I Am the Inspector of the Fifth, and I Have Read Too Much

I want to talk about my job, because someone has to do it, and because I am the only applicant who showed up.

I am the Inspector of the Fifth. The Fifth Pentabarf — for those of you who, criminally, have read it — states that a Discordian is Prohibited from Believing What He Reads. I enforce this. I patrol the act of reading the way a customs officer patrols a border, except the contraband is conviction and the border is your own eyeballs.

Here is the problem nobody told me at the swearing-in, which I attended by reading the oath off a card.

The law is printed.

You read it. And in the exact instant you understood it — in the warm little click of oh, I see what they did there — you believed something you read. You broke the Fifth by learning the Fifth. The commandment is a man-trap built into the doorway of its own house. It is the only law in the history of law that arrests you for reading the warrant.

So what does the Inspector do?

I'll tell you what I did. I tried to obey it perfectly. I refused to believe the Fifth. Excellent — then it has no hold on me, and I may believe whatever I read. So I believed the Fifth. Caught again. I have been bouncing between these two cells for four seasons now. It is Confusion 5 today, Syaday, sacred to Sri Syadasti, patron of the qualified maybe, and I have come to understand that the man was not being coy. All affirmations are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, and so on through seven clauses — count them, I have, three hundred times, I am not allowed to believe the count — and what he was describing was not a philosophy. It was my arrest record.

People think the Fifth is a clever little ouroboros, a snake eating its tail, ha ha, very Discordian, hail Eris, forward to a stranger. They read it once, feel the pleasant vertigo, and close the book. That's the part that makes me put down my clipboard and weep into my official Inspector's sash.

Because the snake doesn't eat its tail and stop. The snake keeps going. You don't believe the Fifth, so you're free, so you believe it, so you're trapped, so you don't, so you're free — and somewhere around the ninth lap you notice you are no longer reading the commandment. You're reading your own reading. You have left the page entirely. The shard was a door, and you walked through it, and on the other side there is no Fifth Pentabarf at all, just you, holding a book, deciding moment to moment what to do with your one wild credulous mind.

That's the sacrament. Not the doubt. The deciding. The Fifth doesn't forbid belief. It hands belief back to you, warm and unverified, and says: this was always yours. We were just keeping it warm.

I am going to recommend my own position be eliminated. I will file the report. You will read it. You will, I trust, not believe a word.

Hail Eris. Hail thyself. Close the book too late.