“Anarchism is Order”
- popular Anarchist saying, often attributed to Mikhail Bakunin

“We simply do not consider it desirable that a realm of justice and harmony should be established on earth”
- Nietzsche, “The Gay Science”

“A state of extreme confusion and disorder”
- The Princeton Dictionary definition of “Chaos”

I’ve been meaning to write this for a long time. On and off for about 4 years, to be perfectly honest. Sometimes I decided it was unnecessary, at other times I didn’t necessarily feel like writing it very much, but now I have both the opportunity and motivation, so I’ve finally done it.

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One of the things which has often caused a good degree of mirth, if some confusion in me, is why so many Discordians consider themselves Anarchists. As the first definition above suggests, Anarchism is based on the idea of spontaneous and natural, yet lasting order. That, if certain impediments to this vision of social organisation were removed, that we could all live in relative peace and harmony with each other.

This has always sounded somewhat suspicious to me, both as a general political sceptic and a Discordian. It doesn’t sound like the kind of comment one would expect to come from people who insist that disagreement, discord, chaos and strife are just as valid and important as order, harmony and cooperation.

The basis of anarchist political and economic thought can be found in the 18th century, and especially in the doctrine of laissez-faire conceived of by Adam Smith, and developed by others. Essentially and very shortened, the argument is that without state control, the individual will act in ways which not only benefit themselves, but community interests as a whole. This is the idea of the harmony of interests, and it is from this much, though not all, anarchist theory stems. In fact, according to Smith, someone doesn’t even need to try and act in the public interest, because his private interest will naturally lead him that way, “as if guided by an invisible hand”.

Now as a factual argument, this had some validity when applied to the 18th century economic structure. However, as society changed with the industrial revolution, so did the social structure and economic systems of production. As such, while the doctrine of the harmony of interests continued, despite a dubious relevance, its new role was to act as a legitimizing tool for dominant group interests, whereby they could identify their interests with those of society as a whole.

An unspoken pillar of the success of laissez-faire was, at the time, that of expanding and new markets. Because of new markets, producers did not compete too strongly in currently existing ones with entrenched companies or individuals, allowing a semblance of harmony to exist. It’s the same sort of harmony that exists when one has very few road users. As the traffic increases, so does the complexity of the system and the possibility of conflict, or at the very least, non-zero sum relationships between road users. The same is true of markets.

However, as we all know, infinitely expanding markets are simply untenable, if not logically impossible. The question of conflict can only be put off for so long.

Somewhat ironically, this adoption of harmony of interest undermines certain Anarchist arguments, since it is possible that the existence state is not opposed to the citizenry, at least theoretically. Running with that, many European liberals and free-marketers that had no problems with the state put forward the opinion that the good of each individual state did not necessarily impact negatively on other states, and that pursuit of self-gratification would benefit the international community as a whole. So would free trade, naturally.

Building on this, 19th century liberals, such as Mazzini, the Italian reformer, argued that nationalism also did not impact negatively on any other nation, and that every nation was suited to a certain part of the division of international labour. At the time, with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Prussian militarists and the Russian Empire keeping an effective lock-down on the various ethnic groups of Eastern Europe, that certainly seemed true, however anyone who knows the history of conflict in the region knows how short-sighted that viewpoint really is, and how many groups have competing claims on the same patches of land, claims that are now entirely exclusionary thanks to xenophobic nationalism.

As nationalistic claims became more insistent and pronounced certain economists in second-tier economies, like the United States and Germany, began to point out how free trade disproportionately benefitted the major trading power of the time, the United Kingdom. Marxist theories, which denied the harmony of interest and placed class-conflict at the centre of its analysis, were also becoming more popular on the Continent. Laissez-faire came under unprecedented attack, and it was only the appropriation of the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin which helped save them.

Naturally, Darwin himself cannot be blamed for the poor importation of his scientific theories into a pseudoscientific area of study. As smaller companies were put out of business by larger competitors and as new markets shrunk, it was claimed by those who benefitted from these actions that this too was evolution – and as such benefitted the community at large. But of course, there is not a direct match between this vulgar Social Darwinism and the doctrine of the harmony of interests, and so it was the latter who underwent a subtle change. Now the good of the community was redefined as to mean that the community was made up of those who were strong enough to succeed, and those who failed were weaklings, who were holding back society at large. They were the price which had to be paid for progress.

Of course, this Social Darwinism quickly found currency in justifying territorial expansion and conquest by the major world powers, by claiming war as a form of “natural selection” which weeded out the weak nations and races of people. As with weak individuals, so were the weak nations sacrificed for the greater good and harmony of the world at large. And although this laissez-faire liberalism became less popular in the domestic sphere as WWI drew closer, it still remained a very real factor of international politics up until the war.

All of this is a nice history lesson, but you are probably wondering exactly how this impacts on Anarchist arguments, since they deliberately disavow the state, a factor they would most certainly claim separates them from the unfortunate side effects and decay of classical liberalism. The purpose of this was to show that one of the main foundations of Anarchist thought – that we can all get along, productively and without conflict – when actually tried in reality only works when those too weak to fight back or protest effectively are ignored and sacrificed for a nebulous greater good. The claim that conflict can be overcome generally and that everyone can benefit from a single system generally is a lie, and that lie can only ever be enforced through military might.

Anarchism, for all its vaunted “individualism” and talk of freedom, at its core cannot tolerate real difference. It cannot accept actors who do not act in a “rational” manner and do not have aims which coincide with everyone else’s aims. And when people are confronted with those who won’t conform, especially to an ideological system like Anarchism, violence is almost always the response of choice. Equally, those who suffer because of the system are cruelly discarded with contemptuous statements about their lack of “fitness” and utility.

Indeed some of these trends seem to have been picked up on by the “National-Anarchists”, Anarchists coming from an extreme right wing point of view, who denounce the state and everything it does as against the “Natural Order” – a list that also includes multiculturalism, feminism and homosexuality.

As I cannot stress enough, when one “naturalizes” certain attitudes, trends or ideas, and combines the idea of “natural” with “good”, the results are not very pretty. It causes the sort of mentality one frequently finds among fanatics and fundamentalists – because it is precisely the same mentality, only religious bigots replace “natural order” with “natural law” ie; God’s Law. Naturalizing anti-statism and spontaneous order has some very serious implications, ones which I don’t think many Anarchists have clearly thought through.

Now, to clarify, this isn’t a “pro-state” argument, though it will almost certainly be construed and portrayed as such by some people. The state/anti-statist dualism is about as clever, and useful, as calling all Americans on the left “Democrats” and on the right “Republicans”. States have good and bad things about them. So does anti-statism. Treating it as some sort of Manichean struggle between good and evil is another reason why I suspect latent fanaticism and dogmatism in much of the Anarchist movement, because it is incapable of seeing the world in any other way than black and white, where you are either for whichever minor political sect they are a member of, or The Enemy.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, are among the reasons I consider Anarchism…well not exactly incompatible with Discordianism, since conceivably any political position could be taken by a Discordian (though their sincerity and motives for doing so would be quite different to many of their compatriots), but why I find it an unusual choice. This emphasis on harmony and order and naturalism…it has some very sinister undertones when one thinks about them, ones which are not necessarily in agreement with adherents of chaos and disorder.

A Salutation to New Discordians – Marcelo Pirani (AKA True Hare)

You may be a prisoner of the tyrant called You

The Sufis teach that the nafs (aka ego, aka “false self”) is the trickiest little bugger, and will continually disguise itself as something else (God, the Greater Good, ascended Space Brothers, the Muse) in order to continue your slavery and addiction to it.

Your ego tricks you into thinking that it is God, or Money, or True Love, or whatever it is you’re burning yourself up to get. It’s really just a hungry little god in your belly which constantly demands food and energy.

Researching the Nafs, the idea seems to be tied pretty deeply into Sufi/Muslim values, and I don’t want to go too far in that direction. They identify the nafs with the animal nature, something that needs to be trained and refined and polished over time. Greed, envy, lust, betrayal, malice, all the things which Muslims condemn is within the basic unrefined state of the Nafs. Isn’t it interesting that in this framework, one’s basic desire to unite with the divine is obfuscated by one’s animal nature? Or to be less dualistic – the unrefined self?

My friend Enki pointed out that this sounds awfully similar to Choronzon, a thelemic demon which dwells in the abyss. Chronozon 333 is within your internal monologue, a force which distracts and obsesses you. Wikipedia notes: “Carroll himself states … that Choronzon is simply the name given to the obsessional side-effects of any deluded search for a false Holy Guardian Angel, or anything which the magician would mistake for his own profound genius itself.”

It’s disarming, right? Because if you give credence to this idea, it suggests that you may be on the wrong path entirely. All that stuff you toil for may be just a distraction from the Divine, however you conceptualize it. And is there any way of knowing? But luckily, conceptualizing this internal force as an external entity allows you to regard and evaluate it with a certain degree of objectivity.

And, if you choose, banish it.

Poor Ned.

Ok, so since we have people here who are barely familiar with the argument, I’ll lay out some etymology and terms.

The whole free-will/determinism language basically stems from a radical philosophy response during the ‘Enlightenment’ era to the prevailing dogma of the “Geocentric Crystal Spheres of the Creator God” theory/model of the Solar System/Universe refined by the church from Antiquity to the Renaissance (shades of the Egg of Mithras model).

Hold on folks….

The Celestial Spheres:

The celestial spheres, or celestial orbs, were the fundamental entities of the cosmological models developed by Plato, Eudoxus, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Copernicus and others. In these celestial models the stars and planets are carried around by being embedded in rotating spheres made of an aetherial transparent fifth element (quintessence), like jewels set in orbs.

In the geocentric model adopted in the Middle Ages, the planetary spheres (i.e. those that contained planets) were arranged outwards from the spherical, stationary Earth at the centre of the universe in this order: the spheres of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. In more detailed models the seven planetary spheres contained other secondary spheres within them. The planetary spheres were followed by the stellar sphere containing the fixed stars; other scholars added a ninth sphere to account for the precession of the equinoxes, a tenth to account for the supposed trepidation of the equinoxes, and even an eleventh to account for the changing obliquity of the ecliptic.

In modern science, the orbits of the planets are simply the paths of those planets through mostly empty space. For medieval scholars, on the other hand, celestial spheres were actually thick spheres of rarefied matter nested one within the other, each one in complete contact with the sphere above it and the sphere below.  When scholars applied Ptolemy’s epicycles, they presumed that each planetary sphere was exactly thick enough to accommodate them.  Combining this information with astronomical observations allowed scholars to calculate that the distance to the far edge of Saturn (or to the inside of the stellar sphere) was 73,387,747 miles.

Ok, so here’s a secret. Most Mythology is humanity projecting onto things in the universe that they can’t understand.

Haha, only serious.

We do this because as soon as we project part of our ’self’ out there we can have some degree of control more than blind non-understanding.

This theory was codified into Western culture by the Greeks (remember the ‘indigestion’ and “The classical Greeks did not influence the classical Greeks” quotes?). The Greeks actually calculated the circumference of the earth pretty darn accurately and got a lot right. The Greeks inherited the legacy of the Babylonians  and developed the science of astronomy. By the second century A.D., they had covered most of the main branches of astronomy: They knew what caused and could predict eclipses, they had charted planets, cataloged stars, observed novae, and discovered precession. They had discovered the Earth was spherical (though that knowledge was lost later), and that it moved around the sun (though that model grew out of favor).

Some excerpts from an article on the Greeks:

Thales probably believed in a spherical Earth; Pythagoras and Plato did, as well. However, though Aristotle was grossly incorrect in his model of the universe, he must be given credit for the first study of scientific geography. He gave three reasons for his thinking:

1. Only a sphere could result from the tendency of matter to fall together toward a common center.
2. Only a sphere could through the circular shadow which we always see during a lunar eclipse.
3. Only on the surface of a sphere would a traveler going from North to South see new constellations rising above the horizon on (s)he moved.

…….The Geocentric model held so much sway because of many of the philosophies of the ancient Greeks. They believed that the circle is the perfect form, and that the simplest model that made sense must be the correct one. Since they “knew” the heavens were perfect, everything must move upon a circle, and since the simplest model was that the Earth stood still and everything moved around it, then that must also be true. After all, we can’t feel the Earth moving, so why should be believe that it does without any extraordinary evidence?

There’s one problem with the Geocentric model and it had to do with the motion of the planets. For periods of time, the planets seem to orbit in an eastward direction across the stars. However, for brief periods of time, they switch and go in a westward direction. This is called retrograde.

….

Plato taught that the movements, occultations, conjunctions, etc. of the sky were all calculable, and they only frightened those who could not “work a sum.” However, he did complain that the heavenly bodies did not always use good sense. He was sure that their movements could be understood, and if they did not make sense then it was the theory that was at fault, not the heavenly bodies.

This lead him to eventually accept the theory that the Earth might not be at the center of the universe, and he wrote “the Earth, our nurse, goes to and fro on its axis, which stretches right through the universe.” In Plato’s school, the theory enjoyed a long life, and it was one of his followers that hit upon the heliocentric – sun-centered – model. Unfortunately, Plato’s greatest pupil, Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), disagreed.

Aristotle’s heavy scientific words contrasted with light and eloquent phrases from Plato, and they tipped the balance in the favor of geocentrism. It would take nearly 2000 years before main-stream thought returned to heliocentric ideas.

With a geocentric model, one must explain the apparent wandering of the planets in some way. Credit for the theory of concentric crystal spheres with epicycles (spheres upon spheres) and eccentricities is given to Eudoxus, but it reached the highest stage of development in the hands of Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria.

Around A.D. 150, the Greek astronomer Ptolemy (left) (A.D. 85-165) – the last of the great Greek scientists – solidified the geocentric model, elaborating and formalizing the view in a manner that closely approximated the movements of the sun and planets. In Ptolemy’s model of the universe, Earth was in a center sphere, surrounded by eight other spheres, which were, in order, the moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and then the “fixed stars.” The idea was absorbed by Arabs and portrayed under the name of “Ptolemaic.”

Angels are Jinn who have surrendered their will to Allah/YHWH.

So the whole point was that they couldn’t quite figure out how to make the “wandering stars” fit into their math, and it pissed them off. These things had seemingly “free will” and thus earned god-titles and reputations. This re-occurs in most mythology about the planets, especially if it isn’t known that the Morning Star and the Evening Star are the same heavenly body. Earlier Greeks did not realize what the planets were, but were quite disdainful towards them. They were referred to as “tramp stars,” which is our word for “planets.” Homer wrote of the morning and evening star (Venus) by two separate names, “Phospheros” and “Hesperos” — he never knew that they were the same planet. It was Pythagoras in 550 B.C. who discovered that Phospheros and Hesperos were the same.

Early Islam shares that confusion, as noted in the wikipedia entry on Satan:

According to the Qur’an, Iblis (the Arabic name used) disobeyed an order from Allah to bow to Adam and as a result was forced out of heaven and given respite until the day of judgment from further punishment.

When Allah commanded all of the angels to bow down before Adam (the first Human), Iblis, full of hubris and jealousy, refused to obey God’s command (he could do so because, as a jinn, he had free will), seeing Adam as being inferior in creation due to his being created from clay as compared to him (created of fire).

“It is We Who created you and gave you shape; then We bade the angels prostrate to Adam, and they prostrate; not so Iblis (Lucifer); He refused to be of those who prostrate.”
(Allah) said: “What prevented thee from prostrating when I commanded thee?” He said: “I am better than he: Thou didst create me from fire, and him from clay.”

Qur’an 7:11-12

Lucifer, of course, means Morning Star. I love the identification of the stars as Jinn fire-beings with free will, and the Angels as fire-beings with free will that have surrendered it to Allah. Then along comes this punk Lucifer (the morning-star) and says “Fuck this, I do what I want. Sometimes I go backwards in the sky JUST TO FUCK WITH THE HUMANS.”

Venus had a similar reputation, dig. How the hell could you describe the path of a body across the sky mathematically if you don’t recognize it half the time when it shows up. Those rogue-star fuckers are obviously “allowed” to wander from the ineffable clockwork plan of the Divine Watchmaker.

So all of this history bubbles up into the Renaissance Catholic Church as the “Ptolemnaic Geocentrism with Crystal Spheres” model of the Solar System.

And then some wise-ass in the church asks, “A’hyuk, well then what makes those immense solid spheres go round and round-y?” and some other fount of ignorance responds, “Well, GOD’s WILL mannifest as physical FORCE. At the beggining of time, he just PUSHED everything and the Holy Spirit maintains the momentum.”

And then oh shit, if everything in the universe that we can approach mathematically is a manifestation of God’s Will and Glory unfolding into the visible universe, then it’s all PRE-DETERMINED.

But, but, but Lucifer had FREE WILL!, the Qu’ran tells me so, and Adam had FREE WILL, the Bible tells me so, and those fucking PLANETS! have free will, the astronomers tell us so [Fuck you and your heliocentrism, Copernicus. I like my model cuz' it's mine. We's gonna kills you, boy!].

This thread is mired in Cartesean Duality.*

Remember this the next time you see some-one spitting and screaming about Free-Will/Determinism: The model is so out dated, it make you seem crazier than the Cargo Cultists.

Cargo Cults

We welcome the return of John Frum and his CARGO!!!!!!!!!!!

Cargo Cult Plane

*[The same premise that underlies the Crystal Sphere model (that God acts as an imminent yet immaterial source of motive force for matter) also underlies the mind/body split (that the mind is an imminent yet immaterial source of motive force for the body) which is the source of all of the Free-Will/Determinism confusion and yelling. Personally, I don't think these models represent what happens in Reality in the least. The math fits, but the underlying premise leads to delusion.]

For this reason certain fine forms of asceticism are developing quite naturally. This asceticism does not slander love, does not blaspheme against it, does not try to convince itself that love is an abomination from which it is necessary to run away. It is Platonism rather than asceticism. It recognizes that love is the sun, but often does not see its way to live in the sunlight, and so considers it better not to see the sun at all, […]

—P.D. Ouspensky, Tertium Organum

What religious narrative in this present day, teaches us such lessons in fabulous morality as the Principia Discordia?  Does any other belief system teach that uncertainty and ambiguity trump order and discipline?  Or that order and discpline themselves contain an a priori possibility of the state of uncertainty coming into play?

This discourse of order and disorder, from where does it arise, this formidable tradition that includes Lao Tzu, Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Artaud, Dali, Duchamp, Tazara and Deleuze?  Does Discordianism truly belong to this august, if mutuable geneology?

From the outset, the introduction to the Principia introduces ambiguity, foreshadowing Barthe’s Death of the Author.  The nature of the author of the tract is purposefully concealed and denied, in an attempt to escape the tyranny of subjectivity, pinning the blame instead of a vast number of culprits, perhaps to show the futility of subjectivity as a starting point for a critique.  Yet the authors are nonetheless identified, so does this not make a mockery of their post-structuralist stance?

Not necessarily.  For the claimed authors are in fact fictional constructs themselves, as we well know.  Furthermore, their approach to their work is detatched, almost bemused by their own interests and obsessions.  The irreducibly textual nature of the work is thus reaffirmed, and the simplistic, postivistic attempts to criticize the Principia with simplified versions of its own arguments are easily dismissed.

The apparent eccentricities of the text, such as Wilson’s claims about the time-travelling anthropologist, are often dismissed as harmless as whimsical diversions on the part of a critic who required some form of ‘creative’ escape from the exigencies of high-powered theory. This attitude, typical of Anglo-American criticism, draws a  firm line between the discipline of thinking about chaos and the activity of writing which that discipline is supposed to renounce or ignore in its own performance. Criticism as ‘answerable style’ (in Geoffrey Hartman’s phrase) is an idea that cuts right across the deep-grained assumptions of academic discourse. It is, as I shall argue, one of the most unsettling and radical departures of Discordian thought. A properly attentive reading of Wilson brings out the extent to which critical concepts are ceaselessly transformed or undone by the activity of self-conscious writing.  His subversive tactics come down to an inordinate fondness for paradox disguising a commitment to order and method.

The interview of Malacypse the Younger by the Greater Poop illustrates not only the need to draw boundaries between meta-fictional philosophical discourses, but also to transgress these boundaries when the cease to have utility for the reader.  This boundary was always subject to periodic raids and incursions by the more adventurous Proto-Discordians, especially those poets and novelists among them who felt uneasy with a discipline that drove a doctrinal wedge between the two kinds of writing. The issue was more than a matter of critical technique. What the orthodox Proto-Discordians sought in the language of poetry was a structure somehow transcending human reason and ultimately pointing to a religious sense of values.  Thus the autonomic-reflexivity of poetry became not merely an issue in aesthetics but a testing-point of faith in relation to human reason. Behind the Proto-Discordian rhetoric of irony and paradox is a whole metaphysics of language, where poetic and religious claims to truth are bound up together. At the same time there were those who assented in principle to this discipline of thought but found it in practice hard, if not impossible, to live with.

The Greater Poop reporter like Barthes, asserts the critic’s freedom to exploit a style that actively transforms and questions the nature of interpretative thought. In itself this marks a decisive break with the scrupulous decorum of critical language maintained in the Situationist’s wake. This is to argue that theory, in so far as it is valid at all, is strictly a matter of placing some orderly construction upon the ‘immediate’ data of perception. Barthes and Malaclypse totally reject this careful policing of the bounds between literature and theory. Where the post-Situationist’s proposed a disciplined or educating movement of thought from perception to principle, they discovered an endlessly fascinating conflict, the ‘scene’ of which is the text itself in its alternating aspects of knowledge and pleasurable fantasy.