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The Prank as an Argument

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The Prank as an Argument

Discordianism holds, in the doctrine of the Aneristic and Eristic principles, that order and disorder are both patterns the mind projects onto an indifferent world. The practice recorded here is the attempt to make a person feel that claim rather than merely accept it.

The method is to stage something false, absurd or unverifiable in public and let observers build belief around it. Planted rumours, invented fragments of conspiracy, hoax documents and elaborate performance pranks have all been used. What is supposed to remain afterwards is not conviction about any particular claim but a durable suspicion of one's own certainty, arrived at by having been caught out rather than by being argued with.

Robert Anton Wilson gave the approach the name guerrilla ontology, which states the ambition plainly: reality itself is the contested ground, and the technique is irregular warfare conducted on it. The Principia Discordia, the movement's founding text, published in the 1960s under the pseudonyms Malaclypse the Younger and Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst, supplies the satirical method the practice grew out of, though the practice as it developed goes well beyond anything the book itself describes.

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