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American writer Charles Fort, who in 1932 wrote that, “I conceive of nothing, in religion, science, or philosophy, that is more than the proper thing to wear, for a while.”
Operation Mindfuck. The aim of Operation Mindfuck was to lead people into such a heightened state of bewilderment and confusion that their rigid beliefs would shatter and be replaced by some form of enlightenment.
Those journalists wanted to know what the name “Echo & the Bunnymen” meant. It didn’t actually mean anything.
ELF (the Erisian Liberation Front),
What we shouldn’t do is confuse these models with the real world, for the map is not the territory and the menu is not the meal.
even if we accept that we only know the physical world through a mental approximation, we rarely acknowledge how much of the physical world is actually the product of the mental.
Look around the room that you are in. Is there anything there that didn’t first appear as an idea in the head of another person?
the story of our evolution is essentially the story of us retreating from the natural world into the mental one.
The Situationists saw in our culture a shift in our focus from being to having, and then from having to appearing to have.
As we cannot escape from this onslaught, the Situationists argued, our only honorable response is to fuck with it.
“culture jamming.”
The music press are, by necessity, more drawn to something that is good to write about rather than something that is good to listen to.
Here they played the offending song outside ABBA’s publishing company and presented a fake gold disk (marked “for sales in excess of zero”) to a prostitute who, they argued, looked a bit like one of the women from ABBA. They then destroyed most of the remaining copies of the album by setting fire to them in a field and were promptly shot at by a farmer for their troubles. On the ferry home they threw the remaining copies into the North Sea and performed an improvised set on the ferry, the only known JAMs live performance, in exchange for a large Toblerone.
‘There’s no point us making records when such fantastic records as this have been made.’
Few people are comfortable with accepting the extent with which blind chance affects their lives.
Satanists invert this symbol, however, so that this point is down, as if the figure had fallen. In this context, the four physical elements are crushing the spirit, trapping it under the physical.
Or to quote Raoul Vaneigem, “pissing on the altar is still a way of paying homage to the Church.” In this way the music of The Sex Pistols was eventually played to the Queen at the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics, and the music of Kurt Cobain was eventually covered by The Muppets.
omphalos.
And so there arose a global, existential gasp of generational fear. There was nothing to believe in.
They were seen largely as apathetic, but it was an apathy born of a logical assessment of the options, rather than just innate laziness.
The historian Eric Hobsbawm has coined the phrase “the short twentieth century” to cover the period 1914 to 1991, from the start of the First World War to the end of the Cold War.
The sense of mounting horror came closer and closer to the surface. The nihilism reached its peak in 1994, the period of Kurt Cobain’s suicide, the burning of the million pounds, and the year Bill Hicks died.
If we can date the end of the previous era, what the historian Eric Hobsbawm called the “Age of Extremes,” to the end of the Cold War in 1991, and we can date the start of the Information Era to the first popular web browser in 1994, what should we make of those years in between? They are boundary years, comparable to what anthropologists call a liminal state. They were a period when the old rules were gone, but before the new order was formed.
If you Google each year in the last quarter of the twentieth century, you’ll find that each successive year has an increasing number of mentions online, as you would expect given the growth of the internet during this period. The only exception to this upward trend is the period between 1991 and 1994, when the number of mentions declines.
a shift from a culture of character to a culture of personality.
Magic is art—or the Art, if you prefer. Writing a book or painting a picture is like pulling a rabbit out of a hat—you are producing something out of nothing. A thing now exists in the world that was not there before.
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.
The word “usury” is now used to mean the charging of excessive interest for loans, but the original use of the word meant making any charge at all for lending money.
Why was making money from financial loans so unacceptable in the ancient world? This is open to interpretation, but one possibility is that it appeared to go against the natural order of things. Work created wealth, so wealth accumulating without work was unnatural.
The existence of interest charges—usury, by the original definition—requires that economy must continually grow, which means that more work must be undertaken, year in, year out.
the increase in a quantity affects the forces that were causing that increase. This simple law seems to affect everything. This is the main reason why economies can’t grow indefinitely, any more than photons can go faster than the speed of light.
They couldn’t give it away or spend it, because that’s what money wants. It wants to circulate. That’s what gives it power. Even if you nail it to a piece of wood, someone will come along sooner or later to steal it and set it free.
The burning of the million quid should not be seen from the perspective of art. It was never about art. It was much more than that, and much more obvious. It was about the destruction of money. It was about the idea that money could be defeated.
Sometimes all you need is for someone to see what you are planning and not look bemused.
multiple-model agnosticism—not simply agnosticism about the existence of God, but agnosticism about everything.
As Wilson wrote in Illuminatus!, “You cannot understand a man’s actions unless you understand his beliefs.”
Wilson put it better. As he used to say, “All statements are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense.”
From a multiple-model perspective, the burning of a million quid in the boathouse in Jura can be said to be both a meaningless act by two attention seeking arseholes which was in no way connected to the wider changes in the world at large, and also a magical act that forged the twenty-first century. This makes it far more interesting than if it was just one or the other,
