If You Can Read This, You Are A Pope!

My favourite Discordian Facebook page lead me to this little gem recently. Some rando asks what's with this Discordianism thing? He even admits to being a bit confused. Confusion is the catnip of the Discordian, latent or active. And in they come all seeking to help by contradicting each other wildly. It makes my heart swell with pride.

There's a mixture of different approaches to thoroughly failing to assist with the confusion in any way. The very first answer begins "a) five tons of flax" the next one helpfully signs off "If you can read this answer, you are a pope!"

Thereafter we are treated to further jewels of the Discordian art such as:

• "an 'objective summary' of the religion could never be accurate"
• "Objectivity isn't really a Discordian value; the common failure mode of the practice is 'dire assholery.'"
• "It's a joke religion taken seriously to various degrees by various people that sprang out of the proto-hippie and New Age scenes by both mocking them and absorbing their more interesting elements."
• "The world is chaos. Order is self-deception."
• "If it's any consolation, you get the same fictions once you're initiated. I'd ask for my money back, but I initiated myself, and have no one else to blame."
• "I have no idea what an earnestly practicing Discordian would even look like -- probably one of those homeless people you see yelling at themselves on the street."
• "...if you don't understand the point of a religion that is a joke you will not understand it either"
• "It *is* a joke. It's a lot of jokes. But, as stated above more than once, it's also serious."
• "I found it very difficult to refrain from just posting a simple FNORD and leaving it at that."

To increase the fun, some answerers are answering as if they are not Discordian, but this merely serves to increase the confusion, so they're probably latent. Hell, all people are really latent Discordians, the question is to what extent you accept that, like all religions. I mean, that's a religion-y type thing, isn't it?

Discordians tend to be poor at identifying what's religion-y and what's just pure control-mania. Like the rest of the world then, I suppose.

Were I to take issue with any of it. And, hell, as a Good Discordian® it is my duty to take issue with the whole by-gosh-darn-it lot. It's in the misidentification of Discordianism as being pro-chaos in the same way it is anti-order.

That's not nearly complicated enough to be the truth.

We like to view things, as human beings, in these neat little dualities, night and day, love and hate, good and evil, order and chaos, salt and vinegar, death and taxes, lions minus tigers equals the root of bears divided by "Oh My!" squared,

The truth of this illusory conundrum is exemplified by the description of "Eristic" (pro-chaos) and "Aneristic" (pro-order) principles that give us lenses through which we can all view the universe. The problem is they're both as false as each other. The universe is a single eternal moment of unending uber-chaos.

Fiddling with either of the illusory constructs just equalises the amount of "chaos" and "order" that are perceivable. So, attempt to make something ordered and it will just increase apparent chaos, go out of your way to cause apparent chaos and order will kick back. The reason for this is that all you're doing in such circumstances is putting greasy finger marks over the lens through which you're viewing the world.

What you really want to do is rip the concept-lenses off your eyes altogether and stare into the joyous face of true chaos.

Actually, don't. It's probably scary, likely it will leave you in a bad place. Instead find a hot dog vendor and ask them to make you one with everything, basically that's almost the same thing.