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Why, he asks, did that outpouring of new religious groups dry up so abruptly and decisively, with hardly any popularly known groups forming after the Waco siege of 1993? The question points to a deep change in our culture, and once again marks the early years of the 1990s as the end of an era. It was not just new musical genres, it seems that stopped appearing at that point in time.
As John C. Calhoun, the 7th Vice President of the United States once wrote, "The interval between the decay of the old and the formation and the establishment of the new, constitutes a period of transition which must always necessarily be one of uncertainty, confusion, error, and wild and fierce fanaticism."
The only exception to this upward trend is the period between 1991 and 1994, when the number of mentions declines. The age of John Major and George Bush Senior, it seems, does not attract our attention.
No-one was in any way prepared for the actuality of World War One, and there is no horror greater than the arrival of the unthinkable.
Cabaret Voltaire. As has already been noted, the six members of this group share with Cauty and Drummond a sense of being haunted by what they did
The movement that the Cabaret Voltaire created is known as 'Dada' - a meaningless, idiotic word which showed their contempt for art itself.
This may initially appear counter-intuitive, of course, because the Dao is associated with peaceful acceptance whereas Dada is violent negation. But Dada emerged during the First World War. The Dao, at that point, would also have been violent negation.
A grimoire was a grammar. A spell is to spell. In the beginning was the Word. The trappings of magic can be equally read as the trappings of creation. Song, dance, performance, recitals, music and pantomime can all be seen to have their roots in the magical practices of tribal shamen. Opera itself was the creation of alchemical thinking, an art form that included all other art forms within it.
The question “Is it art?”, then, should more meaningfully be looked as “Is it magic?”
Modern money is no longer a representation of some physical value such as an amount of gold or silver. Some of it has a physical form, such as pieces of paper or small round pieces of metal, but the vast majority does not. Most of the money supply is virtual, existing only as a pattern of bits inside a computer.
Money is a perfect example of something that doesn't exist, but acts like it does. Money has value only because we say it has.
In Christianity, usury was banned by Papal decree, but when Henry VIII split with Rome and established the Church of England in 1534 he took a different view. Henry made usury religiously accepted, a move which some economists view as key to the Elizabethan Golden Age that followed.
The reason why a positive-interest currency has been favoured is because it encourages economic growth. Indeed, it demands it, for the system would collapse if there was no growth to pay the interest charges to the bank.
There is no established tradition of tainted money cleansing and dispersal foundations.
They couldn't give it away or spend it, because that's what money wants. It wants to circulate.
Physically destroying it is the only way to stop it.
It was about the idea that money could be defeated.
It seemed that wherever there was a significant incident, frequently linked to birth or death, the number 23 would appear. Babies get 23 chromosomes from each parent, for example. In the I-Ching, 23 means 'breaking apart'. The most common psalm at funerals is psalm 23.
An unnatural number of anarchists seemed to have died on the 23rd.
The 23 Enigma is the best known aspect of Discordianism,
We have a choice now. We can either look at these events rationally, or use magical thinking. If we look at these events using magical thinking, and in particular the style of magical thinking that we’ve borrowed from Alan Moore, then a narrative emerges. That story goes like this:
And it is still in the process of collapsing, in no way prepared for the energy crisis and the climate crisis that are gathering speed. When Drummond and Cauty started work, however, such a collapse was unthinkable.
we have noted, the mind essentially runs on a form of magical thinking which processes things in a manner unlike how the material world behaves.
Concepts like time, space, connection and energy work in fundamentally different ways in the mental and physical realms.
dodge to avoid this problem. He claims that magic is not real, if we define 'real' as meaning something that unarguably exists in time and space. Magic, he points out, only exists in the mind. This does not mean that it cannot explain the larger world, for there is an established tradition of things which are best explained with things that don't exist.
This cannot exist because there is no possible number, minus or positive, which will produce a minus answer when multiplied by itself. Regardless, mathematicians in the eighteenth century played around with imaginary numbers for the fun of it and found them to be surprisingly useful.
Our understanding of phenomena such as radio waves or electricity is reliant on them.
This is not to say that electricity behaves as it does because of something that doesn’t exist. Instead, it says that our most practical and useful models for understanding electricity rely on something that doesn't exist.
The problem with quantum physics, Wilson argued, is that many people fail to realise that it is we who draw the lines on the map. "It seems hard to understand how a particle can be in three places at the same time without being anywhere at all," he said, "but when you remember that we invented all the boundaries [...], then quantum mechanics is no more mysterious than the fact that I live in three places at the same time."
Wilson's point, however, is that both the 'wave model' and the 'particle model' are our own inventions,
This recognition, that we habitually confuse our models with what they describe, is central to Wilson's thinking.
His philosophy was one of multiple-model agnosticism - not simply agnosticism about the existence of God, but agnosticism about everything.
The models are not 'true', but they do vary in usefulness depending on how accurate they are in different cultures and circumstances. Once this is recognised, we no longer attach our sense of personal identity to the models we use, and we lose our resistance to swapping between different models when necessary.
Postmodernism was the collision of unrelated forms, all of which were given equal validity. This, clearly, was something of a dead end.
Postmodern theorists may have convinced themselves that the statement "the sun will rise tomorrow" was as valid as the statement "the sun will not rise tomorrow," but they would have bankrupted themselves trying to prove it to a bookmaker.
The other option was Wilson's multiple-model agnosticism, where neither "the sun will rise tomorrow" nor "the sun will not rise tomorrow" would be confused with reality, the thing-in-itself, but both would be seen as models that could be assessed to see which was preferable in the current situation. In this example, the "sun will rise tomorrow" model appears to be pretty useful, while the alternative appears to be rubbish and should probably be put into storage.
Multiple-model agnosticism, then, is a way out of postmodernism which doesn't lead into the belief that, out of all the billions of people in the world, you are the only one who really gets it and everyone else are idiots.
The point is, however, that there is nothing special about the number in itself. It is the fact that it has been singled out and had meaning applied to it, and that Discordians have been trained to recognise it, which is significant.
Reality itself is ablaze with infinite connections: every particle in the cosmos affects every other particle.
It's Too Much, it really is, and seeing reality in all its innate finery would be so overpowering that you'd be in no state to nip down the shops when you need a pint of milk.
The decisions which dictated which data points were ignored and which were presented as significant were made in an attempt to create a narrative that was (a) a good yarn, and (b) something that would mess with the reader's head on as deep a level as possible.
Artists couldn’t create without magical thinking, just as engineers couldn’t work without rational materialism.
Communism, some have claimed, is the most effective model for social order, but only in tribes of around thirty people or less.
We are like Picasso during his Cubist period, seeing his subject from multiple perspectives and producing a single image that is both nonsensical and also full of understanding.
Bill Drummond, it seems, was clearly on to something when he advises that we accept the contradictions.
"Eris is also a dwarf planet," I explained. "It's the biggest actually, bigger than Pluto. It's the ninth biggest thing in the solar system. If you're going to have Pluto on there, shouldn't you have Eris?"
The arguments that it generated in the astronomical community following its discovery led to the controversial classification of what was and wasn't a planet, and this led to poor Pluto being demoted.
