liked most is when dude says 'I sussed it out, we all characters in a novel', or words to that effect, though a bit of a Vonnegut rip off, I guess.

[lil'apple]

if they are aware of the psychological and neuro-biological processes at work within the minds of humans who are unwittingly supporting authoritarianism, and who might otherwise not if they were aware of their actions.

to this very day nobody really knows whats happening between the ears of individual humans due to the lack of technology to monitor the neuronal tempest and the simple but dire fact, that personal circumstances like genetical proposition, biography and above that kinda personal history in context with a more or less unknown enviroment are much too complicated to be assessed by a professional - simple proof:
the fucking mess modern psychology and all the more psychiatry still produces trying to get "patients" back into functionality and the general line.
especially leary's "work" didn't helped that, maybe it even damaged the little promise of the flower powers, there are some writers claiming that he even collaborated with "the agency", which experimented at the same time with psychoactive drugs for information gathering and even riot control - okay, most of the related rumors are more or less conspicrazy-bullshit, but some parts of the so called MX-ultra program of the CIA are proven facts, the involvement of the agency in the development of a mass-drug market via the far-east war business too, trading guns and equipment for anti-communist mercenaries for opiates up to the point that the number of heroin addicts serving in south vietnam endangered the general war efford...
some years ago german psychiatrists in frankfurt experimented for the xth time using lsd in psychotherapy - they had to realize again that the effects are much too unpredictable and in some cases life-threatening to the patient - lsd has it's effects, just like russian roulette...
atrocities like the holocaust aren't the consequence of neurological liabilities - there's a bit psychology and a much greater aspect of sociology responsible - recommended reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Browning
especially his "Ordinary Men : Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, New York : HarperCollins, 1992" is a fucking brilliant piece of enlightment - browning analysed hundreds of eye-witness- and committer interviews by the german legal authorities with members of this non-combat unit of ordinary men, too old to serve at the front lines, a majority of non-nazis and non-antisemites slipping step by step from occupation and police service to guard-duty at jewish ghettos or transports of jews - and ending up as a part of the "wild" phase of the holocaust, executing around 70.000 jewish women, children and men via "genickschuss" in planned and organized massacres.
of special interest is brownings discovery that around 15 % of the units members refused to follow the massacre orders, evading the "dirty" part of their duty reporting constantly as sick, slipping out to mere guard and surveilance duty and applying to be discharged or shifted to another unit, even officers refused openly to support the "judenaktionen" - the leader of the unit never forced his men to follow this specific order which stood in conflict with his soldier-self conception, he let them decide for themselves and even covered the refusal of officers, defending their soldier-honour...
the background of the "non-shooters" was very much the same as the "shooters", nazis and antisemites were a minority, many had a social-democrat past - maybe making them more liable to obey a system which showed them openly how "enemies of the reich" would end... and the few confessions of direct involvement show the personal conflicts these mass murderers still felt - especially if they had to kill mothers and very young children - their helpless attempts to solve this kind of conflict are sometimes almost pathetic and absurd - especially under the aspect, that they weren't really forced to obey...
browning works out that the liability to obey criminal orders wasn't that much depending on personal traits, but on peer pressure, the slow process of brutalisation due to the escalation in the treatment of the jews, a growing frustration and the wish "to get over with it", finally returning into civil life and forget all about it.
i found the same mind set in a collection of interviews with vietnam vets suffering under the conditions of the jungle war and the absurdity of the american war efford killing 80% unarmed civillians supposed to be rescued from communism - back into "the world" and forget it!
most of the german murderers escaped legal prosecution after the war and lived again ordinary lives until some war crime prosecuters stumbled about some leftovers of the units war diaries and dragged the grandfathers involved out of their hiding - but it's really a pity and a waste that only the legal authorities were interested in the case - what could we have learned from desk-criminals like höss, eichmann and this bunch of nameless murderers if they would have been analyzed by socio-scientists?!

and right, wilson is a professional scene-writer, recently i was reading his essays about weird fiction autor h.p.lovecraft (who's quite a weird phenomenon) and the following shit fight between wilson and lovecrafts curator august derleth - oh those pinnacles of ambitious ignorance and hysterical verbiage...
wilson really deserves a shrine of shame... and i agree:
keep it simple and realistic, forget about the fancy stuff made up by people selling "alternatives"!

[LaForce]

I think despite your detours I agree with a lot of the things you said. Browning is great, I also think the Milgram Experiment is pretty relevant to what he raised.

I am not a Wilson defender by any means. I never met the guy and have no reason to pursue popularising him. I do however think that one line of reasoning that he repeats is pretty astute, and is something worth keeping in the brain vault. He isn't even the orginator of that reasoning he just pulled a few different arguments together in a succinct way that made it easy for me to digest. I would be happy to forget the man ever existed but I would hate to think that I might one day forget the reasoning. Your final sentence touches the heart of that line of reasoning:

It is all about that concept of reality. In the same way that a psychotic believes that their hallucinations are real, many people have deluded views about what is "real" but are convinced that their vision of the world is "real". People think that they "know" how the world works and say things like "anarchism is impossible because humans are selfish by nature", or "there will always be war". The same people often cite evolution as evidence of atheism, but in the same breath claim that humans will always be selfish and competitive (I'm not saying that atheism is not a valid view point, just pointing out that it doesn't make sense to believe in evolution on one hand, but that humans will always be the same on the other.... it doesn't make any fucking sense haha).

I'm tired ant tipsy so I aren't being to coherent, but the point is that people are open to suggestions especially by the media about what is "real", they also tend to reinforce these suggestions through their own actions. Many people literally believe that we can keep mining the earth and making televisions forever. The problem is that even if they did not create the concept of reality that allows them to believe this, they are responsible for maintaining it. People don't create reality, but they create their own concepts of what it should be and how it should work, and they filter their experiences through these frameworks. When experience doesn't fit with their frameworks they either ignore or repress them, or they respond violently or self destructively.

Whether we choose to pay attention to this habit of humans or dismiss it as psychobabble has implications for us, because whether we like it or not mass media is aware of this habit in human minds and they purposefully exloit it. For me as a an agitator for freedom, I tbelieve that to take responsibility for my own freedom I have to be willing to share the responsibility for other human's freedom. Most people today in my area of experience are not in nazi death camps or the vietnam war or even in iraq or afghanistan or palestine or the congo. They are people in western societies who are being constantly bombarded with subtle and not so subtle persuasions, sugestions, and propaghanda by an immense system of multi media that operate synergistcally across multiple platforms 24 hours a day. The biggest war we are subjected to is a psychological one and for us to make it a physical one (which many would say we must) we need to be aware of the psychological pressure placed on us because often the lack of awareness of that is the only thing stopping a consumer becoming a fully fledged freedom fighter.

Anyway if you haven't seen it check out the documentary the "Century of the Self". It can be a bit repetative but just be patient geez.

[lil'apple]

bit lacking the time to reply i just want to say that the critique on wilsons output isn't that focussed on him in persona, it's meant to the full range of - dunno - "alternative sciences" or as my smart radio bo doi put it:
the more or less esoterical stuff produced by specialized and very closely peer group-orientated publishers.
just because we still have a gigantic hole in our reception about reality just around the next corner we should be very carefull in recepting explanations on sale - pulling together bits and pieces just and only to produce kinda collage meant to be "different" - and completely free from the necessity to prove it's relevance.
it isn't that hard to learn something about the aspects of getting repressive, corrupted and so on - just watch a bunch of suburb-punks putting up a struggle against a neighboring group, a DIY-outlet going pop, or a scene hero getting old and shitty, sometimes even personal relations, gender and ethnic issues take their toll and are ignored because of habitual filters or self-involvement as a friend or close bystander.
the guy beating up his girlfriend in front of his mates just to prove his manhood and probably whatever else isn't that far from the 18 year old ss-cannon fodder executing a pregnant jewish woman begging for mercy - sorry if i overuse these extreme examples like the holocaust - but atrocities like that (and the whole complex is unique only in it's details) are the most obvious examples of the filters we have to overcome questioning the official explanation - and if possible adapt the extreme circumstances and relations to our very own day-to-day experience - the milgram experiment was quite a step in this direction, but i guess it's still to academic and artificial to have a real impact on the here and now.
and right, being selfish and murderous wouldn't have made any sense during our evolution in which we spend most of the time in small nomadic groups constantly threatened by genetical degeneration due to inbreeding - and again the first archeological evidence for a war-like massacre is barely 15.000 years old, while the modern homo sapiens sapiens appeared 260 000 years ago, all the time multiplying happily to conquer almost the whole planet, no matter what the odds have been...

[formerly inna ruts]

i'm quite impressed, and to set off some more head explosions for those able to see, here's a recommended movie:
elem klimovs COME AND SEE from 1985:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come_and_See - a bit shitty article about this hellish ride bouncing from one repressive subsystem of repression and hierarchy into the next, while the everyday-atrocity of the german termination war constantly lurks behind each and every fucking corner - until a partisan woman ends it at least temporarely and the main protagonist learns about the limits of inhumanity.
there's a laaarge DL at the ol'P-bay, the smaller version from the same source sadly lacks english subtitles, but some of the dialogues are quite important.

[LaForce]

@ lil'apple

I know eaxactly what you are saying. Man I hate this whole pseudo-science new age infiltration of grass roots revolutionary communities. Even more so i detest the conspiracy theory lizard men fuckers who do more to serve power relationships than to destroy them. At the same time though i think a lot of the people who succumb to this shit are basically "on our side" (I fucking hate the concept of sides too - im just being simplistic to get my point across quickly).

I am only uncomfortable with using examples such as holocuast situations or other extreme historical examples because they are so contextually different to what we have to actually deal with every day right now. I'm not saying ignore history at all. I understand that there is so much to learn from it. But nazi drones in the second world war didn't have an industrial comples geared toward planned obsolescense, rapid retooling and rapid product differentiation, or a global marketing system selling "lifestyles" or conformist non-conformity. Freedom Cola for fucks sake haha.

I am interested in actually helping people to liberate themselves and me and us and eachother. People who are here now. And many of those people are punks and anarchists of many persuasions fighting local battles both externally and internally as you said, as well as many other "types" of people. The issues that you raised are exactly the sorts of issues that i think would benefit from a wider dissemination from this understanding of human psychology that Wilson among others (many of whom are not esoteric wierdos haha) talk about. Namely that we are responsible for creating frameworks through which we view reality. We create them with language, habits, beliefs and emotions in reaction to fucked up circumstances.

If people were aware of this tendency within themselves to narrow down and distort "reality", and made a practice and a habit of checking in with themselves regularly to see how their current concepts about reality are affecting their emotions, health and behaviours; then that dude would be far less likely to bash his girlfriend, people would feel better equipped to support each other, and people who weren't yet resistance fighters would more likely become so. Maybe that's naive but i really doubt it.

So my thing isn't about defending Wilson or esoteric salesman making a buck of misguided kids. I'm just saying that this one particular line of reasoning he concretised for me in a really powerful way. It has nothing to do with esoteric bullshit, timothy leary, black magic or lsd, but has everything to do with how we can defend ourselves from oppression, how we can avoid serving powerful interests by adopting self-opressing behaviours, and how we can help other people to see some of the reasons which can lead to them and us doing dumb abd fucked up shit.

Let's not generalise and paint this guy as just being representative of all that espoteric hogwash, because as much as he has written which may just be this, he has written some stuff which isn't. And this stuff i think can be really useful in a powerful way for resistance.

More importantly though fuck him. Who cares about him. What I am saying is let's not ignore a really powerful piece of knowledge because it came from someone who wrote lots of dumb shit too haha.

I have said some pretty stupid stuff in my time. I have also done some pretty dumb things. But I have also done and said some fucking brilliant shit. Personally i'd ptrefer that people don't identify me only with the stupid shit, but more importantly if some of the brilliant shit i have said can realy be of benefit to people, I would hate for it to be ignored just because I said some not so brilliant shit as well.

[grinding hault]

oh no, don't tell me you believe in this bullshit alà wilsons adepthood or (pure polemic:) the bey's higher illumination via sufism - abuse of underaged boys included!
i was reading the first two parts of the trilogy, skipped cosmic trigger after a few pages of boredom - you are right: it's just the rehash of the rehash, tricksters like crowley and gurdjief weren't the first to make up weird stories for the bored upperclass, they learned from the blavatsky's and other offspring of the wave of spiritualism and even satanism in the nineteenth century - the initiators of this greesy mess of special entertainment were asia-travellers returning to europe with some writings and more or less adequate translations of texts on eastern philosophy and religion - most of these people hadn't had any religious interest and published their stuff without other than scientific intent.
to my knowledge crowley spoke only english and a little french - in his time in italy he needed a interpreter to deal with his troubles with the authorities - and even the mussolini-fascist threw him out of state - so how should he have learned from texts written in sanskrit, arabic or other non-european languages?
he was nothing but a trickster and imposter, taking bits and pieces from here and there to appeal the bored upper class daughters who made up the bulk of his followers - and he wasn't the only one, just read the stories about "golden dawn" and other consumer's groups with a "fine" interest...
to me the only good part of "illuminatus" is wilsons mentioning of the "old" workers movement traditions and a few funny ideas like this ss-division hidden in a lake and raiding a hippie-festival - but again: a shitty book full of almost dangerous cliche's and positions, starting with the "shock"-therapy for enlightment, a-capitalism and all this magic crab fitting well into the worldview of bored hipsters - where's my torpedo for fucks sake!

I don't believe anything subjective. I just think its interesting and yes I have been known to be drawn toward occultism. I enjoy the concept of realizing that you literally create nearly all of what you experience, therefore if you trick yourself into believing something, you make it real, no matter how difficult it is to fathom. For me this is the definition of occultism. It's why christians have religious experiences that reaffirm their beliefs, why so many people claim they've had contact with angels or the virgin mary. Because your reality is your own and it's malleable. You can make of it whatever you want without it being any less real than anything else, but without a strong constitution, you're likely to go bat shit.

I don't have much of a personal opinion on aleister crowley and most of what he wrote was deliberately written in bullshit form. A lot of people say a lot of things about crowley and a lot of it's contradictory to other things I've heard, so I don't know what to believe and don't have any desire to know.

[formerly inna ruts]

you don't have to have a religious background to bend the little objective reality we share - for there is one as natural sciences can proof.
this starts with some atavistic common talent we all share to "complete" visual perceptions in moments we feel not quite right or secure, inherited from our primitive prehistoric ancestors wandering around on the steppes and being very much depending on a quick selfpreservation in moments of danger - like most animal species still only have to see parts of the silhouette of their natural predator enemies - and react automatically getting cautious, defensive or ready to flee. we aren't limited anymore to a pure chain reaction, but i guess everybody knows how it is all alone at dark in a unsecure enviroment...
psychiatry and neurology are full of barely understood phenomena - the poor souls hearing voices giving them orders or harrassing them, the "autistic savage" - barely able to live autonomous because almost buried alive in him/herself - but sometimes gifted with astonishing isle-talents, showing them visions of mathematical mysteries, poetic pictures and all kind of stuff average people don't see or never even dream of, a distant relative of mine got caught some 12 years ago on a magic mushroom trip, was after a brief time of disorientation and toxicological problems diagnosed completely sane and well orientated - but since then little white dwarves scurry around the edges of his field of view and never give him a moment of rest.
he knows the little buggers aren't real - but he sees them and hardly sleeps without a shitload of analgetica that will finally kill him some day because his liver is suffering from the side-effects of his medication, necessary to prevent him going mad because the lack of sleep.
i closely know some young synesthetic and maybe eidetic triplets seeing ordinary letters printed in black on white paper in certain different colours, enabling the pre-school analphabets to "read wordpictures" as a series of colour codes and as long as the words are in the vocabulary of their german or polish childrens books. still too young to have any interest about the meaning of single letters these trinity knows maybe hundreds of pages with longer stories by heart, their mom will kill me if she reads here that i tried some simple experiments and found out that the girls are able to paint complete pages in the exact words "seeing" the multicoloured "picture" on the empty white paper before even starting to use the brush or colour pencil.
if they listen to Eric Burdons Animals or some early The Who recordings they often slip into a strange attentiveness, fixating an empty spot on the wall or in mid air and start describing "dancing colours" or kinda kaleidoscopic patterns moving... things that aren't there as everybody else can see - but they enjoy their visions, sourcing in a neuronal bridge between the two brain halves "average" people maybe simply unlearned to use - because every able human has this bridge in his/her head.

the religious motivated hallucinations are - as far as i know - almost a special of the christian believes, but it's not only visions and revelations, its getting physical too:
there are stigmata, bloody tears and invisible wounds that bleed, later saints living only on altar bread and a little (blessed) water for years and decades mostly out of sight of any reliable documentation or long before the current age of more reliable scientific diagnostics - meanwhile a little statistics and psychiatric kategorisation may be ending many a myth, example stigmata:

Some modern research has indicated stigmata are of hysterical origin, or linked to dissociative identity disorders, especially the link between dietary constriction by self-starvation, dissociative mental states and self-mutilation, in the context of a religious belief. Anorexia nervosa cases often display self-mutilation similar to stigmata as part of a ritualistic, obsessive compulsive disorder. A relationship between starvation and self-mutilation has been reported amongst prisoners of war and during famines. A psychoanalytic study of stigmatic Therese Neumann has suggested that her stigmata resulted from post-traumatic stress symptoms expressed in unconscious self-mutilation through abnormal autosuggestibility.

In his Stigmata: A Medieval Phenomenon in a Modern Age, Edward Harrison suggests that there is no single mechanism whereby the marks of stigmata were produced. Harrison found no evidence from a study of contemporary cases that the marks were supernatural in origin. He concluded, however, that marks of natural origin need not be hoaxes. Some stigmatics marked themselves in attempt to suffer with Christ as a form of piety. Others marked themselves accidentally and their marks were noted as stigmata by witnesses. Often marks of human origin produced profound and genuine religious responses. Harrison also noted that the male-to-female ratio of stigmatics, which for many centuries had been of the order of 7 to 1, had changed over the last 100 years to a ratio of 5:4. Appearance of stigmata frequently coincided with times when issue of authority loomed large in the Church. What was significant about stigmatics was not that they were predominantly men, but that they were non-ordained. Having stigmata gave them direct access to the body of Christ without requiring the permission of the Church through the Eucharist. Only in the last century have priests been stigmatized.

From the records of St. Francis’ physical ailments and symptoms, Dr. Edward Hartung concluded in 1935 that he knew what health problems plagued the holy man. Hartung believed that he had an eye ailment known as trachoma, but also had quartan malaria. Quartan malaria infects the liver, spleen, and stomach, causing the victim intense pain. One complication of quartan malaria occasionally seen around Francis’s time is known as purpura, a purple hemorrhage of blood into the skin. Purpuras usually occur symmetrically, so each hand and foot would have been affected equally. If this were the case of St. Francis, he would have been afflicted by ecchymoses, an exceedingly large purpura. The purple spots of blood may have been punctured while in the wilderness and therefore appear as an open wound like that of Christ.

from archeological evidence of historic crucifications we know that the victims of this roman method of public torture-executions never were nailed through the palm of the hand, because this would have resulted in a pre-mortal ripping of the nails through the little tissue and muscles between the finger bones, as soon as the victim weakened enough to hang on the cross, the full weight of the body pulling it down.
the romans also never drove nails frontal through the feet, but sidewise slightly behind the ancle - so the victim could straighten up to gain breath and thus unwillingly prolong the time of suffering in a hopeless struggle against the inevitable death.
but most christian art depicting the crucification of hypothetic jesus christ shows the usual wounds in the palm of the hands and the top of the feet - and even the photographs of stigmatised people do so - somehow strange?
how much of the occult will remain, if we learn a little more about what happens in the neuronal networks, especially under special circumstances?

[lil'apple]

their mom will kill me if she reads here that i tried some simple experiments

don't worry you beast, their mom will only practice some experimental use of biopolymers on you, just for scientific progress...

@ Laforce
again a bit under time pressure:
i don't think that the historical excesses are that far from our day-to-day problems with repression and - amongst other aspects - violence - what made Brownings work so great was this view on "ordinary" men...

the potential to end up in extremes is omnipresent, resulting from conditioning via education, social and economical circumstances and the actual daily events, zeitgeist (in the original meaning, not the "movement") and maybe the media input too (but i still have doubts that it works "that" much on people, i know nobody actually believing anything in TV ect... the main problem is apathy, maybe the lack of alternatives to go or at least ask for.)
"the mass" of people isn't that sleepy and contended with the here and now, they are aware of most BS going on and maybe threatening their hostage-being in the here and now, but it's still more convenient to watch and wait and enjoy a little comfort than to get their asses of and risk unpredictable consequences or the omnipresent deterrence getting serious on them.
back home we work in a neighborhood network producing a unique level of activism and willingness to do something - not out of humanism or revolutionary elan, but just because people gain from it.
to care about people within a not too big range around the individual means the chance that someone cares about you in return, facing the threat of marauding cops on the street together minimizes the individual risk to suffer under reprisals, letting go of old traditions and ethnical limited morals means a smoother living if one joins other ethnical minority people in an uncaring and even racist enviroment.
this works with people far away from the willingness to learn some psychology, but they learn via the day to day experience of the beneficial results. a quite simple and by now almost banal kind of evolution, but bearing remarkable results.
there are still (necessary) fights and conflicts, relapses and a number of people even left the network in anger - but there's a slowly growing number of permanent contributers (and receivers of course) and the whole thing gains momentum and develops side effects - common sense on the rise and everyone gains according to some of their needs from everyone according to some of their abilities.
too bad that we soon reach limits like the lack of production of material commodities, can't create a sphere of workers autonomy and of course the general economical dependence from the "system" around us.
and mentioning "anarchism" still gives you strange looks from people already acting as... at least in part time.

[Nigel]

I think it's important to not conflate Wilson's work with Discordianism. He wrote books about Discordians, but he did not define Discordianism, and in no way could have been considered an expert on Discordianism.

[Canis latrans]

In fact it could also be said that some Discordians don't even like him or his works.

[Nigel]

In fact it could also be said that some Discordians don't even like him or his works.

And many others have simply never read them.

[Canis latrans]

In fact it could also be said that some Discordians don't even like him or his works.

And many others have simply never read them.

And many haven't even read the Principia Discordia.

[Nigel]

In fact it could also be said that some Discordians don't even like him or his works.

And many others have simply never read them.

And many haven't even read the Principia Discordia.

That part I always find funny. But really, why should they? They can learn more about what Discordianism is now by talking to Discordians. Or making it up.

[Canis latrans]

In fact it could also be said that some Discordians don't even like him or his works.

And many others have simply never read them.

And many haven't even read the Principia Discordia.

That part I always find funny. But really, why should they? They can learn more about what Discordianism is now by talking to Discordians. Or making it up.

Shhhhh, they might want to ask us questions now, even if we aren't really real for realness Discordians.

[Nigel]

In fact it could also be said that some Discordians don't even like him or his works.

And many others have simply never read them.

And many haven't even read the Principia Discordia.

That part I always find funny. But really, why should they? They can learn more about what Discordianism is now by talking to Discordians. Or making it up.

Shhhhh, they might want to ask us questions now, even if we aren't really real for realness Discordians.

Nawwwww... nobody wants to hear about Discordians these days. We're way too mainstream. :p

[Canis latrans]

Nawwwww... nobody wants to hear about Discordians these days. We're way too mainstream. :p

We are? Well damn there goes all my hipster cred. Guess I have to turn in my fixie and BCGs. I'm keeping the outdated hats though.

[Nigel]

Nawwwww... nobody wants to hear about Discordians these days. We're way too mainstream. :p

We are? Well damn there goes all my hipster cred. Guess I have to turn in my fixie and BCGs. I'm keeping the outdated hats though.

I know... between that and my scarves and tatty suitjackets, people were starting to egg me on the street.

[Canis latrans]

Nawwwww... nobody wants to hear about Discordians these days. We're way too mainstream. :p

We are? Well damn there goes all my hipster cred. Guess I have to turn in my fixie and BCGs. I'm keeping the outdated hats though.

I know... between that and my scarves and tatty suitjackets, people were starting to egg me on the street.

Then we should meander about PDX, as I seem to get baconed more than egged.

[Nigel]

Nawwwww... nobody wants to hear about Discordians these days. We're way too mainstream. :p

We are? Well damn there goes all my hipster cred. Guess I have to turn in my fixie and BCGs. I'm keeping the outdated hats though.

I know... between that and my scarves and tatty suitjackets, people were starting to egg me on the street.

Then we should meander about PDX, as I seem to get baconed more than egged.

That sounds like the perfect breakfast.