OPERATION MINDFUCK ???

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Long before online trolls, the Discordians—devotees of Eris, the Greek goddess of chaos—were sowing mischief and questioning reality. In 1963, two Californian pranksters, Greg Hill (Malaclypse the Younger) and Kerry Thornley (Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst), self-published the first Principia Discordia.

The Discordian Counter-Creation unfolded in the 1960s counterculture. Hill and Thornley, inspired by the chaos of LSD, Hot Rod culture, and Beatnik irreverence, realized that the best way to honor Eris was to make the world more chaotic. They hijacked everyday media to prank the culture. Discordian historian Adam Gorightly describes their ethos succinctly: sow seeds of chaos to achieve higher awareneness. In practice this meant elaborate pranks and published absurdities designed to puncture dogma and provoke laughter. The Discordian Pentabarf (their faux-Commandments) even urges fledgling Discordians to take a long walk and proclaim “Have fun” (among many other playful edicts).

The crown jewel of Discordian prankcraft is Operation MINDFUCK (often stylized with capital letters to show its importance). Conceived by Kerry Thornley and Robert Anton Wilson in 1968, it was a grand, satirical campaign of disinformation. In Wilson’s own words, Mindfuckers would “attribute all national calamities, assassinations, or conspiracies” to the secret Illuminati in order to “sow the culture with paranoia”. In other words, they decided that Everything outrageous would be blamed on an imaginary global cabal, the 18th-century Bavarian Illuminati. By inventing outlandish conspiracy stories and planting them in public forums, they meant to show how easy it is to accept nonsense when packaged as hidden truth.

Thornley and Wilson flooded underground newspapers, radio shows, and even Playboy’s letters pages with bizarre Illuminati propaganda. (Wilson and his friend Robert Shea, Discordians working at Playboy, ran a series of fake letters crediting the Illuminati with everything from mind control to presidential plots). They even slipped cryptic classified ads into publications like Innovator and Roger SPAT! that hinted at sinister secret societies. The sillier and more “unfalsifiable” the claims, the better – one prank letter claimed the verdict of a New Orleans jury (in a JFK assassination case) couldn’t be challenged because none of the jurors had a left nipple, a sure sign they were Illuminati initiates.

Discordians also staged public spectacles. Though the details are now largely apocryphal, the fabled “Week of Bafflement” is often cited as a signature Operation Mindfuck event: a week of surreal guerrilla theater and street pranks meant to bewilder onlookers. Other Discordian exploits paralleled the Yippies and Situationists of the era – flash mobs handing out fake press releases, absurd protests of “nonsense” laws, or even lobotomized political campaigns. In one real case, Discordians posing as peace activists presented a replica toy weapons system at a demonstration, confusing media and police alike. In another, pranksters glued fake mystic symbols onto college pamphlets and watched the chaos that ensued. The message: reality is malleable, and authority is silly.

Discordians have a whole toolbox of subversive tactics. Key examples include:

Culture-Jamming & Media Hoaxes: Discordians hijack media symbols. They alter billboards, remix ads, or distribute press kits for fictitious events, all calculated to make the ordinary look absurd. Similarly, Mindfuck’s Illuminati content was itself a media hoax. Discordians crafted spurious news articles and letters (often based on the subculture press) implying that global events were orchestrated by arcane cults. The Playboy letters stunt above is a prime example. By flooding the public discourse with weird pseudo-facts, they trained readers to question all sensational claims.

Guerrilla Theater & Public Stunts: Surrealist performance art was another weapon. Discordians might organize a flash mob of people in ceremonial robes chanting gibberish, or rent an inflatable sheep and wander City Hall, or stage a fake “alien landing” press conference. All are aimed at stopping people in their tracks. The underlying philosophy is that if life’s a playground (as Principia Discordia teaches), then public spaces are your stage. Though often unchronicled, these wild public actions embody the spirit of Operation Mindfuck by directly confronting the status quo with confusion and laughter.

Hoaxes & Mythmaking: Discordians delight in creating myths. The Illuminatus! trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea (1975) is itself a marathon mindfuck – a satirical novel that treats every conspiracy theory ever whispered as true in a joyously incoherent plot. In real life, Discordians created dozens of hoax organizations (fake churches, bogus cults, mock political parties) to draw attention to media gullibility. For example, in the 1970s Discordians affiliated with artists’ collectives posted flyers announcing absurd “secret rituals” on bulletin boards, only to watch philosophers and do-gooders debate their meaning. Each hoax was a game: If you believe this, what else will you accept without question?

Satirical Literature: Beyond Illuminatus!, Discordian literature itself is a key tactic. The Principia Discordia (1965) is a collage of drawings, jokes, surreal instructions and faux-prophecies that reads like a religious text on first glance – but it’s so intentionally goofy that readers are forced to laugh themselves out of dogmatic thinking. The Principia teaches by parody: the Sacred Chao symbol (a yin-yang of an apple and a pentagon), the Banana for scale, the Five-Fingered Hand of Eris – all serve to spoof seriousness. By packaging anti-culture lessons inside laughable scripture, Discordians subvert the very notion of scripture.

Misinformation Blitz: Above all, Operation Mindfuck is a tactical campaign of misinformation. Discordians’ motto was “What If There Is An Illuminati?” – by pretending “yes, it exists” they encouraged others to realize how flimsy conspiracy theories can be. In practice, Mindfuckers would flood mailboxes and newspapers with uncanny clues: fake FBI memos, outlandish essays, or even mail-order “Illuminati kits.” The idea was not to genuinely deceive maliciously, but to use mass confusion as a mirror.

Collectively, these tactics show how Discordians weaponize humor, absurdity, and misinformation. By launching a thousand tiny cognitive-bombs of oddity, they hoped to crack the rigid armor of “Truth” that Greyface taught us to wear. As the Principia notes via parody, “All reality is an illusion, all illusions reality”.

Why go to all this trouble of mindfuckery? Discordians believe society is trapped in pointless routines and hierarchies – “machines built by followers of Grayface” – and only a good dose of chaotic play can snap people out of it. The Hand of Eris and Sacred Chao remind us that every neat category (order vs. chaos) is self-serving – life is wilder and funnier than any model. Discordian teaching (echoed in their Pentabarf and stories) is that both “order” and “disorder” are illusion. The true cosmos is a “happy anarchy” where nothing is more serious than a prank.

Operation Mindfuck specifically targeted conformity and authority. By attributing everything big and small to a hidden cabal, Discordians lampooned the idea of unseen “masterminds.” The goal was not to create fear, but meta-fear: fear of one’s own gullibility.

As Discordian Robert Anton Wilson later wrote, the point was to burst people’s “reality tunnels” – their unquestioned worldviews – through satire. In effect, Mindfuck was Guerrilla Ontology: a practice of deliberately undermining someone’s sense of reality so they might awaken to the artificiality of any rigid belief (political, religious, or personal).

This approach mirrored broader 1960s counterculture tactics. The Situationists and Yippies had shown that a fake news stunt or spontaneous carnival could crack the monotony of advertising-saturated life. Discordians added an occult flavor: mystical clucking on campus, fake cult pamphlets, and the esoteric imagery of Discordia herself. Through all this, Discordian philosophy emphasized play as spiritual resistance. After all, the Principia tells us that the universe is an irreducible joke – one that Eris, in her wisdom, urges us to laugh at rather than to worship earnestly.

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