Manifesto of the Campaign for Higher Silliness, Part One

'That's just paranoia. Everybody in the galaxy has that.'
Douglas N. Adams

The question is, how to make that paranoia work for us?

Beingkind, as has so often been noted (usually in tedious detail) by philosophers, pundits, and general professional cogitators everywhere, is constantly in search of meaning. The collective conscious and unconscious mind of sapients and sentients everywhere in the multiverse is continually thinking, thinking, thinking, gnawing at the knots of the Problem like a mouse at a string bag which its nose tells it contains a tasty bit of cheese. But, like the mouse, the conscious (or unconscious, or semiconscious) mind finds that every time it undoes a particularly tantalizing knot, the whole configuration regroups itself into an even more baffling nodal conglomeration. The mental mouse is, not to put too fine a point on it, screwed.

As the Goths know, the multiverse is a gigantic game of cat's-cradle. You need a partner, and you can't find one. As the Goths are so fond of saying, in Goth baseball, you have to be both the pitcher and the catcher.

So what does that have to do with paranoia? Or silliness, higher or lower, for that matter? Or the price of cheese?

Define the problem.


The problem with the multiverse is that someone, somewhere, got it wrong (you've always known this, right?). The quantum nature of Free Will indicates that, whatever choice is made, other, unmade choices throw off quantum interferences that make the choices that were made, the roads taken, so to speak, lead into some very unpleasant byways.

The parallel-universe problem of unactualized phenomena, and their interaction with the now severely limited set of choices open to the chooser, leads the holder of Free Will into an ever-narrowing labyrinth of sheer Ananke (=necessity), that makes the lot of a rat in a maze seem enviable. What, after all, is the use of deciding to invent, say, democracy, and get it right this time, when some other superpower has already got the patent on a faulty design?

Just thinking about it makes one's head hurt.

And it gets worse. The choices made by other people lead the next chooser to choose, not on the basis of his Free Will, but on the basis of previous choices not made by himself. And that leads to back-vectoring, whereby the hapless being is left in the false position of seeming to have intended that which he never, ever would've intended, had he been given a different set of choices to begin with.

Ow!

And that, in turn, means that the consistency of the whole system of the multiverse is full of disjointed, unreconcilable 'facts' which fail to make a coherent whole.

In short, the multiverse is the copybook of a schoolboy who can't do sums. It simply doesn't add up.

Which makes a joke out of reality.

Of course, this makes a lot of people very nervous. So nervous, in fact, that they'll do almost anything to create the illusion of meaning in this sea of doubt. This leads to religions, philosophical systems, and book clubs.

It also leads to paranoia.

Like this: when a sentient being begins to notice a chink in the wall holding up his reality, he gets nervous. He investigates. And, at this point, one of three things happens.

Repeat: There are no rocks
in the sky.

Ninety-nine percent of people, when they detect a hole in their reality wall, will simply slap on a bit of plaster, and when they don't see daylight any more, call it a good day's work. Like Lavoisier: 'There are no rocks in the sky. Therefore, rocks do not fall from the sky.' In other words, all you people with meteorites in your backyard are a bunch of lying schizophrenics infected with mass hallucinations and the desire for a book-club following.

Of the remaining one percent, .9 will go up to the hole and look through it. Unfortunately, it is a very small hole, and it's slanted, so they can only see a bit of what's on the other side. But, like the blind man holding the elephant's tail, they mistake the part for the whole, and build a theory around their 'fact'. They become conspiracy theorists.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Now, .1 percent of sentients in the world, following the ancient and sound biological principle of Bloodymindedness, will do something entirely different. When they find a hole in the wall of reality, they look out. And they are disappointed, because they can't see far enough. And the angle's not good.

So they punch another hole in the wall. And then another.

Eventually, they punch enough holes to make a map of what's on the other side. It may not be a truly representative map - they know that. But they don't have anything better to do right now, and it beats joining a book club.

As usual with unusual behaviour, this tends to get up the noses of the other 99.9 percent of the population. 'Buncha loonies!' they say. Well, let 'em.

There's more than one way to skin a cat - or unravel a truth.

So march to the beat of your different drummer - or cha-cha, conga or riverdance to it, if you prefer. In a world of unmeaning, pursue joy. As the poet Schiller said, we can only be brothers and sisters in the place where that bird rests its wings.

May all your journeys end in laughter.