Year after year, week after week, day after day, why do we keep this up? This Discordian Society? This putting-the-fun-back-into-the-inevitable-dysfunction-of-hypertrophied-order which you find being shoved down your throat and taught to your children against your wishes? Why do we continue to offer you and every woman, child, and man on this planet enlightenment for the taking, when all the other outfits offer you the bottled air version of enlightenment or salvation for an exorbitant price? Why do we continue to insist that Eris be included in all of our feasts even as the world at large is ignorant of Her and of us? Why? Why ask why?
Just know that we are here (and there and just about everywhere that you haven't quite thought of yet). The world is ablaze with the greyfaces who have finally induced most of its human cultures into their market of everything for a price so long as satisfaction is guaranteed. But the problem is that once you fall prey to their addictive treadmill habit of grasping after their ephemeral phantasms, you find it difficult to stop going after more and more of what they have to sell you. If only you could get this next new hotly marketed item/experience/religion, then you may finally have found the elixir, the grail, the ultimate thing that will banish your sense of impermanence and emptiness, replacing it with the constant ecstasy you so crave and think you deserve. No matter how many times their products loose their luster or appeal after you acquire it, somehow you hang on to the fanatical belief that another product is all you need. Just one more. If only it was the right size, or the right timing, or the right packaging, or the right color, texture, noise, taste, thought. If only....no other phrase expresses the point that you have missed the whispers of your own freedom. With every passing year in this habitual circular run through the desires brought to you by your sponsors, it gets harder to break free. The grooves become etched deeper and deeper. And yet, there is Eris and the rest of us, waking you up at odd hours to shout into your face that you are free.
Why do we keep doing this? Why? When all we should really do is watch you spiral out into being that pseudo-self that the advertising specialists have so carefully crafted and sold to you as the be all end all of existence. It could be pretty entertaining watching you run around like a rat in a maze, looking for the passage way that will finally give you the cheese you so desire. But unlike rats, you can climb the walls and grab the cheese directly. This is what makes your predicament even more funny. But no. We don't just sit there and watch. We get involved. We remember when we were small and afraid and looking for that bit of cheese to make us happy too. So we play with you as you walk through the consumer mazes and the corporate religions. We push and pull and cajole you. We whisper in your ears when you are sleeping "Climb out of the fucking maze, already! The joke has gotten stale along with your cheese!"
And you, at first, think we are just a bunch of loons. We are not as serious as you are. Your quest to fulfill the lab experiments of your masters is much more important than living a human life with the ability to stand upright and look at the sky. "No" you repeat to us, "Take your Erisianism and all that silly impossible happy freedom crap back to whatever hallucination you crawled out from." That's what you say. WE....we, the hallucination. While YOU, a person who is cobbled together from advertising blurbs about what it means to be alive, from scraps of poorly understood con-jobs called religions, from pieces picked up from all those people around you who seem better at the game than you are, from the fantasy images of yourself that never seem to pan out when all those shiny products loose their luster...YOU say WE are the hallucination.
Sounds to us like you are tripping on greyfaced consumerism and you can't seem to get back up, let alone even hit the ground. WAKE UP, DUPE! There is no ground for you to fall on in this game. Nothing is going to catch you. There are only more and more "if only" prayers, and more and more shiny products and experiences that your sponsors will sell to you to deceive yourself into feeling real. To convince yourself that you are not tripping into the endless freefall of the bought and sold market fragments of souls memory hole.
Your life has been brought to you by sponsors, and yet you try to tell us that WE are the ones who don't get it? We are the ones who are crazy? We are the ones who need help? Hah! Sucker! Perhaps we should just sit back and watch you spin around and stumble in your dimwitted slavery to desires that were placed into your soul at an early age so that the greyfaces could forever pull your strings and get your heart to jump around at every which way so you can work for them and buy their products and experiences. They have convinced you that time is money. So you need to work all of your time away now so that you can have much more time later on, in some imagined future heaven that few ever get to see. They will tell you that enjoying things now is for fools, even as they party off of the labor and money you have given them. It's a good scam. And the fool is you for buying into it. For subscribing to a reality that is just as false as any other version. Just because it has the majority of dupes believing in it, doesn't make it any more necessary or real.
And this is the point of our existence. (At least that's what we like to tell ourselves and others.) We are here to break up the maze. To get you to see that you do have the strength to climb over the walls. To get past the naysayers. To live the life you feel you are meant to live without any interference of those piddling parasitic sponsors. This life is yours. And we are here to help you with seeing that, not out of altruism, but out of the sheer entertainment value that your realization will give us. Eris is not seeking you out to become a convert to Her Operations Mindfuck (hell, if Eris sought you out, you would not be stuck in that maze you are in now), She is only trying to open up the chances. Blow a little fresh air into the stagnation that masquerades as razzle dazzle. Get the minds to blow open wide. It doesn't matter what you think about our Discordian Society. At least while you are still stuck there, in your land of "if only" and "just one more."
Remember THAT as you trample and get trampled this holiday season to get to your shiny products.
-Irreverend Hugh, KSC
PMM Co-Episkopos, Pan-Goddess Diddling Witch of the Coven of Macha, Arch-Deacon and Rabbi of the International Great Discordian Jihad, spokesperson of slack, and covert cohort of the Church of Eris. (And a whole lot of other amusing titles and credentials which may or may not have any relevance, depending on who you are and what you want.)
November 29th, 2005
Day 546 of the DJ
Rant 149
Rants Vol. 2 Index