Chaosophy 101

Just what are we up to here?

The world: hate it or love it

In all of human thought, there are three broad ways to relate to the world:

• View I: “This sucks. There must be a better dimension somewhere — a heavenly afterlife, a pure cyberspace realm I can be uploaded to, a Pure Land, an ideal realm of abstract forms. I hate this world and seek to escape to that better one.”

  This has an important variant, View Ia: “If I can’t escape it, I vow to overcome it, to master it, to forcefully carve it into a shape closer to my idea of What Should Be.”

• View II: “This world is terrible, in the sense of terror, but also beautiful, and I shall seek to love it as best I can until I inevitably fall apart. This world isn’t perfect but nothing is, and I will tend the Garden of What Is, maintain it and weed it and try to make it a little neater, but defend it from those who would pave over it.”

• View III: “The world is terrible, and so I will hide from that and lose myself in sensual enjoyment until I fall apart; I will make no effort to maintain it or defend it.”

While View III may be sad for those who adopt it and those close to them — my brother drank himself to death, so I know this well — adopting View III makes it unlikely that a person will have a great effect on human affairs. The damage is self-limiting. So for the moment we won’t say more about that option.

View I is the view of many mainstream Christian denominations, but it’s not exclusively a Western malady, it’s also the view of many Buddhists and Hindus. (I don’t think it was the view of that poor carpenter-rabbi Jesus or that admirable prince-yogi Siddhartha, but it’s what goes on in their name today.) View Ia is the techno-salvationist religion of many (too many) tech bros today.

View I goes all the way back to proto-fascist Plato and his dumbass ideas. (See our previous post, Otalp's Cave.)

And as Western philosophy has been described by no less a luminary than Whitehead as “a series of footnotes to Plato”, we can see that the poison reaches deep into our intellectual tradition.

In contrast we have View II, love of the world. The Taoists sages who, rather than seeking the nothingness of Nirvana, sought immortality through sexual yoga — that’s love of the world! “This place ain’t so bad and if we can make love in just the right way maybe we can stay here forever, whaddya say, baby?”

But love of the world doesn’t just mean love of sensual pleasure, in the manner of View III; it means acceptance, satisfaction, contentment with what is. You see such in the poetry of the great Zen lunatic Ikkyū, whose poetry included the explicitly sexual, but also a love of the world “as it is”:

Studying texts and stiff meditation can make you lose your Original Mind. 
A solitary tune by a fisherman, though, can be an invaluable treasure. 
Dusk rain on the river, the moon peeking in and out of the clouds; 
Elegant beyond words, he chants his songs night after night. 

(Zen, for those who don’t know its history, might be described as Indian Buddhism processed through Chinese Taoism with a good chunk of seasoning and spice added by Japanese Shintō.)

Now, throughout human history, we could largely tolerate View I, even View Ia. Their misery about the world was sad, but their power to impose it on others was limited. Sure, there were campaigns of repression and inquisition to guide unbelievers to that ideal realm by force, it’s for their own good and they’ll thank us later; but the world-haters of View Ia couldn’t do much to the actual world.

That started to change with the Industrial Revolution. Suddenly those who found the world unsuited to their Platonic ideals could undertake to make the rough places smooth, and if some us like having mountains and valleys well too bad for us, a perfect sphere is obviously more ideal.

It is therefore necessary that we — at least, we sane folks — explictly advocate for View II.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

To some extent I believe that is what the Neopagan religious movement is rooted in, the revival of nature-based spirituality. I talk about that in my book Why Buddha Touched the Earth, available at fine booksellers everywhere.

But let’s jump back to the root of the problem: Plato and company.

As C.L.R. James wrote in his insightful essay “Every Cook Can Govern”, Plato

…could think and discuss and publish freely solely because he lived in a democracy. We should remember too that the very ideas of what could constitute the perfect society he was always seeking, came to him and could come to him only because the democracy in Greece was itself constantly seeking to develop practically the best possible society. It is true that Plato and his circle developed theories and ideas about government and society which have been of permanent value to all who have worked theoretically at the problems of society ever since. Their work has become part of the common heritage of Western Civilization.

But we make a colossal mistake if we believe that all this is past history. For Plato’s best known book, The Republic, is his description of an ideal society to replace the democracy, and it is a perfect example of a totalitarian state, governed by an elite. And what is worse. Plato started and brilliantly expounded a practice which has lasted to this day among intellectuals — a constant speculation about different and possible methods of government, all based on a refusal to accept the fact that the common man can actually govern.

With democracy, the ancient Athenians governed themselves so well that they made possible a leisure class of pure intellectuals. (Slavery was part of that, yes, as it was part of life in all of the ancient world; but in Athens slaves were so close in status to citizens that privileged assholes like Plato found it offensive.)

This class had the opportunity not just to step back and conduct reasoned inquiry into the world with applied intellectualism — a worthy activity and one which we’re trying to engage in with this blog — but to become so disconnected from the real world of nature and people that those who had tendencies to world-hatred, could let them run rampant.

And these were the philosophers.

Of course I am radically over-stating the case here for rhetorical purposes. I don’t want to say that that tendency has poisoned all of the Western philosophical tradition…but just for the next few minutes, let’s view that tradition as if it were nothing but world-hatred, View Ia, which seeks to impose its order on the universe.

So what would be the alternative to imposing order?

Learning to love chaos

In the late 1950s, three young men, Gregory Hill, Kerry Thornley, Bob Newport made up their own secret club. Not an infrequent thing for boys to do. They were a year or two out of high school, spending a lot of time drinking beer in bowling alleys (because they had cheap beer and were open late) and discussing life, as drunk (and probably stoned) teens will often do.

But unlike most boy’s secret clubs, theirs was founded on a weird and esoteric idea: chaos and disorder is not inherently a bad thing but can be a source of creative power. And they personified this creative chaos with the ancient Greek goddess Eris.

They were the founders of the Discordian Society, a uniquely American mid-20th century thing that eventually drew from — and contributed to — popularized ideas of Zen Buddhism and Eastern philosophy, occultism, absurdism, Paganism, and psychedelic culture. Robert Anton Wilson became a later convert and an important figure in the spread of Discordian ideas, via the psychedelic science fiction class he co-wrote with Robert Shea, the Illuminatus! Trilogy. And Discordianism became a popular memeplex among computer hackers of the 1980s and 90s, who developed not only the tech but the culture of the early internet.

There’s more about Discordianism, its history and literature, at our previous post on the topic; and more about the links between hacker culture, Discordianism, magick, and Paganism at a talk I gave at Winterstar in 2022.

But rather than go into that here, I want outline the field of Chaosophy — the topic of this blog — by citing some of the Discordians’ key discoveries.

We define Chaosophy as something broader than Discordianism, with the Discordians as an important school of Chaosophers. I call myself a Discordian, which is something anyone gets to do (“the way in which a person is to be an official Episkops of The Discordian Society, is for him to declare himself as such. No more, no less.”); but if you find the sillier bits of Discordianism not to your liking because you prefer a different sort of silly and would like to describe yourself as a Chaosopher but not a Discordian, knock yourself out.

Arguably, some of the past greats like Chaung Tzu (usually spelled Zhuang Zhou these days, but he’ll always be Chaung Tzu to me), Ikkyū, and Diogenes the Cynic might be better called Chaosophers than philosophers.

The fundamental concepts of Chaosophy

The fundamental concepts of Chaosophy include (but may not be limited to):

• The Law of Eristic Escalation: “Imposition of order = Escalation of Disorder.”

• The Sri Syadasti/Patamunzo Lingananda teaching: “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. A public service clarification by the Sri Syadasti School of Spiritual Wisdom, Wilmette.

  ”The teachings of the Sri Syadasti School of Spiritual School of Spiritual Wisdom 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. Patamunzo Lingananda School of Higher Spiritual Wisdom, Skokie.”

• “Reality is the original Rorschach.”

• “The human race will begin solving it’s problems on the day that it ceases taking itself so seriously.”

• The Law of Fives: “All things happen in fives, or are divisible by or multiples of five, or are somehow directly or indirectly appropriate to five.” The Law of Fives is never wrong.

We’ll be returning to each of these principles, and other topics in Chaosophy, in future posts. If that sounds interesting to you, subscribe!