Operation MF

[EndtheMadnessNow]

Yes, this one.

The Tragic Success of Operation Mindfuck

With  Discordianism, Kerry Thornley and Greg Hill wanted to spread confusion. They created an overtly self-contradicting ‘religion’, with the aim of amusing people while making them question their assumptions. The ideas spread during the sixties, mainly through underground media and the mail, writing about new anarchist systems and inventing conspiracy theories.

One idea they spread was that of the Illuminati. This was a secret society, based on a real organisation founded in 1776 to spread enlightenment ideals. Contrary to historical accounts, it was claimed the group had continued in secret to the present day. This idea has become a major part of modern culture, appearing in the works of Dan Brown, hip-hop etc.

Among the early Discordians were Robert Anton Wilson and Bob Shea, who were working as editors at Playboy Magazine. They were drawn into the movement through various odd pieces of mail, which they replied to. Wilson began messing with his readers by publishing as many of these often contradictory stories as he could.

Wilson says he did not consider this a prank or hoax but “guerrilla ontology”.  He became increasingly exasperated with the fixed views on both the right and left of politics and wanted people to question the information they received, and to stop seeing their beliefs as inherently true. This ongoing mission of disinformation, of anti-propaganda, was named Operation Mindfuck. As John Higgs put it in an article for Darklore Magazine “The aim of Operation Mindfuck was to lead people into such a heightened sense of bewilderment and confusion that their rigid beliefs would shatter and be replaced by some form of enlightenment.”

Over time, the operation grew, with Wilson and his associates beginning to receive letters from outside their group (as far as they could tell –  although they were becoming sceptical of everything).

Now, almost 50 years later, it appears as if Operation Mindfuck is present all around us. We are deluged with contradictory information. Both sides in the recent referendum marshalled statistics, facts and arguments to show how their side was correct. Without a decent amount of political and economic knowledge, there was no way to pick them apart. Rumours were reported as news, and those reports became news elsewhere. Truth became devalued in an era of fake news.

This has not gone entirely well. As John Higgs wrote about the results of Operation Mindfuck in January 2017, “the ideas behind Operation Mindfuck have since become a tool for those with a lust for political power, most blatantly Putin’s advisor Vladislav Surkov”.  John linked to a short Adam Curtis film looking at Surkov’s career:



A Russian politician, Surkov came from the world of avant garde art to use the ideas of conceptual art in politics. He would sponsor various different groups and organisations, some of which were working directly against him. He then revealed this was happening, “a strategy of power that keeps any opposition hopelessly confused“.

Like the Discordians, Surkov didn’t aim to put forward any particular worldview, rather to bewilder and confuse his opposition. As the Economist magazine described it:

As the political mastermind for Vladimir Putin for most of the 2000s, Mr Surkov engineered a system of make-believe that worked devilishly well in the real world. Russia was a land of imitation political parties, stage-managed media and fake social movements, undergirded by the post-modern sense that nothing was genuine.

Operation Mindfuck began as a playful and active response to the world. Now it has been taken to its logical extreme in an increasingly dystopian world. Which raised the question: what next?

Link to article


Since Q is apparently back in case you haven't noticed, the Game has returned for summer I'll add the following...

I first came across Q last summer. The FT had invited Adam Curtis, the cult BBC documentary maker, to a one-off experimental stage show. He told the story of Operation Mindfuck, which he explained had been devised by two counter-culture radicals in the 1960s. Both were practitioners of something called discordianism, a sort of parody religion centred on the worship of the goddess of chaos, Eris.

One of them, Kerry Thornley, wanted to understand how malleable reality really was. He did so by starting a conspiracy of his own in the letters pages of Playboy magazine. Anonymously. The letter asked if a single secret society, the Illuminati, was really behind all the political assassinations in the world. Kerry Thornley felt this was a crazy idea that nobody would ever believe. Except that over time, strange coincidences, often involving the government, kept happening to him. These eventually made him believe his own conspiracy, prompting a huge amount of self-doubt, to the point he no longer knew what was real or not.

Adam Curtis links that to the emergence of the Dual State theory at the heart of QAnon.

Is QAnon a game gone wrong? | FT Film

https://twitter.com/IARPAnews/status/360814746473201664


How many Qs can there be? LOL


Space Delta 18








Space Delta 18 (National Space Intelligence Center) Emblem Explainer




"Sapere aude" is the Latin phrase meaning "Dare to know"; and also is loosely translated as “Have courage to use your own reason” - made famous by philosopher Kant. Significance of Sphinx is solver of riddles &..?

[ChiefD]

Some pretty interesting stuff! Thanks for posting this. I remember conversations I've had with my hubby regarding maybe a soft edge of this. He graduated from high school in 1970, so his high school years were filled with counterculture stuff. Being fond of writing, my hubby actually wrote an underground newspaper for his high school. I was amazed with some of his stories about stuff he wrote about. Conspiracies tied to all kinds of things going on at the time, with a background of the war in Vietnam. My hubby really enjoyed the counterculture stuff. Apparently, he got into some hot water with his school when they got word that he was doing this. He just took things a little more underground after that. I laugh about this as the irony of his daddy pretty much dragging him to the Navy recruiting office to enlist at the age of 17 so that "he wouldn't wind up in goddamn Vietnam" as his daddy said. So here was a little counterculture rebel, all spit and polish a few months later after coming home after boot camp. Too funny.

But I digress. With our 12 year age difference, my hubby grew up in a whole different time than I did. Anyway, the main takeaway from what you posted is that misinformation and trolling were going on long before anyone even had the internet in the gleam of their eye. Doesn't surprise me that this started in the counterculture 60's with free love and all that.

[Brotherman]

I’ll wait till operation brain drain before I sign up, I’m just hoping whatever they were smoking when they conceived this got better