Purposes
There is a disagreement among Discordians as to whether or not, through OM, they should seek to improve society, topple it or claim that the practice is in fact only for entertainment. Because much of Operation Mindfuck itself involves hyperbole and exaggeration in regard to discussing the Discordian Society, it is difficult to determine the actual scale of the campaign, be it large or practically non-existent.
In The Illuminatus! Trilogy and its sequels, Operation Mindfuck is epitomized by a protagonist named Markoff Chaney, an anti-social dwarf who engages in subtle practical joking, in a deliberate attempt to cause Discord, as a protest against his mistreatment by society. One such joke involves the forging of signs that are signed by "The Mgt." (leading people to believe they're from "The Management" instead of "the Midget") that contain absurdities, and placing the signs in stores and other establishments.
Read more about this topic: Operation Mindfuck
Famous quotes containing the word purposes:
“What if we fail to stop the erosion of cities by automobiles?... In that case America will hardly need to ponder a mystery that has troubled men for millennia: What is the purpose of life? For us, the answer will be clear, established and for all practical purposes indisputable: The purpose of life is to produce and consume automobiles.”
—Jane Jacobs (b. 1916)
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)
“What happened at Hiroshima was not only that a scientific breakthrough ... had occurred and that a great part of the population of a city had been burned to death, but that the problem of the relation of the triumphs of modern science to the human purposes of man had been explicitly defined.”
—Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982)