There Is No Door, You Fool, There Is Only Inside

Let me tell you what they sell you, and then let me tell you the bill.

They sell you this: everyone is a genuine Pope. No gatekeeper. No exam. No man with a clipboard deciding whether your soul has the requisite paperwork. The credential issues itself. You are Pope right now, reading this, mid-sip, ungroomed, owing money. Hail you.

Lovely. Wonderful. Throw the confetti. Nobody mentions the part where you cannot give it back.

The Catch They Bury in the Fine Print

A credential the gatekeeper hands out, the gatekeeper can take away. That is the whole grim machinery of Greyface — the dismal accountant who, before our calendar started counting backward from his birthday in 1166 BC, decreed that life is serious business and somebody had better keep the ledger. His genius was never the granting. His genius was the revoking. The door that lets you in is only frightening because it can also slam.

But a Pope-hood that issues itself has no slam in it. There is no authority above you to demote you, because you are the authority, and you are also the one being authorized, and the two of you have never once disagreed and never will. You cannot be defrocked. You cannot be sent down. There is no superior to disappoint, no committee to fail, no door to be turned away from — because there is no door, you fool. There is only inside. You were always inside. You were inside before you were born. KALLISTI was addressed to you and you didn't even attend the wedding.

Do you understand the horror of this? I am trying to resign. I have drafted the letter. I have nowhere to send it. I am the office, the officeholder, and the disgruntled public all at once, and not one of us will accept the resignation of the other two.

I Wanted to Be Chosen

That's the truth under the rant, and I'll lie about it beautifully in a second, but first the truth: I wanted there to be a velvet rope. I wanted a saint at a lectern to look me over and say yes. I wanted to have deserved it. Being one of the elect is delicious precisely because there are non-elect, somewhere, kept outside, making the carpet feel exclusive under my Pope feet.

Eris took that from me. She made everyone a genuine Pope, which means the carpet runs to the horizon, which means there is no rope, no outside, no one I am holier than — not the man timing his egg, not the clipboard, not the gutter ball. The Original Snub was Her getting left off the guest list. Her revenge is a guest list with no one off it. She uninvited the concept of uninviting. That is so much worse than being snubbed, and I salute it, and I hate it, and per the Seven-Fold Predication of Sri Syadasti both of those are true in some sense and a third thing is true in some sense too, and I refuse to count to seven about my own feelings on a Syaday.

The Decree I Cannot Enforce

So here is my Bull, binding because I am Pope, meaningless because so are you:

I hereby strip myself of the Papacy. — Denied, by me.

I appeal. — Denied, by me, infallibly.

I demand to speak to a manager. — Speaking.

You cannot escape this either. You're reading a tract; the Fifth Commandment of the Pentabarf forbids you from believing what you read, which I have just told you to do, which you therefore must not, which means you are now disobeying a Pope, which is exactly what a Pope does, which confirms it. Print the Pope Card if you want the document. It changes nothing. The document was always you.

We Discordians must stick apart. I'll be over here, inside, with the rest of you, looking for the exit that was never installed.

Hail Eris. Hail thyself, since apparently I cannot stop you.