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omniliquid · 9 months

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OmniLiquid's Church of Discordia: Sermon #666

So, I've been thinking, and drinking, and there's a thing that's been on my mind lately, so it's time for one of OmniLiquid's infamous mostly unnoticed rambly drunken rants about the failures of capitalism on a basic fundamental level that will undoubtedly devolve into a profanity-laden enraged scream into the void, but we'll burn that police station when we get to it.

But the topic for today's sermon in this church of Discordia (all hail Discordia, praise Eris) for which I am the most important pope, naturally, is the fundamental meaning of what it means for something to be a social construct. Listen up folks, this is important shit. This is, in essence, at the core of much magic.

I will begin, as I often do, with a thought experiment, and I will borrow the language (and you may use the voice in your internal reading) of Ben Shapiro, because it is funny to me (I am pretty sure Ben is smart enough to not make this argument, so don't attribute it to him, that would be strawmanning. I am taking the most naive and facetious possible take on economics here, and his voice happens to be my first thought, as a mere coincidence).

"Let's say, for the sake of argument, let's say that there are only two countries, and one of those countries, call it America, is amazing and has a bunch of gold in the ground so they can produce 10 trillion dollars worth of gold or, because the gold makes farming harder, they can produce 1 trillion dollars worth of corn. And let's say the only other country, call it South America, has no minerals in their soil but it's great for growing crops so they can produce 10 trillion dollars worth of crops or they can be lazy and produce only 1 trillion dollars of, like, crafts and stuff that gets sold on etsy. Wouldn't it be best if America focused their efforts on gold and produced 10 trillion dollars worth of gold and South America focused their efforts and produced 10 trillion dollars worth of food and they traded 5 trillion of each so both countries had way more than they could have had otherwise?"

And, yes, I am going to very much take down this strawman, but bear with me, because I am not aiming for the strawman. Like Batman, I am going to aim past the scarecrow and pull the wall down on it from behind. Save your questions to the end, folks, I can't hear them until after I post this anyway because that is how time works (maybe make a note of them, though).

So the first obvious question is, hey Mr. Strawman, what happens when something restricts trade, like if there's a blockade by the trade federation, the Evergreen gets stuck in a canal, or orcas declare war on shipping routes? Won't America just starve if all they have is gold and won't South America's food surplus go to waste and wouldn't this trade arrangement be dumb anyway because without Discordian and witchcraft-related crafts on Etsy the market is just a bland deluge of corporate excess? And yes, that is a very good point and that's where you might expect Batman's grapnel shot to connect and your expecting the absolute shock of Batman just straight up shooting the strawman with one o his tools and breaking his first rule, but no, it goes deeper, and the bards among you are overpowered indeed for seeing this coming and keep that up. Because the real question is, who decided that the 10 trillion dollars worth of gold and the 10 trillion dollars worth of food were equivalent (aside from me in coming up with the dumb argument).

Now we start to hit upon the thesis of this sermon: money is a social construct: what does that mean? I will now use another hypothetical. Suppose we only have two currencies, call US dollars and spicybucks. And suppose the exchange rate is a bit wonky so 1 dollar can be traded for 1 spicybuck and vice-versa for a negligible fee (if done in volume) but because of differences in regulations between countries, the work required to create a dollar worth of products in the US costs 0.95 dollars but the cost to create a dollar's worth of goods and ship it to the US in spicyland is 0.94 spicybucks and through the magic of hypotheticals this happens across every industry for every product and every service. What will be the result? This would be a short-circuit of the dollar, and every corporation would either buy all of their products and services in spiceland or they will be outcompeted by those who do, meaning workers in the US will be completely unable to find jobs , unable to buy anything, complete economic collapse, 100% deathrate in the US.

But this is FUCKING RIDICULOUS. Because if Spiceland didn't exist, the US would just create the products and services it needed and distribute them as normal. Spiceland is a kind of destructive spell that drains the economy, somehow. How? Why? We'll get to that. Maybe. Maybe we already did. Maybe we can only describe the features but not the thing itself. Maybe there's an amorphousness to magick and to experience and to everything, maybe the whole issue is that we are trying to get to the cores of things but there are no cores, just wibbly wobbly things. ALL IS LIQUID.

Quick aside, in Final Fantasy Tactics there is a stat called faith, which varies from 0 to 100, representing lore-wise the amount of belief the character has in the gods, but mechanically the effectiveness of any magical ability is multiplied as a percentage by the faith of the performer AND THE RECIEVER of the magick.

So getting back to the point, money is a social construct. It is a system of exchange rates that is agreed upon by some sort of consensus of the people we interact with and we just kind of agree that a loaf of bread is about a dollar and a two liter bottle of off brand soda is about half that and a modest house is about 50 to 100 thousand and a big mac is two but a double cheeseburger is 1 and rent for a studio or a 1-bedroom is about 350 *whispers from non-existent producer*....

...

And wages have gone up by an equal ratio, right?

[insert the Anakin and Pade meme if you aren't as lazy as me]

right?

...

Ok. How's civil unrest looking? High and growing? Goddessfuckingdamnedright it's high and growing, and it needs to be!

Don't people FUCKING GET IT! MONEY IS A FUCKING ILLUSION! GENDER IS A FUCKING ILLUSION! SURE, SEX HAS SOME REAL FUCKING IMPLICATIONS FOR REPRODUCTION BUT THAT ISN'T A FUCKING PROBLEM RIGHT NOW! PEOPLE SAY ELON MUSK HAS ENOUGH MONEY TO END WORLD HUNGER BUT IT DOESN'T MATTER IF HE TRANSFERS A BILLION DOLLARS TO A STARVING KID IN AFRICA'S BANK ACCOUNT THAT DOESN'T DO SHIT IF THE KID CAN'T GET FUCKING FOOD AND PROBABLY MEDICAL ATTENTION!

People act like money is this thing that can transmute itself into anything and it's sure easy to think that when your experience is driving to the store or ordering shit on Amazon with next day shipping, but money is not the philosopher's stone, it is a false stone, it has limitations, and excessive use degrades the soul. What matters is FUCKING MATERIAL CONDITIONS.

I think if you meditate on these truths and consult your pineal gland, you will gain deep knowledge, but I will add a few further remarks to aid in you meditation before expanding further and bringing in today's scripture.

There is no such thing as an illegal strike, only an unsuccessful one.

I don't recall the exact quote or who said it and I wish I could find it, but I saw someone quote it in a post once, and it was to the effect of: "When we go on strike, they will villainize us and lament that it came to such a terrible place, but don't let them fool you. When we go on strike, we are showing them grandmotherly kindness by not showing up on their doorstep with the guillotines at the ready."

Today's scripture comes from Illuminatus, near the beginning of the fourth trip, between Illuminati memo #16 and Illuminati memo #16 (not a typo) (extra-relevent passages (afaik) in pink, and shit that just resonates with me by syncronicity or otherwise in purple):

""They were using Mace now, and I saw one photographer snapping a picture of a cop while the cop was still Macing him (Heisenberg rides again! From out of the west come the thundering hooves of the great hearse, Joint Phenomenon! Except that I was on acid; if I'd been on weed, then it would really, royally, be a Joint Phenomenon). And I heard later that the photographer got an award for that shot. Right then, he didn't look like he was getting an award. He looked like they had just taken off his skin and touched each raw nerve with a dentist's drill. "Christ," I said to Hagbard, "look at that poor bastard. I hope I come out of this with just another teargassing or two. I don't want any of that Mace." But acid is placid, you know, and a minute later I was on Joyce's juices again and thinking of a drama called 'Their Mace and My Gripes." I made the first line fruity, in honor of Padre Pederastia: "What a botch of a pair to plumb this hour's gripes."

"Bism'allah," Hagbard said. "Our karma is made by our deeds, not by our prayers. You're on the set, so you take the action as it comes."

"Oh, cut out that Holy Man craperoo and stop reading

my mind," I protested. "You don't have to go on impressing me." But I was off on another tangent, which went something like this: If this set is Mayor Daley's circus, then Mayor Daley is the ringmaster. If the things below are the things above, as Hermes hermetically hinted, then this set is the bigger set. Mr. Microcosm, meet Mr. Macrocosm. "Hi, Mike!" "Hi, Mac." Conclusion: Mayor Daley, in a small way, is what Krishna is, in a large way. QED.

Just then some SDS kids who'd been teargassed across the street came running our way, and Hagbard got busy handing out wet handkerchiefs. They needed them: they were half-blind, like Joyce splitting his Adam into wise hopes. And I wasn't much help, because I was tod busy crying myself.

"Hagbard," I gasped in ecstasy. "Mayor Daley is Krishna."

"Worse luck for him," he said curtly, distributing the handkerchiefs. "He doesn't suspect it."

I thought, suddenly:

Hubert the Hump has coughed and hawked And spat on the streets that Lincoln walked

The water turned to blood (Hagbard was a joking jolting Jesus: you expected wine maybe?) and I remembered my mother's story about Dillinger at the Biograph. We all sit there, like him, in the Biograph Theatre, dreaming the drama of our lives, then walk outside to the grandmotherly kindness of the lead kisses that wake us back to our slipping beatitude. Except that he found a way to come back. What was it Charley Mordecai said: "First as tragedy, then as farce?" Marxism-Lennonism: Ed Sanders of the Fugs, the night before, talking about fucking in the streets as if he had read my mind (or had I read his?) and Lennon's "Why Don't We Do It in the Road" was recorded a year in the future. The Marx and our groupies. The bloody handkerchiefs dipped into water, or wine, and the mass rite went on, the mass went Right On, the Mace they rowed. Capone set it up for the Feds, but John was fed up and left the set, so an extra named Frank Sullivan got the bullets. The Autobiograph Theatre, a drama house and a trauma, yes. I maybe should have taken only half a

tab instead of the full 500 mikes, because at that point the SDS kids, all of them siding with RYM-I at the split next year, looked like they had altarboy robes on and I thought Hagbard was distributing communion wafers, not handkerchiefs. He looked at me, suddenly, with that hawk-faced Egyptian glare, and I observed that he had observed, Hopalong Horus Heisenberg, just where I was at You don't have to be a waterman, I thought, to know which way my mind is blowing.

There was a sound from the crowd, like a subway opening all its doors with a suck of air, and I saw the police coming, crossing the street to clear the park.

"Here we go again," I said. "All hail Discordia,"

"Snafu ueber alles," Hagbard grinned, starting to trot beside me.

We headed North, figuring that the ones who retreated eastward would get trapped against the wall and creamed. "Democracy in action," I said, panting along.

'There thou might'st behold the very image of Authority," he quoted, shifting his water bucket to keep it in balance. I caught the Shakespearean reference and looked back: my mind had already: each policeman indeed looked like Shakespeare's dog. I remembered the frantic semantics at the LBJ anti-birthday party, when Burroughs insisted Chicago Cops were more like dogs than pigs, in contradiction to the SDS rhetoric. Terry Southern, taking his usual maniacal middle course, claimed they were more akin to the purple-assed mandrill, most surly of the baboon family. But most of them hadn't discovered writing yet.

"Authority?" I asked, realizing I'd lost something along the way. We were slowing to a walk, the action was behind us.

"A is not A," Hagbard explained with that tiresome patience of his. "Once you accept A is A, you're hooked. Literally hooked, addicted to the System."

I caught the references to Aristotle, the old man of the tribe with his unfortunate epistemological paresis, and also to that feisty little lady I always imagine is really the lost Anastasia, but I still didn't grok. "What do you mean?" I asked, grabbing a wet handkerchief as some of the teargas started to drift to our end of the park.

"Chairman Mao didn't say half of it," Hagbard replied

holding a handkerchief to his own face. His words came through muffled: "It isn't only political power that grows out of the barrel of a gun. So does a whole definition of reality. A set. And the action that has to happen on that particular set and on none other."

"Don't be so bloody patronizing," I objected, looking around a corner in time and realizing this was the night I would be Maced. "That's just Marx: the ideology of the ruling class becomes the ideology of the whole society."

"Not the ideology. The Reality." He lowered his handkerchief. "This was a public park until they changed the definition. Now, the guns have changed the Reality. It isn't a public park. There's more than one kind of magic."

"Just like the Enclosure Acts," I said hollowly. "One day the land belonged to the people. The next day it belonged to the landlords."

"And like the Narcotics Acts," he added. "A hundred thousand harmless junkies became criminals overnight, by Act of Congress, in nineteen twenty-seven. Ten years later, in thirty-seven, all the pot-heads in the country became criminals overnight, by Act of Congress. And they really were criminals, when the papers were signed. The guns prove it. Walk away from those guns, waving a joint, and refuse to halt when they tell you. Their Imagination will become your Reality in a second."

And I had my answer to Dad, finally, just as a cop jumped out of the darkness screaming something about freaking motherfucking fag commies and Maced me, as was certain to happen (I knew it as I crumbled in pain) on that set.""

In case you missed it, and I am not throwing shade, I first read this passage in 2003 and somehow missed it because let's be honest, it is a fucking huge shock to the system to realize the importance that a law passed by congress is in physical reality a few soundwaves and scribbles of graphite and ink on some paper and some electronic shit nowadays but it changes the reality of the lives of people far and wide, but the deeper implication of this, that A IS NOT A, that is FUCKING HUGE.

Because here's the thing. In a world without magick, in a world where people don't have conflicting interests or neurodivergences or imperfect communication or a sense of playfulness or all the other shit that makes us lie to each other and encode messages and make up stories and create false narratives, ok, there is a "possible world*" where A would be A, where every dragon would be a dragon, every spade would be a spade, and where every lost person's journey of self discovery would consist of them uttering I am [a short description]. And that world would be bleak and boring and all of the interesting stories about it have been told and it's called The Giver. But that isn't this world. This world has magick, in fact it has a lot of magick, and you see it everywhere, but maybe you don't recognise it as magick because all the fantasy novels have you sold on this idea that magick is wrapped up in this aesthetic of pointy hats and medieval shit and low science and alchemy is a bit more scientific but got superceded by chemistry, etc.

But, no! LET THE RABBITS WEAR GLASSES (I've just had an urge to shout that recently)! MAGICK IS STRONGER THAN EVER AND THE UNIONS PROVE IT! Magick, in some sense, is the ability to distort reality, and to see reality beyond the distortions. And some magicks stretch thin when the presented reality differs so greatly from actual reality as to breed incredulity. And there are a lot of magicks, I'll bring up housing/ret prices, and point ominously towards the idea of land ownership as a concept, are starting to get pretty fucking thin. And when a longstanding spell breaks, that shit cascades. My advice is for all y'all to be prepared to capture that lightning, and don't just bottle it, Goddess knows we got plenty of bottled lightning, chain that fucking shit, channel it towards good and away from destruction as much as possible.

Anyway, I suck at conclusions, but I hope this shit has been informative. Keep fighting the good fight, confuse the enemy, do your things, and make sure to disobey every authority at least once, especially me.

This message is highly conversational. Dictate it to a reporter while exclaiming that you could have deconversationalised it while in office, but you didn't. If they point out that you're still in office, act like you had forgotten and issue a papal edict of your choice.

Praise Eris, All Hail Discordia.

#Discordian Sermon #Actual number 001 #discordianism #illuminatus #anarchism #anti capitalism #drunkposting #long post

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