Facebook ads told me to become a certified cryptozoologist, so I did

Forget this. There’s nothing good in Icke. I’ve seen way too many brilliant hackers get sucked into David Icke’s bullshit on their way to a crash.

If you still really need closure, I can sum it up as the royal family, the elite and the ‘Illuminati’ are lizards, descended from aliens. Find architects who designed buildings for the Baha’i faith, then trace their contributions back to North American parliaments, legislatures and the like. Find the allusions to the Baha’i faith, find the allusions to Freemasonry and then you’ll see the projection of reality. Once you’ve seen the projection, you’re free from it.

Be safe. If you want to rap about the ideas with someone reasonably safe, I’m Greg and my email is in my profile. If you’re getting lost, I’ll give you my phone number.

Be safe and healthy.

Edit - The danger of Icke is that he takes basic geometry and civil engineering and somehow turns them into conspiracy. If you’re remotely scientific, you’ll see signs of Icke all around you. But some principles are principles because they work. We don’t need conspiracy theories to explain how professions grow.

Edit 2 - Don’t google David Icke. You’ll want the time back and I can’t offer refunds. :(

Robert Anton Wilson has some interesting personal experiments about this in his book Prometheus Rising, where you go looking for a quarter on the ground under different personal contexts[2]. Other instances are things like the 23 enigma[3] or ancient aliens.

I took motohagiography's comment to be on this phenomenon, where the state of mind, or how you prime the mind (e.g. with images or ideas), changes what you tend to find. It can be applied in all sorts of contexts -- prime the mind with ideas like conspiracy theories, and you see them everywhere. Fnord.

[1] http://www.principiadiscordia.com/book/23.php

[2] https://nevalalee.wordpress.com/2016/04/04/looking-for-quart...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_Enigma

The novel Foucault's Pendulum is a book about this mindset; the Illuminatus! trilogy is too in a way, though it's more experiential than descriptive. There are a few non-fiction books, though I'm blanking on the key author's name. For a very contemporary non-fiction (albeit opinionated) take see A Game Designer's Analysis of QAnon https://medium.com/curiouserinstitute/a-game-designers-analy...

The general theme or oomph of the point is that the world, and beliefs we hold tend to converge on certain structural relationships because they just work. Even if it isn't a concrete 100% accurate description of what we see in front of us it just feels right, so we hit a mental stop point and go on about our day.

The belief literally feels good. To hell with reality, this is how it is. One of the tenets of Discordianism is there is no objective truth or order, as truth itself is just surprisingly convenient organizations of the fundamentally chaotic underpinnings of existence, and everyone sees things differently or different aspects of things thereof. We can all be looking at the same thing and see things completely differently, and in a strange sort of way, nobody is wrong. Fnord.

Therefore, as Eris dictates, there is no one true Discordianism, or world, as everyone's view of the world is true into and unto themselves. Fnord!

It can be disturbing to many, because it allows you to completely detach from all of your prior assumptions. Someone completely detached from everyone else's reality isn't terribly yuseful, but they are free to peer through the Chaos to find any momentary tendrils of direction that become revealed.

The original poster posited positive utility from applying these principles to any mode of thought in such a way as to identify when those belief structures have fallen or been distorted by the same mannerisms of thought that make equally quacky, though more mainstream ideas feel good, thusly revealing that the holder of the idea is in a state of mental metastatic equilibrium.

This makes the Discordian in the room a surprisingly strong catalyst for change, or at least the most aware of the set of Reality Distortion Fields at work/being projected by those in charge, and as a consequence, a threat to unified manipulation, and an escape hatch to individual notions of reality. Fnord

Hail Eris!

-A Discordian Malcontent

I could write the same series as Ancient Objectivists, Ancient Anarchists, Ancient Socialists, Ancient Elites, etc. The details they use as justification do not illuminate the subject, they use archeological and historical stories as evidence of their theory - it's all the same thing.

The reason people get the satisfying feeling of "it all makes sense" is because the one stupid idea seems to be reinforced by relatively neutral facts, when in fact, it's just a dumb idea displayed along side facts.

This is what it's all come to... hah.

Grandparents had a fit over me cutting FB. Grandkid pictures are a serious matter.

Many companies get stuck on pleasing investors more than users once they reach that stage of monopoly after they've gone public, and that's why regulation kills them once opportunistic manipulation is exposed.

Unfortunately it takes a really bad/unfortunate consequence of their manipulation to occur before regulation properly steps in.