3 Brumaire CCX - 1:18 p.m.

Dull dry sociopolitical lecture

Suppose I accidentally got my shit together.
Would I get a medal, or a pat on the back and a purple feather?
-- MC 900 Ft Jesus, "If I Only Had a Brain"

Ladies and gentlemen, this was going to go out over the weekend, but I couldn't get it written for various reasons, most of them having to do with my own attention span or lack thereof. It was going to do so in honor of the fifth season of the Discordian Calendar, which began on Saturday, but that only figured on my personal calendar for two days. It was going to do so as an alternative to talking about what's going on in my life, and specifically in my relationship with CB. It's still going to do that, as I'm still walking on eggshells in that regard. She seemed happy again last time we spoke in IM, and when we spoke on the phone, which goes a long way toward making me think there's still time for me to clean up my act. Not only time, but more than the six weeks of it that Southern Belle predicted last night. (She's still determined to hate me, and still determined to deny that she cares enough about me to do so. She'd be so ky00t when she stamped her widdle foot, if she didn't remind me so much of me.) My relationship with my parents is also nothing to write home about at the moment.

And so, in honor of the sacred Apostolic holyday of Maladay, I yield the floor to a gentleman who straddles the fine line between "enlightened supermind from the future" and "pompous self-absorbed git." One of my subsidiary personalities, Anton Gregorio Tsuburaya, a lecturer in Terran Studies at the University of New Milan about a millennium from now. The following is an excerpt from his course on the history of "Unistat" [1] from its emergence as an independent nation-state in 5776 AL [2] to the start of the Fourth Wave, and of Space Migration, 236 years later.

* * *

You may recall from childhood reading of that wholly remarkable book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a certain statement that the apocryphal Galactic original makes. Megadodo Publications' line-leader supposedly says that "the history of every major Galactic civilisation tends to pass through three distinct and recognisable phases: those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, also known as the How, Why and Where phases" for the questions that typify them -- "How can we eat?" "Why must we eat?" and "Where shall we have lunch?"

A lesser-known passage, found only in the original vocal version, states that one can similarly subdivide the history of "warfare" (the primitive custom of organized use of force against largely unoffending parties) into the phases of Retribution (with the Mantrium "I will kill you because you killed my brother"), Anticipation ("I will kill you because I killed your brother") and Diplomacy ("I will kill my brother and then kill you on the pretext that your brother did it").

This tripartite model, of course, constitutes a gross oversimplification. As a good Discordian, I believe that the history of a society passes through five phases -- Chaos, Discord, Confusion, Bureaucracy, and The Aftermath, the lattermost sometimes known as "International Relations" in the era of nation-states we will discuss in the late stages of this course. Or, perhaps, Adams and his imagined alien editors had the right of it, and the Discordian model represents a gross overcomplication. I remain open to the possibility and willing to have my mind changed by your persuasions.

In ages of Chaos, we find the "matriarchal" partnership societies so beloved of Riane Eisler and other feminist writers of Unistat's era of Aftermath. G. Rattray Taylor called these periods "Matrist." When the society needs leaders, the people instinctively turn to those individuals who have demonstrated the skills that best suit the situation at hand.

In ages of Discord, a leader arises who does not step down when the crisis that called for him has ended. The discovery of the fact of paternity, and the consequent collapse of female status, often accompanies this event. Thus, the Matrist structure gives way to what Taylor called "Patrist" ways and means and the Eislerians called "dominator society." The blade displaces the chalice; "Gunn the Farther," as Joyce named him, drives down Anna Livia. The Snafu Principle first arises in this age from the conflict between the commands of the master class and the perceptions of the governed.

* * *

I here interrupt to explain the "Snafu Principle," as Wilson's alter ego Hagbard Celine calls it, in its basic form. The witty Sicilian observed that honest communication is only possible between equals. All power, as a typical domesticated primate alpha male once noted, comes out of the barrel of a gun -- that is, all status has its basis in the ability of the higher-ranking party to threaten the lower party's biosurvival. The gun may be literal ("Talk to me or I will do terrible things to you. On purpose") or metaphorical ("Smart off one more time and you'll be sleeping on the street, Bumstead!"), but it's there. (It's one of the reasons I take so long to tell my parents what I really think of them, when I tell them at all; I have almost no independent survival skills, and I'm sincerely worried about being thrown directly out of the house to fend for myself like a once-beloved cat that bites the hand too often.)

Paul Watzlawick, the semanticist who identified the Snafu Principle and similar problems as "games without end," noted that what is unspeakable soon becomes unthinkable. It becomes simpler to ignore what doesn't fit the official reality-tunnel than to go through life feeling like a coward and/or a liar. This is the burden of nescience on the lower class. Those at the top bear an equal and opposite burden of omniscience. But the man with the gun only hears what the guy looking down its barrel thinks will not cause the pulling of the trigger, unless the threatened party decides he has nothing to lose by speaking his mind.

Well, I've bored you for long enough, so I'll let Anton bore you some more.

* * *

In ages of Confusion, the society experiments with different reality-tunnels in an attempt to find one model which will explain all of reality. The possibility of testing these models against objective reality occurs to the leaders, but they don't do much with it. It does, however, produce some interesting notions, and sometimes a return of thoughts so long forgotten that they seem new -- such as the notion that government should serve to protect the governed as well as the ruling class. They also beget ideas which come as genuine novelties to the species in question, such as what the futurist Toffler wittily named Industreality. The centralization demanded by industreal socioeconomics in turn begets the end of Confusion and the rise of Bureaucracy.

In ages of Bureaucracy, some particular reality-tunnel (capitalism, Communism, Fascism, Objectivism) gains the sanction of the State, or else of the authorities behind it. My learned colleague, Padraig Hakim Hasegawa, blames the State qua State for the uses to which the alpha males of the domesticated primate packs put it. A full discussion of this matter lies beyond the scope of this class. For now, suffice it to say that if the State had not existed as an outgrowth of prior governing structures, the alpha males of the various nation-states would have found themselves constrained to invent it as a distraction from their activities. In these ages, the burden of omniscience becomes merely a different form of the burden of nescience, as the elite receive only the feedback consistent with the official reality tunnel. "Nobody really knows anything anymore, or if they do, they [take care] to hide the fact."

Brother Mord and Mr. Shea state, in Appendix Gimmel of the Illuminatus! saga, that an age of Aftermath "begins with an upsurge of magicians, hoaxers, Yippies, Kabouters, shamans, clowns, and other Eristic forces." My own linguistic research defines "Kabouters" as "gnomes." Since they wrote in the 5970s, two generations before the advent of true silicon intellect, I doubt they can mean the familiar "holognomes" used by many SIs as public faces. Nor can they mean the Gramaryean household pest. My investigation continues.

On the other hand, the Yippies, or Youth International Party, present the student with a wealth of information. Their actions, such as the nomination of a literal pig for the "Presidency" (a form of divine year-king) of Unistat, or the ill-advised attempt to levitate the Pentagram (the five-sided structure built by the war-god General Motors to restrain the true master of Unistat), represented an attempt to transform the Fool into a useful tool -- "clowning revolutionaries," as Kurt Vonnegut once called them. He dismissed them as useless, noting that "Cruel social machines have needed clowns as lubricant so much that they have often manufactured them." In so saying, he showed his incomplete understanding of the situation. The Yippies failed, not because they used absurdity as a tool of illustration, but because they did not clarify the nature of their absurdity. The neophobes saw the absurdity of the Yippies' actions, but missed the equal absurdity of the society those actions parodied.

Eventually, of course, these absurdities became too great to ignore. The main reason they lasted as long as they did lay in the average domesticated primate's belief of eir own isolation. E saw reality, and e heard the pronouncements of the State's media organs telling em not to trust eir lying eyes. Because those media never showed people saying what the people really thought, each Unistater believed himself (or herself) a nation of one, surrounded on all sides by the dupes of the Official Story. If not for the Christmas Miracle in 6012, the domesticated primates might never have survived long enough to evolve true intelligence.

* * *

End of lecture. Those of you who haven't been yawning already, feel free to start now.

-30-

[1] Blame Robert Anton Wilson for that name. (Sidenote: Anton is named in honor of Wilson, remembered in his interstellar "Butterfly Society" as the father of "scientific shamanism"; however, the Akashic record sometimes corrects the spotty historical record in strange ways. Anton was surprised to learn that his spirit-guide was not in fact named "Anton Colin Wilson," and that he also wasn't the author of the prophetic speculations attributed to "Robert Anson Forward.")

[2] Anno Lux (Year of Light), apparently a Masonic formation. Supposed date of the formation of the first Illuminated brotherhood, or else of the Illumination of Hung Mung (patron apostle of the Season of Chaos). Robert Anton Wilson (known to Discordians as "Frater Mordecai Malignatus" or simply "Brother Mord") adopted it as the Illuminati calendar, with the Discordian seasons given German names (Verwirrung, Zweitracht, Unordnung, Beamtenherrschaft, and Grummet/Realpolitik). He was beginning to break out of Western Civ's default habit of placing the turning point of history at the miscalculated birthdate of "a comic-book superhero" who was said (by his biographers) to have been the result of a Jewish girl getting pregnant by a dove and to have cured blind people by making mudpacks for their eyes.

�

last time, on The Slack Shack - our next inciting exstallment