In the tradition of literary fantasy the Babylon Project is part of, which originates in part in the satirical book "Illuminatus" by RAW & Robert Shea (1975), fnord, and fnording have a specific meaning. Fnords are imaginary and do not need not need to be taken literally as things that exist in the material world. You might however find the fantasy useful.

In "Illuminatus" (pp.438-439) a character, while reading the newspaper, sees the fnords, and is made to understand their meaning and origin. Fnord is a word which human beings are conditioned, much like Pavlov's dogs were, not only to view with anxiety and fear, but also not to see, or to deny to themselves they have seen because of yet more conditioned fear, and this from school onwards. These fnords are then inserted into newspapers, increasing the anxiety and fear of the population, and thereby making it easier to control.

"All my left-wing arrogance and contempt for my countrymen melted, and I felt genuine pity. No wonder the poor bastards believe anything they are told, walk through pollution and overcrowding without complaining, watch their sons hauled off to endless wars and butchered, never protest, never fight back, never show much happiness or eroticism or curiosity or normal human emotion, live with perpetual tunnel vision, walk past a slum without seeing either human misery or the potential threat it poses to their security… Then I got a hunch, and turned quickly to the advertisements. It was as I expected: no fnords. That was part of the gimmick, too: only in consumption, endless consumption, could they escape the amorphous threat of the invisible fnords."

Of course, that was 1975, and what with Mass Media, and the overwhelming power of image in this postmodern age, fnord technology has improved dramatically. The image of the Twin Towers on fire, with all of its enormous symbolism, can best be viewed as some kind of super-virus, or magical spell, or in other words as a Super-Fnord. Be it those who planned the attack on the WTC, or our governments (assuming they are different people) the aim of the image is to make you afraid, therefore weak, and therefore easy to control. The only thing to have happened on that day is described at the start of the piece, under "Love". The rest is a fiction constructed by the media, its importance magnified beyond all sanity. Where is the footage of the far greater number of children across the world who died of disease or starvation on that day? In what way exactly were they less important?

Which brings us to fnording. We Discordians occasionally have a bad habit of writing that very silly word "Fnord" over powerful images designed to control your minds and ours. The incomprehensible word, since it attracts your attention by its' inappropriate and bizarre location, nicely negates the mind control potency of the image. We kind of identify fnords for you. We felt fnording was one of the saner responses to the image of the WTC on fire. If the aim of that inhumanity was to make us terrified, and if it is being used to the same purpose by our glorious leaders, then the least we can do, out of respect for the victims, is to see through the trick, and refuse to be afraid. Fnord. Don't allow those bastard things to live in your head.

However, the people who believe the mysterious and invisible fnords are slavering beastmonsters, with razor sharp claw and a pleasant purple complexion, and possibly the highest expression of evolution's efforts in the field of inter-species cunnilingus, should not be disappointed, this is also true, from a certain perspective.



A Final Interlude or Aside:

This section outlines the thoughts of one of the fictional writers of the Babylon Project, and was brought about by a strange literary coincidence, a few days after the attack on the WTC. It should not in anyway be taken seriously, even though everything in it is true.

This fictional author of the BPU, an inter-dimensional secret agent of dubious morality, and exquisite taste in roller-neck clothing, known as The Frenchman, was meditating on the total intelligence failure, which had preceded and greatly facilitated the attacks. It seemed quite obvious to him that these attacks were simply the reaping of a harvest sown by an extremely greedy, cold-hearted and most of all short sighted Western foreign policy. Quite patently, when people decide to use other people's countries as a playground for their power and economic games, they should expect that the oppressed, brutalised, exploited, surviving relatives of the collateral damage would find some way of kicking them in the teeth eventually. Of course, it wasn't quite that simple, after all, deep down there was no difference between the protagonists. Blair, Bush or Bin Laden, all well-educated fundamentalists, powerful and power-crazed men, all desiring to hammer a round world into the square hole of their ideologies, and all prone to getting quite homicidally angry with people when they fail to fit the roles assigned to them. With God somewhat schizophrenically on all their sides at once, these deluded but well-meaning men frog-march us down the merry road to Hell on Earth. We as a species have not evolved past subservience to what were the Alpha males of our monkey packs. There was one difference though, Bin Laden (or rather his network) was vastly more intelligent, in a quite obvious explosive kind of way, than the pyramid hierarchies of the West, which had not only given him cause for anger, but had also trained him, created him as a terrorist mastermind, and then gotten really surprised when he blew up in their faces. This had every thing to do (on one level) with modes of organisation.

In our world of domesticated primate politics, the politics of domination and submission, power still grows out of the barrel of a gun. This is both metaphorically and literally true. The gun can be abstract ritual social expectations ("Don't talk back to your father") or Capitalist society's ability to remove bio-survival tickets from people it doesn't like ("One more word and I'll fire you, Bumstead!") or a really, really big bomb called Daisy (plans to build an obscenely big bomb called the "Hindu Kush Crusher", are currently being implemented, after a heated discussion in the Pentagon in which some Hawks found out they did not have anything that could flatten mountains). All primates in our society tend to lie or flatter to evade displeasure when exchanging signals with those above them in the pack Hierarchy, anything else risks punishment (around here the Frenchman's views again got very similar to one RAW, especially passages of his book "Prometheus Rising").

Every authoritarian structure can be visualised as a pyramid with an eye on the top. Be it any government, bureaucracy, corporation, or mammalian pack. All participants at every level have a burden of nescience in relation to higher levels. That is, they must be very, very careful that their perceptions, thoughts and evaluations are in accordance with the reality tunnel of those above them. This is vital since pack status (and "job security") depends on it. It is much less important that these perceptions be in accord with objective fact. This leads to an equal and opposite burden of omniscience on those at the top, in the pyramid's eye. All that is forbidden to those at the bottom - the conscious activities of perception and evaluation- is demanded of the top. They must do all the perceiving, thinking and evaluating for the whole pyramid. But a man with a gun - the power to punish - will only be told what the target thinks will not make him pull the trigger. The elite receive from their underlings only the feedback which reinforces the preconceptions and reality tunnel. Those who know hide their knowledge, or worse, since what is objectively repressed (unspeakable) becomes subjectively repressed (unthinkable) and no-one likes to feel like a liar and coward constantly: it becomes easier to cease to notice when the official reality tunnel differs from existential fact. The process accelerates, rigiditus bureaucraticus sets in and the pyramid is clinically dead as an intellectual entity.

And the CIA looks really confused when part of Manhattan goes up in flames, thought the fictional writer of subversive literature. He paused from casting around for a cigarette, a pyramid with an eye in it, on a book cover, suddenly attracting his attention.

He picked up "Illuminatus!" by Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Shea, (1975) and turned by chance to Appendix GIMMEL: The Illuminati Theory of History, which made interesting reading, if only because of an astonishing synchronicity in symbolism. It identified a cycle of five ages, of which we shall speak of only three, Bureaucracy, Aftermath, and Chaos (and the latter two only to mention they are the ones coming up, maybe).




How bizarre, muttered The Frenchman, I wonder what it all means?