is it getting around more? is it growing and getting to the masses? opinions?
here's an excellent essay on this:
http://www.23ae.com/index.asp?post=446
As time marches on and culture gets weirder and weirder, I think Discordia is becoming increasingly relevant. I'd like to riff on why Discordia is more relevant now than it's ever been. Here's my take, and I want to hear yours:
At its core, Discordia has some silly lessons about ignoring cultural programming and navigating our fractillian society on your own baffling terms. Its satirical approach towards religion, something that was once so shhh! sacred! that wecouldn'tjoke about it, is an attitude we can ride into many other straightfaced territories. Gender, politics, the economy, war, terrorism, our expectations for the future, your goals, your flaws, your life -- these are things that we can easily bork if we take them to be Real and Serious and a Big Deal. Which isn't to say that they're not a big deal. But that it's better to take them with a spoonfull of salt.
When we get serious, we get rigid, we get tunnel vision, and we get indentured. Discordia is about tearing down serious walls internally as well as externally. In this decade, where there are so many conflicting messages being shouted at us, it's important to differentiate between What Matters and What Don't. And the secret is that people probably take more stuff all bitchtits than is healthy. Healthy for all of us Discordia uses flexibility and humor to cope with the paradoxes and dangers and ubiquitous spags of modern living. It's about escaping the two-man con where both choices are bum, and becoming an active (rather than passive) character in your life's lame-ass Made For TV Movie.
I think this is the most interesting and confusing period of history to date. Historians will struggle to misunderstand what it was like to be alive in the 21st century. The Bureaucracy is getting bigger and sicker. There is a great cultural demand for agents of change who will challenge the existing order and suggest that some tea and scones should follow. The heroes of our day are the people who are kinetic enough to make clothing from this threaded culture and not get weighed down by the dross and rut of the human condition. All sorts of economists, academics, politicians and other knowitall spags think they've got the logical progression of soecity pegged. I'm not even interested in the ehhhhh "logical progression" of society, I'm interested in totally unsharted territory! This is the modern Discordian's role, to flip the blessed bird at binary choices, to make objection and change part of the hegemony, and to enjoy oneself despite our programming and inclination to be boring-ass spags. We are the silver lining to the cultural cabbage patch. This is not just a society of robots, and the Discordians are evidence of it.
At the time of this writing, I don't see Eris as a Goddess in the same way that the ehhhhh religious types think of Gods. My Eris isn't a pagan entity. It's Goddamn 2009, it's 3175, and the "Gods" model is in need of a patch. That language is outdated software. Eris isn't answering prayer calls, the phone's off the hook 'cause she's getting busy Personally, I see Eris as a force similar to the internet, similar to thespirit of protest, similar to hair metal. She's not the force, but the attitude through which Bureaucracy is transcended into Aftermath. She is the unexpected punchline at the end of a decade long shaggy dog joke. And in that I think she has more to offer than the sepulcher and bureaucratic tangle of other contemporary edifices like religions and ideologies and static.
These are the Strange Times, and Eris' advice is to go into this crazy mixed up world like you're attending a costume party. It's a CRAZY party, too - with boobs and drugs and sex and violence and hope and ugliness and beauty and misery. There's straight talk and stray talk silly talk shop talk gossip talk. If you're not having fun, wander around, see what else is out there. It's wild.
There's so much out there, that's the best part. There's more than anyone can handle, and exponentially more every moment. Today, the day you're reading this, is the most complex, interesting, exciting day in history to date. You don't think so? "Listen; there's a hell of a universe next door: let's go!"
Eris would love to be your date to this crazy party. She knows that the Strange Times leave a lot of people miserably confused. She's not going to resolve your confusion, but she can help you become happily confused instead.
So if you ask me, the Principia is 49 or 50 years old, and it's more relevant than ever.
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