A mix of parody religion and intellectual philosophy that emerged from the psychedelic 60s, the ideas of Ayn Rand and the growing paranoia of the Nixon era, Discordianism gave birth to 'Operation Mindfuck', an organized attempt to spread the now infamous ‘Illuminati’ conspiracy theory — the belief that an ancient club of what were actually pro-enlightenment Bavarian rationalists secretly control the world. This is the story of Robert Anton Wilson, Kerry Thornley and other Discordians; as well as their connections to Lee Harvey Oswald, Playboy Magazine, the Watergate scandal & Alan Moore.
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Episode music by Pontus Berghe, Max Mulder (http://doomchakratapes.bandcamp.com), Scott from Amoeba Design (https://twitter.com/amoebadesign)
Welcome, listener, to Premium Chapter 133 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the Operation Mindfuck episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Julian Field, and Travis View.
This week, we're covering the Discordian Movement, a mix of parody religion and intellectual philosophy that emerged from the psychedelic 60s, the ideas of Ayn Rand, and the growing paranoia of the Nixon era.
Operation Mindfuck, as they called their most famous endeavor, involved the crafting and spreading of the now infamous Illuminati conspiracy theory.
The belief that an ancient club of what were actually pro-Enlightenment Bavarian rationalists are still secretly controlling the world.
Now, to further confuse the issue, they also claimed that they themselves, the Discordians, were at war with these Illuminati and made that a central belief of their extended bit.
The Discordians successfully hacked the culture, seeding confusion and chaos in the process, believing that this would jolt the sheeple out of their paranoid, irrational beliefs and force them to question consensus reality, in service of an agnostic individualism.
Today, we still live with the fruit of Operation Mindfuck, which yielded results very different than those its creators had hoped for.
Along the way, we'll see how Lee Harvey Oswald, Playboy Magazine, and the Watergate scandal figured into the equation.
Discordianism can be traced back to Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley, two college students at the time from Whittier, California.
Around 1958, they began debating the concepts of chaos and order during an outing to a local bowling alley.
Here's Thornley interviewed decades later by Discordian, Reverend Wordsley.
Sitting around in a bowling alley in 1958 to be exact, somewhere in the vicinity of Whittier, California, and we were discussing philosophy and we were talking about order and chaos.
Greg's theory was that order was projected on the universe, that it didn't exist at all, that it was a creation of the human mind.
That order was entirely in perception and had nothing to do with what was going on out there in a completely chaotic universe.
Hill's conception of the universe inspired the two men to launch a movement that might celebrate this chaos, and our individual freedom to define our own realities by interpreting it.
They called it Discordianism, and at the beginning, it existed only in their close circles.
It was kind of an inside joke.
That same year, though, Thornley, who had already served two years as a U.S.
Marine Corps reservist, was summoned to active duty again.
He was sent to Santa Ana, California and eventually Japan in 1959, and he ended up working in the same radar operator unit as Lee Harvey Oswald, who Thornley greatly admired, thinking him a model of freedom and independence because of the way he resisted superior officers and seemed undaunted by the military machine.
Oswald allegedly once poured a beer over his staff sergeant's head, a formative moment because it led to his loss of clearance and relegated him to janitorial functions on the base.
Yeah, it's a real Hitler-being-rejected-from-art-school kind of moment.
I don't know, because there's actually a really strong belief, even among the Discordians, that Oswald was, at the time, CIA, and his whole point was to be this janitor-style figure that's fucking around and promoting communism to, like, lure people that might be communists in.
You'll see later that he gets surprising treatment leading up to the JFK assassination.
Mmm.
Thornley and Oswald discussed George Orwell, and the intellectuals saw in Oswald a man who wished to resist the totalitarian dystopia described in the pages of 1984, which, incidentally, Oswald had encouraged him to read.
Inspired by his new friend, and fresh off reading the books of Anne Rand, Thornley decided to write a novel with Oswald as its heroic protagonist.
By October, Oswald left the United States, defecting to the Soviet Union.
Thornley learned of Oswald's defection from the pages of the military magazine Stars and Stripes.
By 1962, Oswald was back in the United States with his Russian wife and their daughter.
They had settled in the city of Dallas, with surprisingly little pushback for his alleged betrayal of the United States.
Earlier that year, Thornley had finished writing his novel about Oswald, entitled The Idle Warriors, a thinly-veiled recounting of the two's experience in the Marine Corps.
Here's from the blurb on Amazon.
The Idol Warriors is the story of a troop of marines in the far east getting laid, pulling
pranks, eating, drinking, and talking about life.
The novel was finished before Oswald was accused of shooting JFK in 1965.
Here's Thornley in the same interview we listened to earlier.
He explains what happened.
It was really a weird experience for me because I was writing this novel based on Oswald.
When Oswald defected to the Soviet Union, I decided to write a novel about a Marine who becomes disenchanted with the U.S.
and goes to the Soviet Union.
And so it was like the hero, and I didn't like Kennedy, I was extremely anti-Kennedy myself because I was so much into Ayn Rand, the laissez-faire capitalism, objectivism, and Kennedy was the arch villain of our movement at that time.
It was like the hero of my novel jumped up off the pages of my book and shot the president.
It was very weird.
Another interesting coincidence from that time is that when he was in New Orleans, he actually met with two men and they entertained a lengthy discussion of how to kill JFK if they were to do it.
A kind of intellectual exercise, if you will.
So they did that for a while and that would later come back to haunt him.
Immediately following the president's death, Oswald was apprehended by the police and later shot by a guy called Jack Ruby as he exited a courthouse, before which Oswald had declared to the press, These totally above-board events led to Thornley giving a deposition about his old buddy Oswald during the 1964 Warren Commission investigating the presidential assassination.
He claimed that Oswald's defection came as a surprise to him because he hadn't thought of his former friend as an activist.
He explained that in retrospect, Oswald now seemed, quote, emotionally unstable and irrational due to his defection.
The commission probed him about Oswald's belief system, which led Thornley to describe the two men meeting on a military base in Japan after they realized they were both atheists.
The first thing he said to me was with this little grin.
He looked at me and he said, what do you think of communism?
And I replied, I didn't think too much of communism in a favorable sense.
And he said, well, I think the best religion is communism.
And I got the impression at the time that he said this in order to shock.
He was playing to the galleries, I felt.
He was smirking as he said this, and he said it very gently.
He didn't seem to be a glassy-eyed fanatic by any means.
Later in the same 1964 deposition, Thornley clarified his current beliefs.
I would say I am an extreme rightist.
I call myself a libertarian, which is that I believe in the complete sovereignty of the individual liberty as is practical under any given system.
Thornley explained that he was more to the left at the time of his conversations with Oswald in 1959, but still believed at the time that the Soviets were, quote, misguided idealists, and that Oswald's, quote, slight bias towards the communist way of life was an act of rebellion against the present circumstances.
But Thornley's detached attitude would not last.
He didn't know it then, but the Oswald business and his own mind would lead him down a paranoid path in the years to come.
The 60s were also a very creative period for Thornley.
Between 1963 and 1970, he and his Discordian pal Greg Hill worked on editions of the founding text of their movement.
Well, I would pick up that book just based on the title.
of which is the most well-known and carries the full title "Principia Discordia, or How I Found
Goddess and What I Did to Her When I Found Her, the Magnum Opiate of Malaclipse the Younger,
Wherein is Explained Absolutely Everything Worth Knowing About Absolutely Anything."
Well, I would pick up that book just based on the title. I mean...
I blame the fact that you probably weren't doing enough psychedelic drugs as a young libertarian
because you totally would have been full on with these guys.
If you're going to be a libertarian, this is kind of the funnest way.
Maybe.
I was a little too sober for this.
The book was written under their pen names, Malaclipse the Younger for Hill and Lord Kayyum Rabenhurst for Thornley.
Principia Discordia is a mess of purposeful contradictions, mock occultism, Greek theology rendered fictional, and pedantic philosophical rants, all rooted on those original 1959 conversations about chaos, which they represented by the Greek goddess Eris, and order, which was represented by her fictional antithesis, Anaris.
Here's from the text.
The aneuristic principle is that of apparent order.
The aneuristic principle is that of apparent disorder.
Both order and disorder are man-made concepts that are artificial divisions of pure chaos, which is a level deeper than is the level of distinction making.
It is only the ideas about reality which differ.
Real, capital T, true reality is a level deeper than is the level of concept.
We look at the world through windows on which have been drawn grids, concepts.
Different philosophies use different grids.
A culture is a group of people with rather similar grids.
Through a window we view chaos and relate it to the points on our grid and thereby understand it.
The order is in the grid.
That is the aneuristic principle.
The belief that order is true and disorder is false or somehow wrong is the aneuristic illusion.
To say the same of disorder is the heuristic illusion.
The point is that little t truth is a matter of definition relative to the grid one is using at the moment, and that capital T truth, metaphysical reality, is irrelevant to grids entirely.
Pick a grid, and through it some chaos appears ordered and some appears disordered.
Pick another grid, Discordianism also came with an extended mythology, some of which just reads as a thinly-veiled allegory for their belief system, and some of which is just there to fuck with the audience.
Episcopos, for example, are the overseers of the various sects of Discordianism, real or imagined, and have titles like those Hill and Thornley gave themselves.
Other examples include Omnibenevolent Polyfather of Virginity and Gold, Bull Goose of Limbo, Professor Moochow, and Castle the Erratic.
Papacy is granted to every living being on Earth by Discordians, and they even have a little Pope card you can print for yourself that informs people you're a quote, genuine and authorized Pope of Discordia.
Saints are also a thing for Discordians, and you can basically canonize one yourself, with fictional characters higher up in the hierarchy of sainthood than their real counterparts.
So there's like five levels of sainthood, and humans, I believe, like real people, can only access the bottom one, and the top four are all reserved for people who don't exist.
It all kind of reminds me of pastafarianism and a variety of other kind of embarrassing shit invented by atheists to fuck with religious people, sometimes deservedly so.
The mimetic successor of discordianism, for example, is the Church of Subgenius, another spoof religion designed to wake up the religious sheeple in your life.
Within discordianism in the 60s and 70s, another meaningful figure emerged, with a little less Ayn Randian objectivism and a lot more mescaline.
He is known as the Episcopos, Pope, and Saint Robert Anton Wilson.
Wilson is a little tricky to study, because it seems like most of the people who write about him are on board with his ideas.
Still, this article by Ben Graham for The Quietus, in which he interviews author John Higgs, both are fans of the Discordian endeavor, is useful to map out Wilson's central belief system, multi-model agnosticism.
Robert Anton Wilson is probably best known for Illuminatus, The 1975 Ur-Conspiracy science fiction trilogy he co-wrote with fellow Playboy editor Bob Shea.
But the self-styled, quote, guerrilla ontologist went on to write many more works that explored the outer limits of philosophy, psychology, history, and occultism via fiction, autobiography, poems, plays, and essays.
Playful yet erudite, Wilson's central concern was always what he termed, quote, multiple model agnosticism.
A breaking down of absolute belief systems in any area, whether that be religion, politics, or the nature of reality itself.
Wilson saw belief as a trap.
Quote, convictions create convicts.
While nevertheless advocating the temporary adoption of many different, quote, reality tunnels just to see where they led.
While being careful not to assume that the one you were currently viewing the world through was any more valid than any other.
Wilson was actually responsible for a lot of the culture and mythos undergirding Discordianism.
Thornley would explain later in an interview.
Wilson said, "Early in our relationship, that one of the things we needed were God models that were appropriate to
anarchism.
And he had written some stuff about Taoism and the spirit of the Valley Lady, the Eternal Female, and about Chen
Dynasty matrism, and so on and so forth.
So I suggested to him Eris Discordia and told him about the Discordian society."
And he was just very enthused about it, plunged into it, got very active in it, and was responsible for a lot of our creeds and dogmas and so on and so forth.
What defined the Discordians more than anything else was a disdain for politics, and in the words of Wilson, an attempt to quote, get people into a state of generalized agnosticism.
Not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything.
John Higgs, a modern Discordian, explained to the Quietus magazine, Wilson mocks Ayn Rand mercilessly in a lot of his stuff.
In the Illuminatus trilogy, Atlas Shrugged is mocked as Telemachus Sneezed.
There was a brief period where he found her interesting, but he quite quickly recognized Ayn Rand for what she was.
So you don't get that strain of libertarianism that has this messianic faith in Ayn Rand liking Robert Anton Wilson.
You just get people who are mistrustful of the state, but don't necessarily believe in the virtue of selfishness like Ayn Rand did, or anything like that.
Robert Anton Wilson always used to say that the left's view of corporations is true, just as the right's view of the state is true.
Multiple model agnosticism is not necessarily a political viewpoint.
It sort of hovers above them all, and it's valuable to everyone on the political spectrum, I think.
Although they saw themselves as anti-dogmatic, the Discordians still hatched various plans to spread their belief system, just as their religious counterparts did.
Wilson would explain this in another of his well-known series of Discordian novels, Cosmic Trigger.
Cosmic Trigger deals with a process of deliberately induced brain change.
This process is called initiation or vision quest in many traditional societies and can loosely be considered some dangerous variety of self-psychotherapy in modern terminology.
I do not recommend it for everybody.
Briefly, the main thing I learned during my experiments is that reality is always plural and mutable.
"Operation Mindfuck"
One year after he discovered discordantism through his mail correspondence with Carrie Thornley in
1967, Robert Anton Wilson found himself in Chicago working for Playboy magazine,
where he fielded letters to the editor for a section called "The Playboy Advisor."
By this time, he had built a strong relationship with Thornley.
He would later write in Cosmic Trigger, Astonished at how totally our political philosophies agreed.
We were both opposed to every form of violence or coercion against individuals, whether practiced by governments or by people who claim to be revolutionaries.
We were equally disenchanted with the organized right and the organized left, while still remaining utopians, without a visible utopia to believe in.
Wilson and his colleague Robert Shea, who ran an anarchist zine on the side, were tasked with responding to the endless deluge of reader mail at Playboy.
And they were astonished by the unending conspiracy theories people would not stop writing in about.
Everybody seemed insanely pilled.
And faced with this pilled readership, they came up with a fun idea.
What if they wrote a book based on the idea that, quote, all of these nuts are right, and the conspiracy theories they complain about are all real?
It would become the Illuminatus Trilogy.
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