On the Transmutation of Perception and the Magick of Memes

A Treatise on Memecraft and the Art of Participating in Chaos

I. The Principle of Participation

You cannot control Chaos… But you can be an active participant.

You do not seek to alter the world directly with magic, you seek to altar perception of it.

You control your fate not by changing your environment, but changing yourself. You must either adapt to your ecosystem or migrate to a more comfortable one. The transmutation is personal, individual, internal; yet may cause a ripple effect.

II. The Chain of Manifestation

However, you can affect the external world using the internal.

Thoughts beget words, words beget actions, actions beget results.

Words can be heard, interpreted, repeated, discussed. Thus, thoughts can become ideas, which become ideologies, which become collective action.

Changes of perception spread through memetics; creating shared cultural identities, values, memories, hopes, and fears often referred to as the Collective Conscious or the Zeitgeist. Each community is comprised of individuals. Each society is comprised of many overlapping communities. And now with the advent of radio and the internet, all societies make up a larger international zeitgeist. Therefore, if you transmute yourself, and your communities, and your society, you can transmute the world.

III. The Power and Peril of the Collective

Religions and extremist political groups use this to create rigid, conformitarian, authoritarian groupthink; and use these astringent collective consciouses to control large groups of people.

However, like-minded individuals also form groups more naturally to achieve worthwhile goals; frequently opposing high-control groups.

IV. The Parable of Luck

A microcosm of this principle is Luck.

If one believes in the lucky penny superstition, they will be looking for lucky pennies. It naturally follows they will be faster to notice lucky pennies and will therefore pick up more pennies than the average person.

If one were to look for all dropped pennies, take the heads-up ones, and flip the tails-up ones and leave them; they could artificially create their own "luck," and create luck for other random believers.

The pennies aren't lucky; they are merely perceived that way and it gives one influence (but not control) over the world around them.

Luck is made through confirmation biases being specifically and intentionally altered.

In effect this craft is the act of training yourself to perceive specific desired patterns.

V. The Art of Memecraft

This magick might then be called in short Memecraft or memory work, as it is the manipulation of ideas, thoughts, and memories through the modern equivalent of an oral tradition.

Folk legend remains as the internet continues mixing cultures and keeps many around the world engaged in mythmaking (for better and worse.)

A positive example is the vast movement to oppose tyranny through journalism and documentation of the abuse enacted by tyrannical regimes, including the preservation of banned books and the spread of independent news sources.

The negative is that the regime currently invading the USA used this craft to spread disinformation and social unrest while consolidating power unchecked.

To understand how this works, one could look at creepypastas and urban legends, the Mandela Effect, and every variety of fandom or meme culture from an honest and skeptical perspective.

VI. Practicing the Craft

To practice memecraft, one must effectively economize information, distilling it to short and memorable formats.

Use humor and horror and anger, encouraging the spread of these snippets and using strong emotions so that the information becomes embedded in the thoughts of the target audience.

Embrace irony, contradiction, and controversy. Those who oppress us will not fight fairly, nor have they in the past. We must use our arts and turn their tactics against them.

VII. On Ethics and Freedom

That is not to say that ethics should be ignored. We will hold the morals outlined by secular humanist philosophy and the Seven Codes.

However, we must erode their optics, reveal the injustice of their artificial hierarchies, and be willing to push boundaries to protect our own Will and Freedom to express it.