Coincidance - Principia Discordia

C0INC1DANCE 43
matrist "Consciousness III." They not only incline toward Victorian prudery,
but have revived the old Victorian delight in sexual slander and blackmail.
Just as the great Irish rebel, Charles Stewart Parnell, fell into disgrace and
was ruined when his adultery with Kitty O'Shea was discovered and
denounced by the Catholic clergy, many radical heroes have been cast down
from their previous eminence when these ladies published sexual exposes of
them (with names omitted, but all other details immediately recognizable) in
their magazines. (Sometimes the names are included, as recently happened
to a gentle Black pacifist, who was not even accused of unethical acts but just
of having the wrong ideas, but who nonetheless suffered the humiliation of
having his mind, soul, body and his "golden penis," no less, roundly
condemned in several issues of a radical journal.) Not only are their dogmas
sacrosanct, democratic discussion scorned and scientific research rejected (as
"male"), but many of them have announced that reason itself is deeply
suspect and now frankly embrace the "credo quia absurdum" ("I believe because
it is absurd") of the church fathers.
Rejection of science and free discussion are, of course, characteristic of all
totalitarian movements; thus, nonbiblical astronomy was heretical to the
Inquisition, unpalatable anthropology was "Jewish" to the Nazis, unsatisfactory
biology was banned as "bourgeois" in Stalin's Russia and irritating ethology
is "sexist" (and unpleasant psychology is "chauvinist") to these ladies. Like all
other totalitarian fiats, this is intellectually protected by concentric circles of
similar rhetoric. Thus, to question the concept of witchcraft or heresy in the
days of the Inquisition automatically meant that one was a witch or a
heretic. To say that science is neither Jewish nor gentile, socialist nor
bourgeois, but merely the activity of independent minds attempting to be
objective, opened one to suspicion of being "Jewish" in Germany or
"bourgeois" in Russia. To say that behavioral sciences cannot be dismissed
with epithets like "sexist" and "chauvinist" is to convince these ladies that the
speaker is "sexist" and "chauvinist." To push the argument one step further
and say that such protective rationalization prevents objective inquiry is to
encounter the same rhetoric in a third concentric armor and again to be
charged with heresy, Jewishness, bourgeois tendencies or sexism, etc. At
the furthest extreme, where communication has been reduced to the mere
stubborn hope of trying to communicate, is the "credo quia absurdum " or, in its
modern form, "You're just being rational—can't you feel the truth?" At this
point reason retires from the field, defeated as usual by the will to believe.
One is reminded of a story about Mark Twain and his very fashionable
and respectable New England wife, who once tried to cure him of his salty
riverboat speech. Mrs. Twain noted every cuss word he used all week long
and then woke him Sunday morning and read it all back to him. Twain