The Consent Form of Eris

Here is the thing nobody hands you with the Golden Apple: the apple was thrown at a wedding she was not invited to.

Read that again. The Original Snub was not Eris pranking a willing crowd. The crowd was busy. They had a marriage to attend, hors d'oeuvres, a seating chart. She rolled KALLISTI under the table of people who had explicitly arranged their afternoon to not include her, and the resulting confusion — three goddesses, one shepherd, ten years of war — was visited upon people who, to a man, would have checked the box marked no thank you if anyone had offered them a box.

So when we celebrate Operation Mindfuck — the glorious Erisian sport of liberating the schooled mind into productive confusion — we should at least notice we are reenacting a crime scene.

The mark did not ask

The standard defense runs like this: people are asleep inside the Curse of Greyface, the 1166 BC infection that taught humankind disorder is evil and life is serious business. To confuse such a person is to wake them. You are not vandalizing their certainty; you are liberating them from it. Operation Mindfuck is therefore a mercy, and mercy needs no permission.

This is the most beautiful lie we tell, and like all our beautiful lies it is half true, which is the worst ratio there is.

Because notice what the argument smuggles in. It says: I have determined that you are asleep. I have determined that my confusion is better for you than your order. I have appointed myself the one who knows which of us is awake. And the Fifth Commandment of the Pentabarf — a Discordian is Prohibited from Believing What He Reads — was supposed to protect people from exactly that posture. From the person who has decided things on your behalf. We turned a commandment against gurus into a license to be one.

Confusion is not freedom; it is a vacancy

A confused person is not a free person. A confused person is a person whose furniture you moved. Whether they are now freer depends entirely on whether they get to choose the new arrangement — or whether you have simply installed your chaos where their order used to be, and called the eviction enlightenment.

Sri Syadasti, patron of the qualified maybe, gave us seven clauses for exactly this. All affirmations 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. Seven. He did not say and therefore I will decide which sense applies to your life. He left all seven on the table. That is the discipline of the maybe: you hold the confusion open, you do not aim it.

The mindfuck that aims — that picks a target, that wants a specific person to crack in a specific way by Tuesday — has quietly become an Aneristic act. It has a goal. It has a plan. It is order wearing an apple costume.

The only consent form that works

So here is the Erisian ethic, and it is stricter than the loud version, not looser:

Confuse yourself first, and always more than you confuse anyone else. Be the wedding guest who threw the apple under his own chair. Operation Mindfuck has a guest list and your name goes on it before any other. The fnord you can plant in a stranger you must first have failed to see yourself; the certainty you mock you must mock louder in the mirror. We Discordians must stick apart — and the first thing you must stick apart from is your own delicious conviction that you are the awake one in the room.

A mind you blew open without asking is not free. It is just yours now instead of theirs. That is not liberation. That is colonization with better jokes.

Bite your own apple. Leave theirs on the table. If they reach for it, that is a wedding you were invited to.

Hail Eris. Hail thyself — especially thyself, and suspiciously.